Kongregate News

That's it, everyone -- Weasel has finally run out of Thing-Thing games to upload onto Kongregate. But his latest entry, Thing-Thing Arena 2, still picked up a $250 victory in the first week of our new set of contests. However, Luksy was no less a winner last week after winning both $150 runner-up prizes with Runes of Shalak and The Classroom 2.

Remember that contest winners are now determined by user ratings, so keep voting!

With much agonizing deliberation, the staff at Kongregate has selected the official winners for the Kongregate Game Contest 0. They are as follows:

Winner:
Gamma Bros.

Runners-up:
The Fancy Pants Adventures
Clubby The Seal
QWERTY Warriors
Papa Louie: When Pizzas Attack!
Prehistoric

Funniest: Dark Cut
Most Innovative: The Game of Disorientation

Pixeljamgames is the official winner of the $1500 grand prize, with $500 to be given out to each of the 5 runners-up. $250 will be awarded to Dark Cut and The Game of Disorientation.

Papa Louie: When Pizzas Attack! was also the winner of last week's $250 contest.

We unfortunately set up our contest rules with restrictions on international contestants, unaware of how many terrific games would come from overseas, such as Warbears and Orbox B. Our new contest is therefore open to developers from around the globe, in addition to being based on user ratings.

So keep those games coming, and don't forget to vote!

Starting this Saturday, Kongregate will be kicking off its second set of cash contests for contributing developers.

The prizes are bigger this time, and winners are now based off of user ratings. For more details, check out our updated contest page.

The full list of winners for this week's contest and our overall contest will be announced soon.

Everyone at Kongregate is currently in Seattle attending Penny Arcade's Child's Play charity dinner. We encourage everyone to support Child's Play, which helps bring a bit of Christmas joy to children in hospitals around the world.

Sometimes judging a contest can be agonizing. Who wants to be remembered as the people who chose Titanic as best picture over L.A. Confidential? After much deliberation, Thing-Thing 3 was selected last week's contest winner, with The Game of Disorientation adding much pause to our decision. Orbox B also grabbed our brains and refused to let go, but was unfortunately ineligible due to international contest restrictions.

Killing spiders is undeniably fun, but the epic journey of an endangered exopod in Tri-achnid was a lot fun too, which is why we decided to name it the winner of last week's contest. We also had a great time with the fast-paced, tolerate-no-crap Hovercrafty and the incredibly addictive rotaZion.

Two D Array's Float was named last week's contest winner, perhaps justifying the number of hours we spent collecting stars in a completely vegetative -- I mean, deeply meditative -- state of mind. We also had a lot of fun with Weasel's Thing-Thing Arena, even if the gangsters are now shooting back.

If there's anything we at Kongregate hate more than hordes of unarmed gangsters, then we haven't found it. So we were pleased to name Thing-Thing 2 by Weasel the winner of last week's contest. We also loved The Classroom 3 by Luksy, and don't forget to check out the original Thing-Thing, too.

Typists rejoiced last week as their favorite carpal-tunnel-inducing activity was transformed into a game of gritty war-torn carnage in QWERTY Warriors by Weasel, which was named last week's contest winner. We also had a bit of retro revival with Eleminer by Ericsoco and Pac by Komix, both of which are great games with some classic inspirations.

If Week 3 had a theme, it was definitely the invasion of European bears. We loved the humor and difficulty of Warbears by Ioji and the innovative 2-player Panda Park by pixelate, but sadly both are ineligible because we didn't have the stomach to figure out European contest laws. Luckily we had another equally worthy entrant, and we are happy to declare Luvcraft's Pretty Pretty Bang Bang the winner.

We had some excellent games uploaded last week, much to the dismay of Kongregate's indecisive judges for the weekly contest. As we agonized over the decision between Prehistoric by True Darkness/Buzzwerd and Four Second Fury by jmtb02, Gamma Bros. swooped in on Sunday (the last day of our weekly contest) to win both our hearts and last week's $250 prize.

A special thanks to jmtb02 for also submitting Dark Cut, and to True Darkness and Buzzwerd for sharing more of their terrific collaborative archive.

A lot of great games were uploaded last week on Kongregate (just our first week in alpha!), but Fancy Pants Adventures took home the weekly contest prize of $250. We at Kongregate were also impressed by Galactic Gravity Golf and Swoop-to-Nuts, which were named last week's unofficial honorable mentions.

Our weekly contests run from Monday through Sunday, so any games uploaded between last Monday and midnight this Sunday will be considered for this week's prize. Thanks to everyone who's uploaded, and keep those games coming!

We're looking for an ActionScript developer to join the Kongregate team. Learn more at our jobs page.

We want to apologize to all our players for the 4-hour outage we had last night. We now know the cause and are taking steps to ensure it does *not* happen again. For those interested, there's a full writeup of the issue and our response to it here.

We've just issued 5 invitations to all our current users, so let your friends know about Kongregate. As our site continues to grow in stability, features, and games, we'll issue more invitations as we draw closer to our public launch. Look for the "invite a friend" link at the top of every page.

This is just an early alpha. Our plan is to add a lot more polish and features before launch, but we wanted people to play with what we have first. So tell us about bugs you find, what we're doing right, what we're doing wrong, and what you really wish we'd do. Send it all to feedback@kongregate.com, and we'll thank you with points...once we finish implementing them.