If you're anything like me, you'll have a favourite developer, and mine just happens to be Valve. For those of you who don’t know Valve, it's an entertainment software and technology company that has been around since 1996. Since its beginning, it has produced an overwhelming amount of award winning games, with the most recent including Left 4 Dead 1 & 2, Portal 1 & 2, Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike. It is also the developer of leading-edge technologies including game engine Source, and premier online gaming platform Steam.

The other day I was searching for an online "time waster" game during my journey home. I don’t like signing up to free gaming websites so I was thrilled to see that the old classic Snake was free to play online. For those of you who don’t know (rare, but they’re out there) Snake was a game that featured on the old Nokia phones, back in the day when phones were used for texts and calls only.

Want to see a demo of how computer games will look in the not too distant future? You are in luck. Here is a big breakdancing bunny courtesy of Samuel Lapere. Forgive us, the quality isn't great but it's still pretty phenomenal.

Bethesda have just release the debut trailer for their upcoming game Dishonored and it’s a must watch! It's being developed by Arkane Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks, the guys responsible for the multi-million selling Elder Scrolls franchise.

I was pretty shocked last week when the Coalition Government reversed its position in their dramatic Budget announcement. The UK government has declared its intention to establish a nationwide games tax break policy, in a manoeuvre that leaves the British sector in shock and jubilation. They stated: "Following consultation on the design, the Government will introduce corporation tax reliefs for the video games, animation and high-end television industries from April 2013, subject to State aid approval," read the official budget report.

Five questions finding out more about our Twitter followers, how and why they got started, and what they feel about the industry asked by Social Media Manager @TobyJOYdigital

The Visual Effects Society (VES) are holding their 10^th annual awards ceremony very soon, set to define the greatest VFX moments from 2011. Earlier in the week VES released their nominations for this year’s awards, a list that recognises the outstanding VFX achievements across film, animation, television, commercials and games. Regularly referred to as the “Oscars” for the visual effects world, this is a highly prestigious event for VFX professionals internationally. Receiving an award from any of the 23 categories is a great honour.

I stumbled across a very cool iPhone game and loved how it felt, played and looked. I did some research and managed to get one of the team to write this blog post! Here is what Christian Buettner, from A Local Chaos Project, had to say about their creation:

It seems there is an abundance of technology conferences to choose from this year. For fellow technology enthusiasts out there, this is an exciting time, as we are treated to an ocean of updates, new releases and ground breaking developments. One conference we give a particular seal of approval to is the much anticipated CVMP (Conference for Visual Media Production), now in its 8^th year running. This is a conference dedicated to the geeks of the visual media production industries, whether that is in film, broadcast or games.

I’ve been looking at the latest version of IKinema, and I reckon those of you out there who work on game animation might want to take a look at it. If you don’t know what IKinema is, the official marketing description is “A full-body animation technology that allows effortless run-time control of characters during game play to achieve full adaptation to a scene giving users a new game animation experience”.