Game Jams

If you're not familiar with the term Game Jam, it's where a team of game developers (artists, programmers, designers, etc.) get together to try to create a new game from scratch in 48 hours.  Sometimes this is done as a challenge to see what the developers are capable of, sometimes it's done in order to try to make a simple game to sell on an app store, and sometimes it's done to perpetuate a running gag.

Peter Molyneux is a famous game designer who created the Populous, Fable, and Black and White games.  He's also famous for making ridiculous promises or having wild ideas for game concepts.  He's so well known for this that a parody twitter account was created spouting even more ridiculous ideas.  At some point someone decided there should be a game jam using these fake ideas as inspirations for games.  Some of the results look surprisingly fun.  I don't understand how some of them are games (without any explanation, the videos I watched didn't make much sense).  Of those 18, these are my top 5:

#5: Don't Deux It

You play a pigeon who must find the right item for people on rooftops to keep them from jumping off.  Honestly, I just like this one because of depressed Spider-man, although the game does seem fun and well made.

#4: PsychoBaby

You play as a baby with the arms of "a dead baddie".  The arms do not believe this is reality, so they are wantonly destroying and killing things.  You must convince them this is reality by finding cameras and getting your picture taken.  The concept of this one is just so insane and the look on that baby's face for not being able to control his arms is pretty hysterical.  I also like how the arms just randomly pick up any objects in range and chuck them around angrily.

#3: Friends 'Til The End

"You play as a small boy with a remote control helicoptor that is alive and your friend, then you discover a nuclear missle inside it".  This game actually looks like it'd be a challenging, but fun game to play.  Although they do make losing pretty spectacular, so I might die on purpose a few times.

#2: Days of Your

You are a period.  When you meet other punctuation marks they will speak to you and you must place yourself at the right points in the sentence.  Once you do, you collect that punctuation mark and go meet the next one, but now you have two punctuation marks at your disposal.  This one actually seems like it could be a really awesome edutainment game if it is more fleshed out.  People may actually learn the difference between your and you're or its and it's with this game!  I would love to see this turn into something that ends up in schools someday.

#1: Breaktris

I can't really describe this one without ruining a bit of surprise, so just watch the video.  I could definitely see this on the AppStore and of all of these games, it seems to most complete to me.

Bonus: Pause Pirate

This wasn't in that one playlist and is definitely an epic game worth noting.  The original idea was "What if the pause button was a weapon? Until developers think outside the box we're going downhill."  Again, I don't want to ruin the novelty of the game's idea by describing it, so just watch the video.