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PAX10 Humble Flash Bundle discounts the showstoppers
The PAX 10 Humble Flash Bundle is live for five days and offers a lineup of really cool independent games that have been featured at PAX Prime over the years. Up for any price you feel like paying is Badland Premium, Solar 2, Containment: The Zombie Puzzler and Jamestown: Legend of the Lost Colony Deluxe Pack, plus a DigiPen three-pack including Deity, A Flipping Good Time and Solace. Pay more than the average to add in Fez and The Swapper. Throw down more than $15 and get Cannon Brawl (Early Access version) and Life Goes On, too. Life Goes On is a selection in this year's PAX 10, while the rest are pulled from 2011 and upward. The PAX 10 Humble Flash Bundle supports, in part, Child's Play Charity. We'll have all the news and previews live from PAX Prime 2014 right here. [Image: Humble Bundle]
1, 2, 3, 4, Counting Kingdom declares a monster war
You won't have to wait until PAX Prime at the end of this month to get your hands on Counting Kingdom, one of the games spotlighted in the PAX 10; it's out today on Steam. Counting Kingdom blends math education and tower defense by assigning attacking monsters numerical values, which you add up to cast spells and send them back to the algebraic depths from whence they came. It may look cute and kid-friendly, but developer Little Worlds Interactive promises a game that "requires real strategic thinking" on its Steam page. You can become a mathemagician and protect The Counting Kingdom for $8.99 until August 12, at which point the game's price will increase by one, making it $9.99. There, that wasn't so hard - we're totally ready for those monsters! [Image: Little Worlds Interactive]
PAX 10 spotlights Framed and Duet
This year's PAX 10, a collection of games from independent developers, has been determined and will be highlighted at next month's PAX Prime convention. The ten games were hand-picked by 50 industry experts, starting with Duet, Kumobius' elegant arcade-style action game for iOS. Duet is joined by LoveShack's Framed, a narrative puzzle game trapped in a comic world. Both Duet and Framed received attention earlier this year when the games were among six total mobile titles in the PAX East Indie Showcase. Those two games are joined by an abstract 2D PC platformer from DigiPen's Neat Snake known as Flickers. Infinity Monkeys' Life Goes On is also in the mix, in which players set out to find the Cup of Life by ironically sacrificing knights to the game's deathly contraptions. Untame's amorphous puzzler Mushroom 11 will be included in the showcase, as will Funktronic Labs' sci-fi, turn-based adventure game Nova-111.
PAX 10 stars Gunpoint, Ridiculous Fishing, Towerfall, more
The PAX 10 is a decadent lineup of the year's top indie games, as chosen by a panel of 50 industry experts and primed to be featured at PAX in Seattle, Washington. This year's list reads as follows: Avalanche 2: Super Avalanche, Badland, Escape Goat 2, Gunpoint, Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, Owlboy, Ridiculous Fishing, Rogue Legacy, Sokobond and Towerfall. We're particularly tickled about Gunpoint, which we think "oozes creativity;" Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, which is "too cute to be depressing," and Ridiculous Fishing, which earns five stars with flying colors (and fish). The entire lineup offers a hefty hunk of indie gaming goodness, and you can find them all at PAX Prime in Seattle from August 30 to September 2.
Cannon Brawl devs release alpha build for free
Cannon Brawl is dropping off an alpha version, available to download and play for free on PC. The game is a 2D mix of multiplayer action and real-time strategy, in which you control a little zeppelin that can build structures and fire cannons. Unfortunately, this is an early version of the game, so it likely has plenty of bugs, performance issues, and other compatibility problems. But the devs want to get the game in your hands, so if you're in the forgiving mood you can download it starting now.Cannon Brawl has also appeared on Steam Greenlight, and is aiming for the Xbox sometime in the future.
Daily iPad App: Splice is a different puzzle game
Splice is an experimental puzzle game for iPad, put together by a developer called Cipher Prime. It was originally released on Steam and has received several awards. After being selected for PAX 10 and Indiecade 2012, Splice has made the jump over to iPad. Splice is intriguing in that it's not easy to get into, as it's a puzzle game that plays hide-and-seek with its mechanics. But it definitely creates a striking mood, and it wordlessly communicates its principles quite well. The basic idea is that you've got to line up what appear to be biological cells in a certain order, usually in a symmetrical pattern, by splitting and then recombining them (hence the title) a certain number of times. Like most great game ideas, this sounds more complicated to do than it is. In the end, you've just got to look closely for a pattern, and then figure out where the cells need to go. There are some great touches in the atmosphere of the game, too. For example, when you mess up and need to redo your splices, you just touch a timeline on the side of the screen, and the game artfully rewinds to the last cut you made. TUAW got a chance to talk with Cipher Prime at PAX last week, and founder Dain Saint said that the game was originally developed in Unity. Bringing it to the iPad didn't take long at all, but the optimization process took about a month. The company is now working on a sequel to a previous title, Auditorium, after having raised the funds for it via a Kickstarter earlier this year. But Saint also told us that before it makes Auditorium 2, the goal is to make a much smaller title, hopefully with a development time of just about a month, to "work through our production pipeline." After that, it'll be on to the bigger title, but Saint isn't sure whether either game will make it to the iPad just yet. With a team of just five people, there's obviously not a lot of time for extra tasks. At any rate, it's good to see Splice on the iOS platform, and hopefully its success will bring Cipher Prime and other indie developers back in the future. The game's artistic and experimental, so it might not be for everyone (especially with the current $3.99 price, despite the game being even more expensive on Steam). But if you're looking for a really gorgeous puzzle game with some out-there mechanics, Splice is a very interesting experience to try.
Cannon Brawl brings 2D RTS to the PAX 10
The PAX 10 picked some excellent titles to show off right outside of PAX's Indie Megabooth in Seattle last weekend. Of the indie games on display, a 2D real-time strategy game called Cannon Brawl was my favorite. Cannon Brawl (formerly called Dstroyd) is the product of four developers calling themselves Turtle Sandbox Games, and was a winner of the Activision Independent Games Competition last year, picking up $175,000 and a chance to be published with Activision.The game looks very different from the last time we saw it - the graphics are much cleaner, the interface is simple and well-designed, and while the gameplay is fast and complicated Cannon Brawl does a great job of mixing quick moves with solid and interesting strategical choices. The game's not done yet, but it's coming together very well. Odds are that we'll be seeing this game a lot more in the future.
This year's PAX 10: JS Joust, Offspring Fling!, Puzzlejuice and more
The PAX 10, an illustrious group of indie games chosen annually to be spotlighted during PAX Prime in Seattle, have been selected. This year's rarified group include the likes of Johann Sebastian Joust, Offspring Fling! – a game we highlighted in length on the Super Joystiq Podcast – and hypnotic iOS darling Puzzlejuice.Other lesser-known titles include the latest from Cipher Prime, the studio behind Auditorium and Fractal, a Steam title called Splice, and puzzle games Containment: The Zombie Puzzler and The Bridge. Puzzle-platformer The Swapper is also represented, along with DigiPen's stealth-action game Deity and Catch-22. Turtle Sandbox's action-strategy hybrid Cannon Brawl rounds out the list of ten.All PAX 10 titles will be featured in their own special area at this year's PAX Prime, which goes down August 31 through September 2 in downtown Seattle, WA.
Antichamber preview: Psycholudology
Trying to describe the hour I spent with Alexander Bruce's PAX 10 Finalist indie game, Antichamber, is going to be one of the most difficult descriptive feats I've ever attempted. I think that the big hang-up is that it's going to mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people: For me, my time with the game was all about learning the obscure rules of a universe with no immediate context; a game about second, then third, then fourth-guessing my own actions until I found a solution I was able to walk away from with just a modicum of satisfaction. For the person who took up the demo after me, it was about moving forward as quickly he could, attempting to adhere to an entirely pointless 90-minute time limit while ignoring all the lessons the game had to teach. Here's the thing: I'm not entirely sure either of us was playing it wrong.
PAX 10 says these are the best indie games
The top 10 indie games in the entire world have been selected as this year's PAX 10, each of them winning some free booth space at PAX Prime from August 26-28 in Washington. Chosen as the "best in gameplay, originality and overall fun-factor," winners include Atom Zombie Smasher, Jamestown, Fez and seven others you're probably not cool enough to have heard of. Find out who won (and by process of elimination, who lost) according to the press release after the jump.
Bastion is Supergiant Games' first title, playable at PAX
When Supergiant Games opened its doors during GDC earlier this year, it revealed it was working on a digital title to be released in 2011. This week, Giant Bomb unveiled that title -- it's called Bastion and should be available for public consumption by next summer. Supergiant explains Bastion as an "action role-playing game set in a lush imaginative world, in which players must create and fight for civilization's last refuge as a mysterious narrator marks their every move." The "mysterious," somewhat lyrical narrator makes his first appearance in the game's trailer -- which we've dropped after the break. Considering Supergiant's pedigree (ex-EALA Command & Conquer devs) and how beautifully detailed this initial media is, we have high hopes for Bastion. The game will be playable at PAX Prime this weekend as part of the "PAX 10."%Gallery-101176%
PAX 10 winners announced for PAX '10
The ten independently-developed games that will be featured on the show floor at PAX Prime 2010 have been announced. There are a few recognizable names in this year's PAX 10 collection, including Super Meat Boy and Retro City Rampage-- but there are also plenty of lesser-known (but assuredly spectacular) indie titles in the mix as well, like the pictured Fowl Space. Check out the full list of featured titles posted just past the jump, or catch a glimpse of each game in the gallery below. If you want to give the games a once-over at PAX Prime, you might want to grab one of the remaining one-day passes for the event. %Gallery-97577%
PAX 10 announced, features an all-stars of indie gaming selection
With PAX 2009 just under two months away, the folks organizing the Penny Arcade Expo have begun gearing up for the show. How do we know, you ask? Simple: The PAX 10 was announced today, featuring a list of games we'd sorta/kinda heard of before. Since we're so cool and totally knew about all these games before anyone else did (yeah right), we're a bit nonplussed by this year's PAX 10 winners. Hell, we even have Fieldrunners running on our giant, collective iPhone right now. Seriously! Okay, fine, we only knew that one ... CarneyVale: Showtime by the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Games Lab (Xbox 360) Closure by Tyler Glaiel and Jon Schubbe (PC) Fieldrunners by Subatomic Studios (iPhone/iPod touch) Liight by Studio Walljump (Wii) Machinarium by Amanita Design (PC) Osmos by Hemisphere Games (PC) Puzzle Bloom by Team Shotgun (PC) Tag: The Power of Paint by Tag Team (PC) Trino by Trinoteam (Xbox 360) What is Bothering Carl? by Story Fort (PC)
Penny Arcade Expo 2008 to showcase indie games
The annual Penny Arcade Expo has quickly evolved from being simply a gathering of video game enthusiasts to becoming one of our most anticipated gaming conferences each year. We never know what we're going to see there first hand, from fresh rhymes to Metroid attacks, and this year's event, taking place from August 29-31, looks to up the ante with a showcase of independent games called PAX 10.Event organizers are currently seeking indie talent to show off during the event, and devs can submit their creations online for consideration from now until May 7, after which a panel of 50 "industry experts," including PA's own Gabe and Tycho, will decide which ten submissions represent the crème of the crop based on gameplay and that all important "fun factor." The home-grown games will each be shown as part of the event's PAX 10 exhibit, and attendees will be able to vote on which one tickles their fancy, with the one garnering the most votes being lifted up following the expo on the Penny Arcade website as the Audience Choice Award winner. But with just a touch over two months remaining, time is running short -- if you're a would-be developer you've already wasted precious minutes reading this post! Get cracking!
