Quote - Actually the quake & doom series of games can be "scripted" so that the in-game engine can be used to make proper animations & short movies, you still don't get decent facial animations though but it's a start :D

This depends on the engine... Doom/Quake are meant to be fast paced action FPS games so of course no one cares about expression. A much better engine for this is the Source engine (half life 2 and CS 2) or the Oblivion one both of which do nice facial animation.

The Half life / source one can actually look stunning as in this example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA3OgWspGAc

(and still render in realtime)