The 2010 Penny Arcade Expo “PAX 10″ Winners Announced

Friday, July 16, 2010

PAX 10 logo The Penny Arcade Expo 2010, better known as PAX, (arguably the largest independent games festival of its kind in North America if one takes attendance into account,) has officially announced this year’s top ten best new independent games – the PAX 10 – to be featured at the conference taking place this August in Seattle.

Now in its third year, the 2010 PAX 10 includes titles already proving to be commercially successful (Altitude which has been available and popular on Valve software’s Steam network) and others are already well-known in gaming communities (Super Meat Boy, Retro City Rampage), but some are lesser known works (Fowl Space, Shibuya) that will now receive well-deserved increased exposure.

Super Meat Boy is ready to take over

It has been a good year for prolific indie developer Edmund McMillen (Aether, Gish) whose original Flash-based game “Meat Boy” caught Nintendo’s attention and has since turned into already popular Super Meat Boy with appearances at IGF, and E3 2010. McMillen is also a central subject in the upcoming documentary Indie Game: The Movie.

It is also nice to see Wadjet Eye Games‘ “Puzzle Bots” make the cut; Dave Gilbert’s point-and-click masterpiece “Shivah” is still among my nostalgic favorites.

What we are starting to see is a set of indie super-developers whose names appear over and over again in the indie game lexicon. Of course, we are always on the lookout for the new faces, but it is interesting to note the patterns emerging in the indie game renaissance that seems to be taking place.

While a majority of the titles are exclusive to the Windows PC platform, there is no consistency in genre as titles range from side-scrollers and action RPG to “open world action parody” and “real-time strategy wargame.”