Round-Up: ILL Clan On MTV, Hell Tycoon, GameTrust In SpaceRound-Up: ILL Clan On MTV, Hell Tycoon, GameTrust In Space

Author: by Nich Maragos, Simon Carless

Today's round-up includes some Torque-driven machinima for MTV2's Video Mods show, the latest Tycoon title, sporting a distinctly devilish twist, and GameTrust's attempts to send casual game websites out of this world, as well as today's product news, Letter To The Editor, and Gamasutra job postings. - MTV Video Mods, the MTV2 program that repurposes video game characters and settings for new videos of popular songs, has chosen the ILL Clan, a well-known machinima outfit, to create interstitial animations for the currently showing season. "What makes these newest shorts unique is that rather than create them using an existing game, such as Halo or Half-Life, the ILL Clan has created everything from scratch using a raw game engine," said MTV Video Mods producer Alex Colletti. The custom engine is built upon Torque from Garage Games, a popular indie game engine. - Anarchy Enterprises has announced that Hell Tycoon, a project which originally began as a joke, has evolved into a full-fledged PC strategy game release scheduled to come out on June 6, 2006. "One of the artists made some kind of hell-spawned creation and stuck it into one of our other tycoon games. It was running around breathing fire on all the happy little tycoon village people, and we all had a laugh," said Bill Wallace of Anarchy. The game will require players to built torture structures to torment Hell's denizens to a degree befitting their crimes on Earth. All 9 traditional Dantean circles of Hell will be present. - GameTrust, a web platform for casual games, has announced a contest for its LaunchNow Affiliate Program where the winner will receive a journey nearly into space. Affiliate websites who sign up for the affiliate program will be entered into the competition, the grand prize of which is a ride in a MiG 25 to the edge of the Earth's atmosphere, as well as three nights in a luxury Moscow hotel. Affiliates can sign up at GameTrust's site; the winner of the space trip will be announced on December 19th. - Also updated today: product news including Princeton Digital's licensing of reverb for the Xbox 360 SDK, JoWood's use of Quazal's Rendez-Vous for its titles, a Letter To The Editor discussing the problems of banishing piracy, and today's Gamasutra jobs, including positions from 2K Games, Artificial Mind and Movement, Blue Tongue Entertainment Limited, KingsIsle Entertainment, Lucky Chicken Games, SOGA Interactive, THQ Studio Australia, Venan Entertainment, Visual Concepts, and John Romero's as yet un-named new game studio, from whose advertisement today's lovely wrap-up picture is sourced.