What makes a studio differente from another, is the quality of its creative workforce, and that talent and quality is usually revealed in several occasions during the process of creating a videogames.

Right from the concept phase, you may feel the expertise and experitse of the team by the way an idea is generated, discussed, documented and iterativly evolved into a game able to make thousands of people to buy it.

Some times just being able to take a peek on those teams are able to organize and work is already a very valuable experience.

With all the buzz around UDK, CRYENGINE and UNITY, most of people actually missed the fact that VALVE decided some time ago to follow on the footsteps of the  referred engines, and released free the Source SDK.

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SDK_Installation

If you want to try it, but you are not familiar with the engine, then a couple of tutorials would come andy as to start engaging the engine,  and produce samples works.

http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/reference/programming/source-sdk-making-a-single-player-mod-r2819

There is no doubt that CryEngine has certainly

Now, that you have Cryengine 3 freely available to learn, you will probably discover that you also need a good 3D edition package, and in case you don´t have money falling down from your pockets, you have a free alternative that can be used to start your learning process without needing to go the dark side of development (piracy).

Crytek has finally released the SDK for the Cryengine3 game engine.
The SDK is located at http://www.crydev.net and needs registration before being ran,although not needing it for the download of the SDK which is aproxmatly 650 Mb.

The license is free of all non commercial applications and developers are welcomed to contact Crytek for other licenses.

The technology associated with videogames has progressed over the last years tremendously

No, you are not reading the header of a new "pacman" clone, where a small smartphone runs along a blue maze eating off some portable consoles ;)