Crispy Gamer News

I’ll admit it. When I think of a magazine giving a video game an award, Popular Mechanics isn’t exactly the first name that comes to mind. Nonetheless, the publication has recognized Will Wright and EA’s latest brainchild, Spore for its achievement in design, creativity and engineering, awarding the game with a “Breakthrough Award”. Spore is being honored for its procedural animation system. Other “Breakthrough Award” winners announced included the Amazon Kindle e-book reader, the Intel Atom processor, and the Caroma Profile Smart Dual Flush Toilet. Yes, Spore and a toilet are earning the same award.

“The Maxis team is honored to be recognized for Spore’s procedural animation system by Popular Mechanics,” said Lucy Bradshaw, general manager, Maxis Studio. “We’re in great company with the other recipients of the Breakthrough Award. Procedural animation helps to bring Spore players’ creations to life through intuitive, realistic movement and we look forward to continuing to push the limits of this system in future Spore projects.”

You know how the saying goes, behind every good Overlord, there’s a good writer. With that in mind, Codemasters announced this morning that Writers’ Guild Award-nominee Rhianna Pratchett has been signed to return to the Overlord series as scriptwriter for the Overlord II, the sequel to the twisted fantasy adventure, and both upcoming spin-offs, Overlord Dark Legend and Overlord Minions.

Pratchett will continue her role as writer following her nomination for Best Videogame Script game in the 2008 Writers’ Guild Awards in Britain. In addition to video games, the Writers’ Guild Awards recognizes the best in British writing talent across TV and radio drama, soap, comedy, theatre and movie screenplay categories. The awards will be held at BAFTA (The British Academy of Film and Television Arts) on Sunday, November 23rd in London.
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