The seventh annual Global Game Jam wrapped up on Sunday and the results are... mind boggling.
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Over 28,000 developers, programmers, artists, musicians, testers and more gathered at more than 500 sites in 78 countries around the world and created over 5,000 new titles in the 48 hour code-a-thon. That's... that's a lot of games.
Now, even devoting five minutes to each game would take about 17 days in total, so I had to trim down the titles to play. Firstly, I decided to focus solely on Team America (USA! USA!). This blatant nationalism still left approximately 1200 games to comb through. Filtering even further, I focused only on the games available to play on Windows PC systems, whose trials could be downloaded. That brought me down to 840 games.
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So, it wasn't small, but it was at least manageable...or something. Still a lot for a guy like me, who plays about fifty games a year, but enough of a start.
The real trouble came with deciding which of those games to play. The selection process was based on one single rule: does it sound fun? And thus, we are presented with the following nine games.
(It should be noted that these are all titles created on little more than knowhow and caffeine and are far from finished products. Many may never see a life any further than the Game Jam)
Blacksea Odyssey - developed by a team out of the Downtown Orlando Game Jam site, Blacksea puts you into a tiny boat on dark water and you collect bigger and bigger fish, dragging their corpses behind you to attract the biggest fish of all. The controls feel a bit sluggish, but the art style can keep you entranced.
Spaceships - developed by Elliot Mahler from the University of Southern California. Perhaps the most complete title of the many I sampled, this game flips the script on the enduring classic, Asteroids. Instead of the ship, you play the asteroids themselves, setting new ones down and watching the mayhem as the smaller and smaller cosmic debris attempting to destroy the mechanical interloper. Simple, elegant. The ship gets stuck off-screen every now and then, but just watching the madness occur is quite delightful.
These are but a fraction of a fraction of the available titles. Check them out, or go find one of the over 5000 games made this past weekend at the official Game Jam site. Hey, you never know what you might find! And if you do stumble across a diamond in the rough, let us know about it in the comments.
