PAX East wrapped up a few hours ago, and it was a awesome, tiring blast. There were new games to see, clever people to talk to and helpful strangers at every turn.

Over this coming week I’ll be converting video, deciphering notes and generally devoting more time to everything I got my hands on. But until I get home, here are some things I’m looking forward to.

Best Brawler

There were two great brawlers at PAX East this year: Shank and The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile. Even without Shank’s visual style, I think the game’s combat would be very satisfying. But the original The Dishwasher is one of the most technically proficient brawlers I’ve ever played, and Vampire Smile seems even more refined.

In The Dishwasher, each basic enemy had specific ranges where they were most dangerous, and you had a lot of options for neutralizing enemies. That carries over to the new game, only now there are new weapons to experiment with and new bad guys to deal with.

Also, the levels in the demo have a more consistent flow to them. In the original, you’d come to a new screen. It would fill with enemies and you’d stay there until they were all dead. You’d do that for a bunch of screens then you’d come to a boss. Cut scenes and bosses are woven much more naturally into the level design of Vampire Smile, at least in the demo.

The game looks a little better than the first one, the enemies move more naturally and the cut scenes are more than manga panels. And there are little touches that really add to the characters you control, Yuki and the Dishwasher. If you pay attention, you can see a cat following Yuki and a crow following the Dishwasher. Vampire Smile will be on my Xbox when Ska Studios releases the game.

Best Local Multiplayer

Slam Bolt Scrappers takes a lot of ideas and magically fits them together. You and your teammate each control a large flying muscle man in a halo, sombrero or Viking hat. As the match progresses creeps descend from the sky. When you pummel one to death, it drops a building block — a Tetris piece — that you pick up and carry around.

You can rotate the piece and drop it like you would in a game of Tetris, or you can fly down and place it anywhere it fits among your base. But instead of disappearing whenever a line is formed, they transform into turrets any time you make a square out of the same color blocks.

Of course, as you’re trying to construct your base, the other team is flying around, fighting the same creeps in the same airspace. So it’s only natural that the players can attack each other. But fighting the other players is the weakest part of the game. There’s not much to do besides swing your fists, so whoever has the least amount of life gets to choose to stay and die or run away.

It’s pretty easy to get a handle on what you’re supposed to be doing, but actually doing it while another team is getting in your way and building their own tower is harrowing.

I had a ton of fun losing both games I played, so when Fire Hose Games releases it I’ll be trying to convince my friends to play this instead of Wii Sports or Rock Band the next time four of us are gathered.

Best Style

Once again, Shank is going to get passed over for another game. I nearly missed Limbo this year. I went to the Xbox booth in the last hour of the convention to get some time with Hydrophobia, but when I got there it had a pretty big crowd and I didn’t want to wait in line. So I wandered around the booth and saw Limbo. It still had a line, but I didn’t mind waiting for an IGF winner.

Limbo really is gorgeous. I knew that, obviously. It looks like something creators of the new A Boy and His Blob would make if the designers had no souls. But YouTube videos don’t really do it justice.

It’s also a cruel, punishing game that encourages puzzle solving through death. In one of the puzzles, there is small body of water you have to cross. There are two bodies in the water. I jumped on the first one, but I didn’t make it to the third, so I drowned. But I was able to see someone ambling my way. The next time, I jumped to the first body and waited. The ambler walked into the lake and promptly drowned to create the platform I needed to cross the water safely.

Did I mention it’s wonderfully morbid? Bear traps sever your head from your body, gears grind you to pieces and spiders happily impale you. The actions are surprisingly detailed for a game that lacks a color pallet.

Best Game I Know Little About

I was in line for a panel on the Death of Print (which I have some interest in because my day job is at a newspaper), and I found myself in line with an iPhone developer from the UK.

He said his primary influence was X-COM, and while I don’t have a clue how that style of game would work with a touch interface, a mention of X-COM is enough to generate instant interest from me.

His studio is called Stargazy Studios and the game he’s working on is called Huscarls. Huscarls was an Anglo Saxon bodyguard, so the game asks you take on that role, keeping important Anglo-Saxons alive as they go from place to place.

That game will take X-COM’s turn-based tactical gameplay, but focus on close combat. Of course, I haven’t seen any of the game yet, so the concept could fail miserably. But I’m an optimist and I hope the game is awesome.

Best Online Multiplayer

Monday Night Combat is probably going to be written off by some of those who see trailers as a less charming derivative of Team Fortress 2. And it’s true that the games share the qualities of stylized art and team combat, as well as a similar color scheme.

But Monday Night Combat takes some good ideas from DotA: Allstars, Heroes of Newearth and League of Legends. Each class has three skills, which can be upgraded during the match with the money players earn for performing various actions.

And the goal, aside from putting bullets into the other team, is to escort bots to the opposing team’s base, where they take down the shields of the Money Ball. First team to destroy the other’s ball wins. Keeping them alive is pretty important, so the support classes have more to do than in some other games.

I wish it were for PC, because I hate console FPS controls, but I may pick this up anyway when it comes out this summer on XBLA. The developer, Uber Entertainment, doesn’t identify as indie, but they’re privately held and don’t seem to have a publisher, so I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt.

and finally…

Biggest Disappointment

This is probably a bit unfair, but my least favorite game of the con, aside from some of the very experimental games from the MIT’s Gambit Game Lab, came from the same guy who did Dishwasher.

Charlie Murder isn’t finished. James Silva says the official word is that the band is on a break while the attend counseling to deal with conflict within the band.

When I saw the game was playable, I was really excited. It’s the first game I played at PAX, after we had finished setting up and before the doors opened. But the game was a huge letdown.

Characters run slowly and awkwardly across the screen. There are two attack buttons, but one of them is a limited special attack, so there’s really only one button to mash for most of the game. The characters are still people I want to play as, and I’m still interested in the band rivalry between Charlie Murder and (other band), but the gameplay needs to be there or I’m not going to play the game.

I’m still glad I got a chance to play the early build. If the released version is great, I’ll get to say I played the game back when it wasn’t awesome. Ska Studios put Charlie Murder away to make room for a second Dishwasher station by the third day of PAX East, and I think that was a good move.

…

And now it’s time for a long ride home.

Resident columnist James Bishop and I are headed to Boston in the very near future to participate in the East Coast’s Penny Arcade Expo. We’ll be talking to indie developers and playing games and generally trying to make anyone who isn’t there excited and/or jealous.

If any developers we haven’t already scheduled time with would like to talk to us, get in touch with me or James. And if any readers are going to be at PAX, feel free to tip us off to anything you think deserves our coverage.

And if any readers are on that twitter thing, you can follow @gamegnathus to see where I am and what I’m doing — assuming the wi-fi is usable.

If you went looking to buy Plain Sight Monday, you were probably disappointed. Beatnik Games decided to push back the release date by two weeks “due to unforeseen circumstances.”

In Plain Sight, players jet around in suicidal ninja robots building up points until they die. If they kill themselves, they bank those points. If they’re killed by another player’s death, those points are lost. This basic strategy plays out across five play modes.

Hopefully the Londoners can resolve whatever got in the way of Monday’s release and we’ll see the game on the new release date. You can preorder it on Steam or download it from other digital distributors on April 5 for $9.99.

[via Beatnik Games]

Cave Story is now available on WiiWare. It is 1,200 points. It is worth it.

Even without the graphic facelift and new music, it would be worth the $12 those points translate into. That is all you really need to know.

When I think of indie games, Cave Story is what comes to mind. It’s the ideal for me. And not because of the retro graphics or the great controls or the weird world the strange characters inhabit or the fact that it costs nothing. It’s the way the game was developed. A passion project by one developer in his spare time over the course of however long he felt the game needed.

That idea, that this slice of gaming perfection could come from one person is what got me to think about games in the same way I thought of music. That they could be DIY. I was part of some combination of the punk, ska and hardcore scenes at one point or another over the past decade. What attracted me to those genres of music, especially at that time, was that the bands that made music that they wanted to hear. That drive makes for a much more interesting sound. And a much more interesting game.

The changes Nicalis has made to Cave Story aren’t likely to change the core of the game. They treated the author with reverence, something Pixel still seems surprised by. This game opened my eyes and, if you haven’t had a chance to play it yet, now is as good a time as any to start. If you don’t own a Wii, the game is still spectacular on PC, Mac Linux and hacked PSPs.

File this under suspicious. A few days after indie developer Tommy Refenes devoted his GDC rant to trashing Apple’s App Store, the app he used to highlight the problem, Zits & Giggles, was pulled from the store.

One of the problems with Apple is that the company hasn’t always been clear about its actions, especially regarding App Store approvals. So only the people who pulled the app from the store know why it was removed.

There are two reasons I can think of that the app would be removed.

The first is that the app violated some part of Apple’s secret code regarding apps, but had flown under the radar until the rant pointed a lot of attention Zits & Giggles‘ way. Refenes said he had been raising the price of the app every time he checked on it, and it was up to about $400.

Apple has removed at least one app for being priced stupidly high. The company removed the app I Am Rich because it charged $999.99 and did virtually nothing. So there is some precedent for removing expensive apps.

The second is a more worrying possibility. The removal could be retribution for Refenes’ rant. And if Apple pulled his app in retaliation, then they’ve validated his argument.

Which is funny, because I don’t really agree with Refenes. The App Store is terrible for a lot of reasons. It takes a big cut of developers’ revenue, it’s full of low quality games and apps, and, as evidenced above, it’s an inscrutable gatekeeper.

But Refenes doesn’t make any logical connections in his rant. He starts out saying the App Store is awful, but doesn’t support the argument. He tries to argue that the iPod and iPhone are the Tiger Handhelds of this generation, but only succeeds in proving that bad ports of popular games, like Mega Man 2, Sonic and Street Fighter IV are similar to those crappy handhelds.

Popular titles are always going to be big sellers, even if they aren’t suited to the medium. First-person shooters still control like crap on consoles, but how many came out even before Halo introduced a moderately useful control scheme?

And his experiment with Zits & Giggles, which resulted in 14 people buying it at $299, doesn’t prove that the App Store is a failure, it just proves that some people have too much money to spend, or don’t read the prices, or put more value on expensive things. It reflects a tiny fraction of the App Store userbase.

To draw the conclusion that the people who buy games on the App Store aren’t gamers from those two examples is a bit of a reach.

If Apple had left things alone, the rant would have been remembered for the amusing story of a crappy app selling a lot of copies at an exhorbitatnt price. But now Apple is likely to suffer the Streisand effect.

Regardless of why the app was removed, people are going to assume that it was removed because of the rant.

Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe public outcry will get Apple to change their ways and open up the app approval and removal processes. But if history is any indicator, all the complaints will fall on deaf ears.

[Hat tip Ben Abraham]

Boss Baddie’s new game, Wake, just received an update that adds higher resolution support, customizable controls and bloom lighting. I don’t really know what bloom lighting is, but it’s probably better than regular lighting. Version 1.1 also has slightly different scoring and extra engine optimization.

Along with the update, Boss Baddie decided to cut the price by about 42 percent. So the price of Wake fell from $12.99 to $7.49, and the Lunar Pack, which combines Lunnye Devisty and Wake, is only $9.49. Lunnye by itself is still $3.20.

The developers said they dropped the price to encourage more competition on the online scoreboard.

[via Satan Sam]

Just about everything about black pants studio’s Tiny and Big has drawn me in. I first noticed the quirky art style, some that feels familiar and unplaceable. Then the game mechanic, cutting rocks with a laser to make platforms. Then I watched the video and saw the comic letters spelling out sound effects like ZAP and SMASH. Then I played the demo.

The is silly, but that fits with the character design. This is a game that doesn’t take itself seriously. Big has stolen Tiny’s heirloom undies, and leads Tiny on a chase. In the demo, that chase ends with a volcano erupting. The black pants team has only been working on the project for seven months, and jumping in the demo is a bit wonky, but the rock cutting mechanic just feels great.

I implore you to watch the video below and then download the demo. No excuses Mac and Linux users, there are versions for you guys too.

[via IndieGames.com]

2Bee Games, an online community for independent game developers, launched its third Indie Game Contest at GDC last week, and like last time, a multi-platform publishing deal and cash prizes are at stake.

The contest is for original, non-commissioned work, and the winner is determined by the site’s online community and industry experts. In the last contest, more than 120 games were entered, and Climb to the Top of the Castle rose from the ranks to win the publishing deal and $10,000. This contest bumps the prize up to $100,000, so expect competition to be fiercer this time around.

The competition begins May 1. In the meantime, the community is getting a face lift, so expect more information when the new site is finished.

[via 2Bee Games]

Cave Story is finally being released on WiiWare next week, so The Nintendo Channel talked to the port’s producer, Tyrone Rodriguez, and the game’s creator, Daisuke Amaya, better know among Cave Story fans as Pixel. Pixel explains where Balrog came from and what he hopes new players get out of the game.

The interview is pretty amusing, in part because Pixel still seems incredulous about the fact that his game is going to be on a modern day console. And I think it is doubly interesting for anyone else who’s played through the game recently, as I’m sure I’m not the only person who went through the Cave Story again in anticipation of the WiiWare release.

Watch the video below.

[via Nicalis]

Less than two months after Boss Baddie announced the game, Wake is available for your personal computer.

You control a engineer who has been stranded on a sinking ship. You start at the bottom and work against the rising sea level and the interior of the ship in a search for safety, collecting items to help you on your way, like flares, flashlights and axes. As the water rises, it takes out the ships lighting and puts out fires, so finding your own sources of light is pretty important.

You can pick Wake up for $12.99, or add Lunnye Devitsy to the order for another $2. I know the second game costs $3.20, so you’re only saving a little over a dollar, but it’s a bargain at full price. Short demos are available for both games, so you can see if they’re your thing before getting out your credit card.

[via Satan Sam]