Our 5th competition today comes to a close and we are here to honor all of the games that were entered, as well as award a few prizes, too. The "upgrade" theme was not an easy challenge, and several game designers rose to the occasion and delivered some of the most compelling and promising games we've seen in a CGDC yet.

Four times we have made a call for entries to a competition that celebrates and rewards excellence in casual gameplay, and four times we have been, ourselves, rewarded by the Flash game development community and the exceptional level of quality within the entries submitted. Choosing a small group to represent the best of those submitted, whether for the selection of finalists or for the top awards, is not an easy task. We wish we could reward everyone who submits an entry, but for every competition there must be a winner.

It is difficult enough to design a game that is fun to play; harder still to design one that keeps a player coming back to it again and again. It seems that so many games today are one-off, disposable experiences offering little reason for a replay. When we chose the word "replay" for the theme of this competition, we were looking forward to seeing games with excellent replay value...

With voting now over, it is my pleasure to announce the recipient of the Audience Prize for the CasualGameplay Design Competition #2: Sprout!! With 41.6% of the popular vote, Jeff Nusz' Sprout proves beyond a doubt to be the favorite among the JIG community as well.

When we first announced the competition and its "GROW" theme in January, the response was warm and welcoming. There seemed to be a popular expectation that the competition would yield games similar to the Grow series from On of Eyezmaze. Instead, we received more than a dozen different "GROW" interpretations, each one creative and original in its own way, and not a single Grow clone. And still the games exceeded our expectations.

There are a lot of awards being handed out this week, in addition to tomorrow's announcement of the results from our 2nd Flash game design competition(!) The Game Developers Conference is in full swing out in San Francisco this week and the results of the Independent Games Festival (IGF) and Game Developers Choice Awards have been announced, and there are a couple of familiar faces that we need to give a nod to.

The results are in from the recent Flash Forward Film Festival held in Austin, Texas, last week, and there are some exceptional items that simply should not be missed. In particular, be sure to check out the Bendito Machine, a stunning piece of work by producer, animator, and illustrator, Jossie Malis.

The Best of 2005 is a celebration of the best games reviewed here at Jayisgames over the past year. It is not an exhaustive list of all the best games available since we can only review the games that we come to know about. For this year's Top 10 list there are ...20 games! Yes, that's right. There were too many great games released in 2005 to narrow the list to just 10. So, without any further ado, here are the games you picked as the Best of 2005:

The Best of 2005 is a celebration of the best games reviewed here at Jayisgames.com over the past year. It is not an exhaustive list of all the best games available since we can only review the games that we come to know about. If you have a game, or are part of a team that produces them, and would like to have your game considered for a future rev...