Universities generally teach acting for theatre or film (movies or television). But games? Not usually. The University of Wisconsin at Madison, however, is changing that. Teaming up with Raven Software, the theatre department at UW-M is offering curriculum on how to mo-cap act for video-games. The new trend of 3D animation in games is definitely oriented around motion capturing, and with professional actors learning how to interact with developers and use the mo-cap technology, it's a fair bet that character animation is going to definitely get more fluid.

Besides being the first gaming-oriented mo-cap class we can think of, it's also one of the first times we've ever heard of a respected university using games as curriculum outside of computer science classes. Could these be a trend towards including interactive media in other courses, such as writing or art? We certainly hope so.

[Via ArsTechnica]

There are some gaming rigs that just take the cake when it comes to pure, refined muscle. Running Crysis on maximum settings at 60 FPS constant? Pieceacake! Handling Age of Conan on max settings with dozens, perhaps hundreds of players on the screen at a time? Not a problem. Alienware has just announced a new machine that makes these beastly rigs looks like wussies.

Featuring a 3.2 ghz processor overclocked to an insane 4.0 ghz, your choice of linked video cards (Geforce 9800 GX2 or Radeon HD 3870 X2), and 4 gb of memory, it's a crazy gaming rig for those who don't want to build their own and just want to get to the fragging. Just don't let all that power go to your head.

A recently-launched feature on Cartoon Network's website called Game Creator lets fans of the new show Ben 10: Alien Force build their own platformer levels and present them to the world. It's been an immediate success, garnering 380,000 unique maps and over 20 million game plays in one week.

Leveraging the power of the audience as content creators is a brilliant way to build up a brand, and ensures a steady stream of visitors to the site. There is no greater advertisement than word-of-mouth, and getting to offer something to the community makes visitors feel valued. We'd love to see other sites offer creator tools like this.

[Thanks, Jessica!]

American McGee's upcoming American McGee's Grimm, a collection of episodes that loosely parallel classic Grimm Brothers fairy tales, aren't just episodic, nor are they just digitally distributed and marketed at casual and adventure gamers.

They're all of those rolled into one.

Grimm, which will take place over 24 weekly episodes (roughly the length of a primetime television show's season), will be released exclusively through GameTap's digital distribution service. Running on the Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3, McGee's Shanhai-based developer Spicy Horse hopes to reach a very broad audience of gamers; thus their primary aim for the casual crowd. "I'd really like to see people who've never played 3D PC games before able to enjoy the story, visuals, and game mechanic," McGee recently told Next Generation.

McGee is grateful to and for GameTap, for he believes that without them, Grimm -- and his Spicy Horse studio -- would never have become a reality. "Ricardo Sanchez [Vice President of Content for GameTap] originally approached me to build something episodic and 'different' for Gametap," McGee says. "We [Spicy Horse] could not be happier. The experience has been one of the most rewarding and interesting game projects I've ever been involved with."

Look for American McGee's Grimm exclusively on GameTap this July.

Spanish mag Micromania recently visited the Blizzard Entertainment offices with the intent of procuring a preview of StarCraft 2. While there, they dug up some specs that may or may not be official.

Minumum Requirements
GFX: GeForce 7/8 Series or Radeon 1000/2000 with 256 MB RAM
CPU: Pentium 4
RAM: 1 GB
Internet: ADSL 1 Mbit

Recommended Requirements
GFX: GeForce 8000 or Radeon 2000 series with 512 MB RAM
CPU: Core 2 Duo or Athlon X2.
RAM: 2 GB
Internet: ADSL 3 Mbit

Blizzard has always made a point of aiming for hardware's lowest common denominator in order to reach as broad an audience as possible with their software. According to a recent hardware survey conducted by Valve, most gamers seem able to meet the minimum specifications just fine. But, as any true PC gamer knows, the minimum specs are nothing but text to take up box space; it's the recommended specs that matter.

While these specs have not been confirmed by Blizzard Entertainment, they do not seem too far-fetched. Stay tuned to Big Download for any and all StarCraft 2 news.

Developer Blue Byte and publisher Ubisoft's Settlers series of long running strategy games continues to be popular, especially in Europe and now players of the latest game, Settlers: Rise of the Empire, can now download a new 1.6 patch for the game right here at Big Download.

The 196 MB patch is mostly for bug fixes and improvements to the game but if you haven't downloaded the previous patches the 1.6 version also includes all oft the content that was included in previous updates, including three new single player maps, a map editor and more.

Download the Settlers: Rise of an Empire 1.6 patch at Big Download now.

What economic downturn? Oil may be $135 a barrel and food prices are going sky high but people still love to pay for games. Want proof? Take a look at the newest financial numbers from game retailer Gamestop. The company just announced that its first quarter 2008 profits (ended May 3, 2008) were $62.1 million compared to just $24.7 million for the same period a year ago. Revenues were $1.8 billion for the quarter compared to just $1.27 billion for the same period a year ago.

Gamestop CEO R. Richard Fontaine stated that their company is "very bullish" on the future. It's already opened 210 new stores in the last quarter and plans to open as many as 600 new stores in 2008, with over half of them opening outside the US. Gamestop is now saying its full year guidence will see growth between 28 and 33 percent.

Wow. Today seems to be the day to reveal new free-to-play MMO games. French developer Cyanide Studio just announced plans to release Dungeon Party, which they plan to release sometime this fall. Like KingIsle's just announced Wizard101, Dungeon Party has a cartoony art style but this game seems to be more of an action game and less of a social interaction title.

According to the press release, Dungeon Party will have players pick from six character classes and then battle in teams of five players against another team searching for treasure with a number of traps and monsters to deal with in each round. There's no word yet on how Cyanide plans to get revenue from the game. They did say they plan to have a beta test of the game sometime this summer before its official launch.

Download the Dungeon Party gameplay trailer at Big Download now.

[Via Blue's News]

If you're the type of gamer who dreams of someday becoming a game creator, then we suggest taking a look at Janosch Toth's blog entry over at IGN. It's an interesting look at his creation process when making levels for Sacred 2. Heck, it's actually a worthy read even if you don't plan to put your brow to the burner in the videogame industry. Yet if the promise of intellectual stimuli doesn't sound appealing to you, then we should also mention there are some pretty sweet pictures involved as well.

The amazing thing is that Janosch creates these levels without a pre-drawn blueprint of any kind. That's right, this guy just imagines the levels in his head and puts the mouse to work. If the images of the end-product are any indication then the method seems to be quite effective for him. Everything from the lighting to the layout of his levels seems very well executed. We were especially impressed with texturing work in his cemetery design.

For a look at the origin and story of the Crimson Skies games you may want to check out a feature that 1UP is running. They've recently been covering Dark Void, from developer Airtight Games, who happen to be made up of many original team members who worked on Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge. However, 1UP recently decided to take a step back and look at the history of both Airtight Games and Crimson Skies. One bit of cool knowledge from the article is that even before Crimson Skies on the PC there was apparently a BattleTech-style arcade game named Corsairs that never came to be.

Airtight is quick to point out that while there are many similarities to Crimson Skies they don't see it as a spiritual successor to those games. We can only hope for a day when pirate-piloted planes burning across the sky return to the front of our collective minds, but until then at least we have Dark Void to look foward to playing.

Late last year, Interplay and GameTap broke up. All of GameTap's friends were sad to see it happen, because they really liked Interplay and didn't want to see it go. No one knew exactly what caused the relationship to go sour; who can say what happened behind closed doors? It's been a sad six months; GameTap has been eating a lot of chocolate while watching old movies alone until 2 AM. Not good!

But now something wonderful has happened; Interplay and GameTap are getting back together! Interplay is bringing 14 of its best games with it, including the entire Descent, Freespace, and Earthworm Jim series. Take-Two is tossing in a few titles of its own to celebrate -- Civilization IV, Sid Meier's Pirates!, and Civ IV's Warlords expansion. Not bad!

The new titles unfortunately won't be available until June. In the meantime, though, two less prestigious (but not necessarily less fun) titles have been added to the library: submarine sim Dangerous Waters and action RPG The Chosen. Not ... eh, we could go either way with those.

[Via Joystiq]

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars developer Splash Damage now has a new development deal with another publisher . . . and it may surprise you. The UK based company will now be working with Bethesda Softworks, the publishers and developers behind the Elder Scrolls titles and the upcoming Fallout 3.

Details on exactly what Splash Damage will be doing for Bethesda Softworks have yet to be revealed but it's certainly a departure for the developer having worked for nearly their entire existence with id Software. The team originally started as a Quake 3 mod team who linked up with id and Activision to make the free multiplayer shooter Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Splash Damage also created some multiplayer levels for Doom 3 before moving forward on Enemy Territory: Quake Wars which was released for the PC back in October to solid reviews but somewhat dissapointing sales. We hope to get more info on the new Splash Damage-Bethsoft collaboration in the months ahead.

Radical Entertainment's Prototype is an intimidating and ambitious project, from a developer's perspective. That fact was arguably the theme of an almost-3,000-word interview Gamasutra conducted with Senior Producer Tim Bennison. Give it a read if you're interested in the game, which is due in 2008 2009.

In the interview, Bennison described and spun the game's incremental innovations -- a gradually transforming, open-world version of Manhattan, "adaptive parkour" movement mechanics, and alternation of direct combat and shape-shifting-based deception gameplay. The interview is laced with creative design buzzwords like "the metagame," "interacting ambient systems," and "deceive or destroy;" think of that what you will. Bennison also described his thematic vision for the game (it's about "finding out who you are and why you're here," presumably in some existential sense) and the challenge of getting approval for such an expensive game without a recognizable IP.

The most interesting feature discussed was "the web of intrigue." When players capture the DNA of foes, they are not only able to use their victims' appearances and abilities; they're also able to view some of their memories. Those memories form a web of clues that can be viewed in the quest for answers to the conspiracy at hand.

The folks at Bohemia Interactive have been very busy with a new update for their 2007 released military shooter ArmA: Armed Assault. The developer just released their 1.14 patch for the game and have decided to add a new an ambitious gameplay mode. Warfare basically turns the game into an RTS-FPS hybrid title.

You can get a lot more info on this new mode via this PDF manual but basically the Warfare mode has two teams of 16 players each battling it out and also capturing cities on the game's massive maps. Gaining control of cities gives each team more resources that are used by the commander player to build structures and factories that make more weapons, vehicles and other items. There's a lot of other new features added in the patch including new anti-cheat methods, the removal of disk-based copy protection and more.

US owners of the game (which was published by Atari) can download the 1.14 patch right here at Big Download (you will need the 1.08 patch installed beforehand). In addition new game editiing and mod tools for ArmA:Armed Assault have also been released and can be downloaded at the game's official community wiki web site.

Download the ArmA: Armed Assault 1.14 patch at Big Download now.

Download the ArmA: Armed Assault 1.08 patch at Big Download now.

Yep, it's still there. Ironclad Games and Stardock's critically acclaimed space strategy title Sins of a Solar Empire remains in the top 10 list of best selling PC games in the US three months after its February 2008 release. Now registered players of the game can download a new patch for the title.

The 1.05 patch (currently available via the game's auto-updater and via Stardock's Impluse client) adds two new maps to the game along with a number of single and multiplayer bug fixes. This is a relatively minor patch but Ironclad and Stardock are preparing a major 1.1 patch that will reportedly add a number of new features.