We love these homebrew contests, as they always bring out a batch of new games and applications for us to try out. Over 20 programmers entered the 2007 Drunken Coders Christmas Game Coding Competition, an event in its third year running. The entries are currently being reviewed by the Drunken Coders judges, and the winners will receive donated cash and hardware prizes.

Though developers were asked to produce only holiday-themed works for the DS and GBA (several of the submissions have ignored this requirement), the wintry games still manage to span a variety of genres, ranging from Christmas Turkey, a retro-ish collect-a-thon platformer, to VirusDS XmaSS Edition, a Christmas-skinned update of the adult puzzler we've featured previously. All 24 titles are available for you to download and play.

The game that will likely immediately stick out to most gamers is Halo NDS Beta, a very basic release that bears little resemblance to Bungie's FPS. Whatever potential the beta shows seems naught, however, as the programmer claims to have "lost the source code" while explaining why he couldn't add any Christmas cheer to the project. You're better off playing Lily and the Lost Angel, the simple-but-fun shmup pictured above, or Snowman Attack, a Geometry Wars-esque shooter.

[Via DCEmu]