If like every other sensible-minded person on the planet you’ve fallen head-over-heels in love with Portal, you’ll be wanting to read this amazing and informative interview with writer Erik Wolpaw over at RockPaperShotgun:

“In defense of games, I want to point out that the writing in plays, including everything by August Strindberg and The Lion King, is 100% pure crap. So we’re doing better than they are even though they have the benefit of mostly not being about space marines.”

Personally, I can’t get enough of Portal. It has a simplicity and pureness to its narrative the likes of BioShock could only dream of…

Well poke me in the ear and call me Susan if Super Smash Bros. Brawl on Wii doesn’t look absolutely and utterly amazing!

Not content with having the most stuff crammed into any Smash Bros. game to date, with at least 5 million playable characters (slight exaggeration), shed loads of multiplayer options, and a sparkly new adventure mode, Nintendo have blessed us with an awesome-looking level editor to boot!

The fact that levels you make get uploaded to Nintendo so that each day you can get a random stage from other players just adds icing onto the already well iced cake.

Get all giddy with excitement here!

We’ve lined up something a little bit special for the 12th CGEmpire Music Competition. Animation artist Ilias Sounas has kindly given permission for you to take his animation short (roughly 3 minutes), and score music for it!

All entrants will be able to use their scored animation as part of their showreel (crediting Ilias and CGEmpire of course!) - a great addition to any portfolio since it is something unique!

Of course, it doesn’t end there! The winner will also receive a copy of SIR2, an easy to use native audio-plugin to use for high quality reverberation worth €149.

The deadline for the competition is the 1st of December 00:00, London time.

More information can be found in the CGEmpire Music Competition Thread.

As well as recognising the best Independent games each year, the IGF also feature a Student Showcase with prizes going to the Best Student Game and notable showcase entries.

This year’s entries have been announced on the IGF website and there is a gratifyingly high standard of work on show. Stand-out entries include Crayon Physics Deluxe by Kloonigames and Flipside by Team 3.

Crayon Physics Deluxe is a 2D puzzle game where your crayon art becomes real interactable objects, while Flipside is a platform game featuring an environment that can be viewed from two sides - a happy bouncy side, and a dark insane side.

Check out the other entries on the IGF website here.

BAFTA Fellow, Will Wright gave his inaugural speech at the BAFTA Video Game Awards, in which he made a very interesting argument against the industry being obsessed with viewing games as a natural evolution of cinema, novels, and other non-interactive media.

With an impressive history of sandbox “God Games” from Sim City, through the amazingly successful “The Sims” franchise, to the highly anticipated evolution sandbox Spore, Wright can be noted for making games where the player makes up their own stories within the world the designers provide, and are not forced to play the game down a linear pre-determined narrative. It is clear this is where his passion lies.

He has some interesting points, as the open-ended nature of interactive media is after all what distinguishes it from non-interactive media, so it should not be viewed as “just another way to tell a story.” However, as recent hit Bioshock shows, a strong narrative experience can be highly rewarding in itself.

Full Story.

So what do you think? Are we capitalising on interactive media as much as we could be? Why not discuss this on the forums?

After failing to snag any BAFTAs at this years awards, Resistance: Fall of Man and therefore Sony have been “forgiven” by the Very Reverend Rogers Govender. Phew!

The Dean of Manchester told the BBC that, “we do forgive Sony for what they have done, even though they still believe they have done nothing wrong.”

Sony did apologise for using the graphics, but refused to withdraw the game from sale. Apparently due to the row, the cathedral has seen an increase in visits from young people and tourists.

Just goes to show, really.

Full Story

Well crickey! Although Bioshock rather predictably won Best Game at last night’s BAFTA awards, it’s Nintendo who have come out on top with Wii Sports picking up six out of the thirteen awards!

Categories the popular Wii game won included Sports, Multiplayer, Innovation, and Gameplay.

Other notable winners included Okami which scooped best Artistic Achievement and Musical Score.

After the game awards, Will Wright was presented with a BAFTA Fellowship in recognition of his contributions and influence on the video gaming industry.

Full Story

Part 2 of Nickenstien’s on-going tutorial on how to write your first DirectX game has been posted here on CGEmpire.

Nickenstien says, “The intention of this tutorial is to take beginner programmers through the stages of setting up a project and walking them through the basics of creating a re-usable game engine, and then creating a little arcade game with it.”

Ultimately, the game produced will be a simple vertically scrolling shoot-em-up in the spirit of games such as Xenon2: Megablast.

Read part 1, here!
Read part 2, here!

Nolan Bushnell creator of Pong and, arguably, the computer games industry describes modern games as “unadulterated trash”.

“A lot of video games today are very isolated,” he goes on to say, “You don’t see mom and dad, sister and brother, sitting down like they used to play, say, Monopoly.”

Bushnell hopes to push gaming in a new social direction with his latest project uWink. This combines his experiences at Atari and his Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time restaurants to create an environment where families or groups can get together to have fun.

Read More

Continuing development of CGEspace into an online showcase of CGEmpire member’s skills and portfolio, CGEmpire is proud to announce the beta launch of “CGEspace Jukebox”!

CGEmpire members can add any mp3s they have hosted at any web address on the internet to their Jukebox, allowing other users to listen to their music when they visit the member’s CGEspace.

So what are you waiting for, musicians? Give it a spin!