Thought that nobody could better the green lollipop from the last round? Think again!

Who will win this action packed face-off between the T.V. Industry and the Publishing Industry? In the red corner, we have Mashpotato a scientific art editor from Canada…

Lots of applause from Canadians, artists, and er… potatoes?

Aaaand in the blue corner, we have Dan Marshall an Associate Producer (and Indie Developer) from the UK…

Lots of applause from Britons, swanky T.V. types, and the entire games industry

Round #1 - DING DING!

Wow, Mashpotato’s straight in with a left-hook to the jawbone with this beautifully photographed squeezy plastic pig. “Here is the Puffer Pig. It’s made out of a weird plastic-rubber-like substance that makes your hands smell, and unlike what its packaging stated, it disappointingly does NOT bounce”, she says as she dances around the ring like a butterfly. Dan’s looking a little woozy… but wait… what’s this?

BANG! Oooooh! A strike to the kidneys with this totally amazing hand-made UFO. A good hit, Dan, but it would have been harder if it had been in focus. But wait… the judges have spotted something! YES! LOOK! Dan Marshall has the same monitor as Adam Adamowicz from Bethesda! That’s sure to be worth a couple of bonus points!

“I’m making a film called ‘How To Survive an Alien Invasion’”, gasps Dan as he stares ruthlessly at Mashpotato, “It’s all done 1950s B-Movie stylee, for which I have made some deliberately-bad UFOs. They’re made out of those little metal cartons you get Mr. Kipling’s Cherry Bakewells in, glued together (with some glue) and dangled from sticks by nearly-invisible thread. They look deliberately and hilariously shit.

Lovely Kat, who sits near me and is talented with her fingers (at making props) took it upon herself to shame my shit flying UFOs by making a proper, landed one.”

Mashpotato didn’t like that hit one bit, but it looks like she’s still okay - in fact…

Wow! She’s caught Dan completely off-guard with a cracking close-up (but slightly blurry) action-shot uppercut! It’s looking like there’s no way back for Dan now…

…Or maybe not - he’s just spat out a tooth and is looking mean. Uh-oh… careful Mash, careful…

AND SHE’S DOWN! Caught by a cunning Photoshop composite! It’s looking bad for Mash… but…

DING DING!

Saved by the bell! Well, it looks like we’re going to the judges for the scores…

For her amazing squeezy pig, the judges award Mashpotato 7/10 - that’s a good score indeed!
For the stylish hand-made flying saucer, the judges award Dan 7.5/10…

That puts the T.V. Industry firmly in the lead…
But will another ‘thing’ put it in its place?
Stay tuned!

In the wake of the ‘not that surprising or interesting to be quite honest’ Byron Report, The British Media have had to step up a gear and resort to making up some fairly serious grot about video games in order to shock and amaze the general populace.

Step forward TV has-been Anne Diamond, then, who in a special report for The Daily Mail is giving her “chilling verdict” on some cherry-picked-for-their-violence video games, and making some stuff up for good measure.

“Resident Evil 4: Shouldn’t even be allowed to be sold, even to adults. It wallows in violence for violence’s sake.

There has been a cataclysmic chemical attack and Earth is roamed by zombies that don’t stop until you shoot them in the face or slash their arms off.

You play Leon, a good guy. Through his eyes you witness truly ghastly scenes of torture and death. When I played, I was stabbed to death with a pitchfork amid fountains of my own blood. This kind of violence can only be bad for you.”

Um… ok. This was bound to happen really, wasn’t it?

Most worrying of all, though, is this promo photograph of Anne herself. There’s either some very unusual Photoshopping going on, or she’s gotten hold of some enchanted GHOST copies of the games:

Which leads me to believe that in the original photo of her being forced to hold some games she wasn’t looking nearly as condescending and critical. MYSTERY!

Well yes, obviously that’s not very shocking at all really - if there is any certainty in life it’s that any incarnation of Mario or Mario Kart will be at least ‘pretty cool’.

So the question really comes down to is it ‘good’, ‘really good’, or ‘pant-wettingly good’?

Well, on the one hand there’s the addition of motorbikes and stunts which, well actually considering that one of Luigi’s karts looked like a vacuum cleaner on the DS version isn’t that big a deal at all. Stunts? That seems a little un-Mario Kart-y but apparently it’s all just a bit silly and fun and doesn’t break anything at all, really.

What is brilliant, is the inclusion of the utterly pointless circular Wii remote holder - sometimes referred to as a ’steering wheel’. As Eurogamer say, “you can play the game just as well by holding the ends of the remote and steering”. So what’s the point? Well, as they go on to say:

But that doesn’t take into account Nintendo’s incredible ability to mould plastic in such a way that it inspires feelings of happiness as soon as you pick it up. The Wii Wheel is ergonomically brilliant, satisfyingly solid and adorably chunky. There’s a big fat B button extension underneath for hopping into a slide (or using an item if you opted for the mum-friendly auto-slide control scheme) which is much nicer than using the naked controller. You have a firmer grip, too. It doesn’t actually do anything - and yet, using it changes everything.

Yep, that sounds like our Nintendo and Mario Kart alright - was there really any doubt? Start your engines on 11th April.

Read Eurogamer’s review!

Here is Adam Adamowicz.

He’s a concept artist for Bethesda, the chaps behind the brilliant Morrowind, slightly less brilliant but still cool Oblivion, and most recently the not-out-yet Fallout game that’s probably going to be ace:

Hello Adam! Doesn’t he look lovely?

Adam draws lots of pictures of monsters and things, apparently. But that’s not news. No, what is news is that by the looks of things, me and Adam Adamowicz have the same monitor! Look! I have proof:

See where it says ‘1′? That’s the Dell logo, that is. I know that because I’ve got one on the monitor that I’m literally looking at right now! See ‘2′? That’s a little light that tells you which screen is active or something. ‘3′ is the ‘on’ button. It lights up green when the monitor is on, and I think it might go orange when it’s on standby (but that’s hard to test without turning my computer off which would rather muck up writing this post). Finally, ‘4′ is the lovely solid swively stand that comes with it.

You can read lots and lots about lovely Adam and his amazing taste in monitors over at Bethesda’s blog.*

*Interview may not actually contain any information about monitors.

Eidos Interactive have announced what Brand Manager Ray Livingston has rather ambitiously called, “THE new phenomenon on the Nintendo DS” in the form of cute-looking puzzler, Soul Bubbles.

The game features neat use of the DS touch-screen in order to manipulate your bubbles by first drawing them, then deflating them, or cutting them or joining them to other bubbles. They can be filled with water or gas, and used to escape traps, extinguish fires and avoid all the sticky or dangerous surfaces that will slow the bubbles down. Marvellous!

Woo! Cutting a bubble using the stylus!

Livingston (not to be confused with Ian Livingstone, who’s Creative Director at Eidos) goes on to say that, “every single person who has picked up this game has fallen in love with it instantly. We can’t wait to introduce the world to Soul Bubbles.”

Presumably every single person who has picked up the game thus far works for Eidos, so we’re not sure how much trust to place in that - however if the screenshots are anything to go by, this looks like it could be a cute, engaging, and fun addition to the DS library. Huzzah!

Version 1.5 of S2Engine, Profenix Studio’s PC game and virtual reality engine, is now available. Priced at €135 for the ‘Basic’ edition with the ‘Pro’ and ‘Full’ versions available soon, this latest version features (amongst other things):

• • OPENGL 2.0 support
• • New shaders for water, detail bumpmaps, reflections, alpha blending, texture coords animation, etc.
• • New easy Script language syntax
• • Improved support for GUI
• • Terrain editing/painting/sculpting/rendering support
• • Hidden Surface Removal system revisited for next-gen games
• • Mesh with more than one material support
• • COLLADA file support for static meshes with multimaterials
• • Mesh Instancing and hierarchical mesh grouping

Looks nice, doesn’t it?

For a complete list of features, pop over to Profenix’s webpage here.

We all know Spore is going to be great. On the DS it looks particularly amazing with its super-stylised and yet outrageously cute 2D creatures.

In a completely sensible move, Spore on the DS isn’t some kind of horrifically scaled down version of its PC big-brother but rather a fleshed out individual focusing entirely on the creature bits. As you’d expect, you can completely customise your creation picking up new legs and such-like as you progress, with design decisions determining the characteristics of your little fella.

And to top it all off as Jason Haber, producer on the DS version of Spore, demonstrated to Eurogamer in their preview it’s even possible to create a carrot. And wander about. Although, being a carrot, it’s not going to be terribly good at fighting. Or eating. Or staying alive generally.

All in all, I think we can safely say that Spore on DS is going to be completely brilliant.

10/10 in advance.

(even though we don’t do game reviews)

Whee! That’d be good, wouldn’t it? It’d be a bit like when you used to wander into WHSmiths when you were a kid and browse the £1.99 and £2.99 super-cheapo budget games because they were all you could afford (and your mum would let you buy).

And now, almost 20 years later, the first £9.99 game on the Nintendo DS is due out - which is sort of like £2.99 in today’s money isn’t it? Yeah?

The game’s called ‘FIZZ‘, is some sort of puzzle game, and rather dubiously has a bit with a picture of a (sort of) sci-fi looking girl with ‘touch me’ written underneath.

Still, it all looks rather promising and if this is the beginning of a cheapo-games trend on DS then that can only be a good thing. Set your alarm clocks for April 25th 2008!

P.S. I was going to make a ‘Pokemon’ joke in the headline there, because ‘Pokemon’ sounds a bit like ‘Poke(t) mon(ey)’ but changed my mind because I realised that in fact, it would have been rubbish.

Readers of the (frankly amazing) CGEmpire forums will be aware of our latest scientific and wholly enlightening research project to discover which job tends to have the best ‘things’ on their desk.

Is the TV Industry better than the Games Industry?
Do designers have better ‘things’ on their desks than artists?

It’s all the sort of practical and thought-provoking information that you need in this day and age.

Anyhow, we have our first contender from Bignobody, owner/operator of NotSoft Games:

Wheee! An octopus! At least, we presume he means the octopus given how much other random rubbish is scattered over his desk. We’ve even left the NotSoft logo (i.e. blatant plug) left un-cropped from the image because we’re so nice.

We give this ‘thing’ 6/10 - a great start, but we’re sure there’s lots of room for improvement.

This is now the benchmark. Think you can do better? Get involved here!

Update: We’ve just noticed the green lollipop! That could’ve been a 6/10 beater, you know, if it had been in close-up.

Good God, I should write headlines for a living. I’ve literally just amazed myself with that one.

Where was I?

Oh, yes - R. Scott Campbell (the game designer chappie of Fallout which was apparently ‘a bit good’) has started his very own new Games Studio called WhiteMoon Dreams. Woooo! Very hippy!

Anyhow, he’s set up ship in Pasadena, California, found a bunch of guys to work with him (11 so far), and got an unnamed Japanese publisher to give him a bundle of cash. Presumably to make a game with.

One to keep an eye on, basically. Expect some kind of game from them on PS3, X360, and/or Wii at some point in the future.

Full story.