You can dig through the tumultous, heaving mass of congealed infants produced by the Global Game Jam. You can do this, and more, play these crazy prototypes, here.
Expect some of the better ones to get the treatment right here.
09 IGF Winner for Innovation
Between is the latest full game from Jason Roher, done in his idiosyncratic style of OpenGL cross-platform and bit-wise read .tga files. The game requires you to play with a friend, and generally plays with your expectations of multiplayer interaction. At first you'll experiment with the controls, trying to get an idea of what it's all about, as you do you'll begin to create new patterns, building a great structure in a multiverse between dreams and waking life. As you do a sense of creeping solitude is fuddled by the strange adjustments to the landscape, things you did not plan, and the sense that the person you had to network with as a requisite for starting the game is lurking around like the Christian God or a more mischievous sort of invisble man, depending on the level of altruism. You then realize that Instant Messaging functions as both a philosophical sutra and a transhuman sort of prayer.
Videogame Game
I sifted through the gulag of titles on the site and discovered an interesting postmodern platformer entitled "Videogame Game." Before I get into a spiel on how it deconstructs the 2D platformer genre - and more specifically the 8-bit kind - I'll shut up and post the link.
http://globalgamejam.org/games/videogame-game
It's cool stuff. Any game that has it's protaganist as a string of text is awesome in my book.
Thanks for the mention!
Worth mentioning that one of the GGJ constraints was that every game be playable in 5 minutes or less. So if the list of 300+ games looks daunting, just remember that you could play all of them to completion in less time than it'd take you to go through a single epic CRPG :)
Did any of the PlayThisThing staff participate and make any games (that they'd admit to)?
GGJ
I was one of the judges at the Columbia event (in NYC), but didn't actually make a game...
local jam
I was checking it out a few weeks ago, but the montreal location was cancelled, so no jam for me.
Maybe next year.