Yay Wouter!

Congratulations to Wouter Visser, who won both the JayIsGames.com Casual Game Design Competition #3 AND its Audience Award with Gimme Friction Baby (named for a Turbonegro song - you frickin' rock, Wouter!).

If you enjoyed the soundtrack to Gimme Friction Baby (ironically, the music is kind of shoegazey, quite the opposite of what you'd expect from the title) the band responsible are We vs. Death and their website offers many free downloads. May I recommend:

Wake 44 (the song used in Gimme Friction Baby)
(yes,) we went to Novgorod
mkultra

JayIsGames.com are already gearing up for the Casual Game Design Competition #4, with a longer lead time and even more valuable prizes. If you're an aspiring game designer, keep an eye on the JiG site for an announcement of the theme. Hopefully it'll be more useful than "replay"!

JayIsGames Competition #3!

The third annual JayIsGames Flash Game Design competition - themed "Replay" - is parading the entrants as we speak. It's too late to enter, but you can play the games and vote for the winner of the Audience Prize. The first and second prizes are chosen by JiG reviewers, but the Audience Prize is chosen by PayPal donations of at least USD $1.00 and can add quite a jolt of cash to a talented designer's prize. Alternatively, it can do Great Justice for a designer who for some bizarre reason wasn't chosen by the staff judges.

Here's some of my picks from this year's entrants:


Karma fuses the concepts of reincarnation and the Western 7 Deadly Sins to create a game where the aim is to clear your sins and reach salvation with as few reincarnations as possible. It has a few bugs which can make it frustrating to play, but the music, sound effects and visuals are gorgeous and soothing enough to prevent you from hurling the keyboard through the monitor.


Tonypa's Yalpeyalper is a simple but cute game where you need to eliminate all of the squares in the grid by setting off a chain reaction. Be careful, though - if you're wrong, you'll end up having to replay all of the levels you've previously won.


In Paracaidas (parachute in Spanish), you guide a parachutist safely to the target. It doesn't sound like much, but it's beautifully designed and fun to play.


Wouter Visser's Gimme Friction Baby leaves it to you to work out how to play it. Once you do, you simply MUST go back and try to beat your high score... goddammit...


In Timebot, you stand on panels to open doors, etc. Then you kill yourself and reincarnate to actually go through the doors. It's a pretty cool game.

If these games don't do it for you, there's plenty more at JayIsGames!

Turkish Sign of the Cow

Turkish women attempt to increase their parliamentary representation.

I wish them well, but what I really want to know is: what the hell is this woman doing?



I'm gonna take a punt and guess that a devout veiled Muslim lady isn't calling on our semi-inflated dark lord to support the women's parliamentary bid, but then I'm not sure that she's calling on the support of Lita Ford, Joan Jett, Pink et al (although that would be kinda cool). I've heard that the "horned hand" gesture is to ward off "the evil eye" - is it a hope for good luck in this context?

Consult Me For All You Want To Know

Sam Turner is a prolific blogger whose latest blog (one of five he has going) posts highlights from a 1900 book of household management. It's only just started, so head over there and show some love. Especially for the one where it recommends drinking wine boiled with ginger... to treat diabetes.