Rocksteady Studios' Batman: Arkham Asylum and Naughty Dog's Uncharted 2: Among Thieves racked up nine and ten wins at this year's Navigatr Awards respectively, with Batman capturing the overall Game of the Year honor. The National Academy of Video Game Testers and Reviewers Corp. has run its annual awards, as voted on by a body of some 640 game journalists and writers. Despite Uncharted 2 receiving the highest number of wins, Batman edged it out ...

Motion capture studios CaptiveMotion and Metricminds collaborated with Remedy Entertainment to complete cutscene facial animations in Remedy's upcoming Alan Wake, the companies said this week. CaptiveMotion is an Arizona-based facial performance capture studio, while Metricminds is a Frankfurt-based motion capture and animation studio. According to Metricminds managing partner Philip Weiss, the two companies "came together at the end of a five-year [development cycle]" to create facial animation's for Alan Wake's cutscenes, providing animation data for ...

United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown has singled out the country's video game developers as "leading the way" in Europe, and Labour MP Tom Watson has called for industry tax breaks in Parliament. Speaking about British innovation in an online broadcast in advance of London's Global Investment Conference (MP3 link), as reported by Edge Online, Brown said the UK is "leading the way in creative industries -- by far the biggest producer of computer games ...

According to a recent study by casual game developer PopCap, nearly a quarter of internet users play games on social networks -- but the age of those players can differ significantly across regions. In its "2010 PopCap Social Gaming Research" report, the company found that fully two-thirds of social game players in the United States are 40 years of age or older, while the majority of players in the United Kingdom are under the age ...

In this round-up, Gamasutra highlights some of the notable jobs posted in its industry-leading game jobs section this week, including positions from ArenaNet, Sucker Punch and more. Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly. It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone ...

Facebook says it's expanding its commitment to Facebook Credits -- a universal virtual currency system run by the social network allowing users to purchase digital goods in social games and applications -- and revealed its payment terms for developers. With Facebook Credits, which will be available alongside other virtual currency options from developers and payment providers, the social network will take a 30 percent cut of Credits spent, leaving developers to collect the remaining 70 ...

[Is Apple's stringent governance of its "explicit" apps unforgivable censorship, or an overreaction to a legitimate problem? Editor Danny Cowan of iPhone-focused sister site FingerGaming checks out all of the "boobs and butts" on offer in the App Store and suggests that maybe it's good riddance to many of the apps the company pulled.] Every day, I spend a few minutes catching up with the newest applications released for the iPhone and iPod Touch, at ...

PlayStation 3 sales rose 29 percent week-on-week in Japan to 32,130 units, but sales of all other platforms were either down or flat, according to Japanese tracking firm Media Create. PS3 saw sales rise during the week ended February 21, as Resident Evil 5: Alternative Edition for PS3 captured the top software sales slot with 143,000 units sold. Three new PS3 games entered the top 10 charts this week. While the PS3 was the top-selling ...

Truly believable story experiences need important, plausible NPCs, says Ubisoft Montreal's Patrick Redding -- who says the absence of visible personal consequences in Far Cry 2 was one of the game's "big mistakes." Redding, who's done narrative design on Far Cry 2 and Splinter Cell: Conviction, says the importance of genuineness in non-player characters as was one of his main takeaways from the experience of working on Far Cry 2, and he explains as part ...

Uncharted 2 developer Naughty Dog is getting new digs -- "a bigger, better kennel," as it says. On March 1, the team is trading up to a larger work space 500 feet away from its current office. "We've built out our new studio from a raw and open floorplan to a killer new studio that provides us with more flexibility in space, layout and adjusting to fluctuating staffing needs - not to mention there are ...