I have worked on major console games and written games in both C and C++. I also maintain an open source raytracer which I've implemented in C, C++, D, and python. So yes, I speak from experience.

Eve online is a great example of a game for which almost all game logic is in python (stackless). The "engine" is in C++, I think (not sure on that one). So I would adopt their model but use C instead of C++.