Latest Blender (2.48) targets game development...

...and it may have won my heart. This release is the one largely contributed to by the Apricot game project, with piles of entity placement tweaks and additions. My favourite two features are grease pencil (which is brilliant, especially drawing tablet support) and the real time glsl shaders. Oh, and the real time physics. ...And the nice sculpt improvements :)

Now I just wish each input device could have a different tool assigned to it, like with GIMP, which would make grease paint mode super intuitive.
I think I can put up with the interface now, considering how much meat this program has!

Here are their (as usual) nicely presented release notes:
http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-248/

Got a bit interested in the changes, but blender works horribly on my macbook. It's a problem with the intel graphics drivers or something. There is a workaround, but that makes it impossible to use the game engine (since it won't update the screen anymore if the fix is used)