GarageGames Launches Great Games Experiment, Contest

GarageGames, the independent developer responsible for dev tools such as its Torque engine as well as the Torque X engine for XNA Game Studio Express, recently launched a community website entitled the Great Games Experiment. GGE, essentially a social networking site oriented towards games, allows gamers and developers to create profiles, showcase games, find games, seek advice on developing games, and simply talk about games. It is similar to MySpace, but with a topic. The Great Games Experiment is currently in a beta period, and Shacknews has partnered with GarageGames to offer beta membership to Shackers to check out the site before it reaches its final and completed form. To get started, head over to the official website and apply for an account with the referral code ShackNewsGGE. From there, you can create an account as a gamer or a developer and get started. To drum up some excitement, GarageGames is also currently running the Great Games Contest (link requires active GGE account to view) for registered users, consisting of numerous categories corresponding to various areas of participation on the GGE site. Prizes include a Nintendo DS Lite, an iPod Nano 2G, a membership to the XNA Creators Club allowing Xbox 360 owners to compile and play XNA Game Studio Express games on the console, subscriptions to magazines such as Indie Gamer and the excellent Game Developer, GarageGames development content packs, and more. Among the various criteria used to award the different prizes are high quality participation in the community, being the most popular gamer or developer, submitting the most complete and playable Flash games, creating the best game profile page, writing the best game review and so on. There is also a no-commitment free raffle to win two passes to the Game Developers Conference to be held in San Francisco this March. The current round of the contest ends February 5. Each week, until March 4, there will be another round; on that date, there will be a final two-week round of the contest. Check out the official site for more.