Time is now of an essence, as we've reached the final week of the contest! Yes, you'll have to get your entries submitted by 11:59 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on June 13th (that's this Friday!) to be considered for the $9,000 in prizes we still have up for grabs, so get cracking!

If you've been participating on the Dobbs Challenge forums, you may have noticed they've got a little busier with people announcing that they're taking part, so it looks like our judges are going to have a pretty hard time! If you remember our picks from the$1,000 First Month Challenge we were astounded by the high quality, so we just can't wait to see what's on offer by the end of this week.

So, lets just remind everyone what's at stake:

The open categories are Best Windows Game ($4,000), Best Windows Mobile Game ($2,000), Best One Button Game ($1,000), Best Game Starring Dr Dobbs And The Defy All Challenges Crew ($1,000), and Best Total Conversion ($1,000) -- for making something that's completely different in genre/style from the original Dr. Dobbs Challenge, but still keeps 'collect Visual Studio icons' as the mechanic and starts from the same codebase.

If you still haven't entered, remember there's still a week, and if you burn the midnight oil (and drink a lot of coffee!) you'll have as much chance of anyone of grabbing one of the prizes -- don't overlook the Best Windows Mobile Game category, for example -- and we'll be judging all entries, even those considered "incomplete" by their creators. So there's absolutely no reason to not try and flex your programming muscle by June 13th!

If you're interested, firstly download the specially created 'Dr. Dobb's Challenge' games for either Windows and Windows Mobile. Then you can can win from a remaining prize pool of $9,000 by modifying the games using a trial version of Visual Studio 2008, in association with competition sponsor Microsoft.

 Good luck!