Penny Arcade has announced the finalists for its PAX 10 indie game competition, which include Puzzle Bots, Super Meat Boy, Altitude, Hegemony: Philip of Macedon, and six others, to be showcased for attendees of the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle this September.
Event organizers say on the competition's official site that this year's call for submissions drew more than 100 independent games, with "a panel of game industry experts" responsible for culling that total down to the ten best.
The full list of finalists is as follows:
- Altitude - Nimbly Games; PC
- Bastion - Supergiant Games; PC, unspecified consoles
- Fowl Space - Pixelante; PC, Mac
- Hegemony: Philip of Macedon - Longbow Games; PC
- Plane Weaver - Team Plane Weaver; PC
- Puzzle Bots - Wadjet Eye Games; PC
- Retro City Rampage - Vblank Entertainment; Wii
- Shibuya - Nevercenter; iPhone, iPod
- Solace - One Man Down; PC
- Super Meat Boy - Team Meat; PC, Xbox 360, Wii
Earlier this year, hardcore sidescroller Super Meat Boy was nominated for Excellence in Audio and the Seumus McNally Grand Prize at the Independent Game Festival held during Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
And, in a historical connection to the IGF, the long-in-development strategy game Hegemony: Philip of Macedon was developed by Longbow Games, a family-owned independent development studio whose original president and lead programmer Seumas McNally serves as the namesake for the IGF's top prize. McNally died of Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2000.
This is the third year of the PAX 10. Last year's finalists included Osmos, Fieldrunners, Machinarium, and Tag: The Power of Paint -- whose team was hired by Valve and is incorporating mechanics from Tag into the upcoming Portal 2.
