Robh Ruppel is the art director at Naughty Dog, the developers of the Uncharted series. Before that, he spent over a decade working at Disney's animation studio.

This gallery of his work includes examples of both concept art and matte paintings from across that period, and features pieces from the Uncharted games, personal projects, Disney movies and more.

For lovers of fine art it's some damn fine art.

If you want to see more, you should check out Robh's personal page.

To see the larger pics in all their glory (or so you can save them as wallpaper), right-click on them below and select "open in new tab".

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I remember Ghosts 'N Goblins being about two things: underpants and skeletons. Mostly about underpants. It's easy to forget amidst all the cheesy humour of the game, then, that it had a fairly brutal premise.

I mean, it's not like destroying Satan himself and then escaping the netherworld of Hades is tough enough. No, there is a time limit as well.

[via VGJunk]

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The Commodore 64 turned 30 this week. As the firs video game platform my family ever owned, it will always have a very special place in my heart.

But I was born in 1980. What do kids born in the 21st century think of the machine?

The BBC and C64 fan Mat Allen went to find out. They're...curious. And, bless them, not as dismissive as I'd have thought. One girl's suggestion of adding dancing music to the system's agonisingly long load times is even a damn fine idea.

They then went to a high school. Things were a little sadder there. Partly because the kids looked so bored it was if they were being held against their will. But mostly because seeing their bemused faces just makes me feel old.

You can see the kids reactions in the video below. The best part is probably the extensive Last Ninja exposure. The worst is that the BBC's video player takes longer to load than a C64 game did, so you'll have to be patient.

Commodore 64 turns 30: What do today's kids make of it? [BBC]

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As someone who spends most of his time on an iPad playing strategy games, and as someone who when not playing them on an iPad is playing them on a PC, when I had the chance to speak with Johan Andersson, the Studio Manager of Paradox's internal development team, there was one thing I needed to know above all others.

When can we hope/expect to see Paradox's blend of grand strategy titles (ala the wonderful Crusader Kings, Victoria, Europa Universalis) - a type of game only currently available on the PC - come to the iPad?

"Yes, we definitely want to do that!", he replied enthusiastically. "However, with current machines, our games would not work that easily, as they require a fair bit of memory. So I'd expect us to have to do pretty creative engineering to handle it, because we can't do stuff like removing features or making less countries playable, as that would not be a Paradox Development Studio game."

"Our games are supposed to be complex and fun", he continues. "I'd expect a game like our political simulator Victoria II would actually be the easiest to port, especially when it comes to interface. Since the gameplay there when you try and steer your country through the industrialization and the political reforms is a lot about "nudge these values, let time fly to see effects and watch your people revolt against your government". So we´ll see what the future holds when it comes to iPad games."

Victoria II on an iPad? We can only dream. But what about other platforms that aren't a PC? Paradox as a publisher is already dabbling in consoles, with games like Lead and Gold and the upcoming A Game of Dwarves, but those are very different beasts to its traditional PC titles that are, well, about as "PC" as a game can get.

"Well, a large part of the development-team have worked on consoles before and we all definitely prefer PC", Andersson tells me. "Because PC gives us the freedom to create the games we want to create and make them just as we want them to be."

"We hope they come across as grand, fun and challenging and were not sure we could make that on console. If the industry changes, I don't know.. "

Paradox fans, I'll have more from my interview with Andersson in the days to come.

As video gaming has become more popular, thanks to platforms like Facebook and mobile phones, the industry (and passionate fans) took a lot of pride in seeing the average age of a "gamer" climb out of the teens, into the 20s and then the 30s.

So it's a bit weird, then, to see that the average age of a gamer in the United States has suddenly dropped from 37 to 30. In just one year. That's an age the industry hadn't seen since 2005.

What gives? Did a whole generation of Wii Sports-addicted pensioners suddenly kick the bucket? Was the year 2005 a bumper crop for newborn babies, who are only now reaching for a Nintendo handheld?

Sadly, it's nothing that dramatic (or morbid). Seems the Entertainment Software Association, who track such things on an annual basis, decided to change up their methodology, expanding a range of questions that used to be based only on consoles and PCs to include newer platforms like the iPhone.

The result is that a whole bunch of kids and younger humans who weren't originally being included in the data now show up, dragging the age down. It's good news for stat lovers, as it's obviously more accurate data, but bad news for those who took some sense of pride from seeing the average age be somewhere clearly in "adult" territory, rather than "should be adult but really isn't".

Oh, and if you're wondering what kind of criteria you had to hit to be considered a "gamer", it was basically anyone who played any of the listed devices for an hour or longer a week.

How gaming's demographics reverted to 2005 [Ars Technica]

One of the more bizarre stories to come from the London Olympics so far has been the farcical conclusion to the group stages of the women's badminton, which saw eight players deliberately try and lose in order to manipulate their knockout stage seedings, to the outrage of many.

Maybe instead of blaming the athletes, though, the organisers of the tournament could instead have looked to video games for a little help on how to stage an event where this kind of thing is avoided.

Author and fighting game veteran David Sirlin has written an interesting piece on his site that draws on examples of video game design (and Magic cards!) to highlight the problems inherent in organising a tournament that one the one hand is designed to encourage people to win, but on the other discourages (and in this case disqualifies) athletes from doing everything within the rules to, you know. Win.

I don't agree - there's more to sport than rules...as a contest there are other things in play like sportsmanship and entertainment - but it's still a good read for a different way of looking at the controversy.

Playing to Win in Badminton [Sirlin]

The Dark Knight is not very good at Halo. Bruce Wayne was obviously too busy with all that money and grief as a kid to have learned his way around a control pad.

He's making up for it now, though. The only way he knows how.

Which PC franchises are getting better with age, and which are getting worse? Before we go any further, know that this is not science. It's just the results of a survey a single website specialising in PC gaming ran a little while ago. Like our own grand census from a few years back, that makes it interesting, but not something indicative of the entire gaming population.

Got it? OK, let's get into it.

Most of the results are as you'd expect. Elder Scrolls and Total War out front, C&C and Dragon Age bringing up the rear. There were a few surprises, though. You hear a lot of people bitch about Civ V, but it seems to fare pretty well here. Maybe people who read PC Gamer are just really into it, but it's just as likely to be the result of the vocal, angry minority being drowned out by those who actually enjoyed the radical changes made to the series.

As for the Battlefield result...hilarious.

Which franchises are getting better, which are getting worse? The PC Gamer poll results [PC Gamer]

Tina isn't doing the off-topic thread tonight, but that doesn't mean we can't have cats! In fact, let's just combine her thing (cats) with my thing (music) into one super thing.

I give you THE MEOWMIXER. File this one under "Publicity Stunts We Fell For," because I fell for this one. Something about mixing my own horrific version of the insanely earwormy Meow Mix theme song is too appealing not to do 100 times.

So there you have it—a perfect fusion of music and cats. What is the catchest ad jingle of all time? It may well be this one. Throw that one around (or anything else) here or over in the Talk Amongst Yourselves forum. Have good meowing.

Meow Mixer [Meowmix.com]

(Thanks, Nervo)

That's the point of The Expendables, right? That they're a bunch of meatheads from another era who are Back To Kick Some Ass?

Even keeping that in mind, this game footage assembled by our video maestro Chris Person is some of the goofiest, most meatheaded dialogue I've heard in a long time. It's practically Duke Nukemesque. I certainly acknowledge that it's no easy task to write in-game dialogue, but this stuff is still pretty lowbrow.

Tina is playing the game for us, so I've not yet had the pleasure. But I'm not sure if meatheaded protagonists blowing shit up is ironic enough in video games yet. It's not passé enough; it's still pretty current. I'm more interested in Evan's idea of making an Expendables-style game with similarly washed-up video game characters.

(Though there is an argument that the video game industry is basically already doing that. Heyo!)