"The intense sense of purpose and camaraderie amongst The PAX 10 was astonishing," commented Michael Wilford of Twisted Pixel. "We feel extremely lucky to have been chosen from such an august group and grateful to have been a part of the PAX experience."

Judging from what I've seen of the game along with Crecente's hands-on impressions from the show, I'd say the PAX audience made a very good choice. Look for the award-winning title to hit Xbox Live Arcade early next year.

THE PAX 10 AUDIENCE CHOICE AWARD WINNER ANNOUNCED

"The Maw" Selected from PAX 2008's Inaugural Indie Games Showcase

Seattle, Wash., September 22, 2008 - The votes are in! The organizers of The PAX 10 today announced Twisted Pixel's The Maw as winner of the 2008 Audience Choice award. The PAX 10, a showcase of ten independently developed games, were selected by a panel of 50 industry experts out of over 80 submissions as the best in terms of gameplay and "fun factor." The PAX 10 winners displayed their games at the 2008 Penny Arcade Expo (PAX), allowing attendees the opportunity to view each of the titles and cast their secret ballots, earning The Maw top honors for the inaugural year of the showcase event.

"The PAX 10 winners were great to work with and were as busy as any other booth on the Expo Hall floor," said Penny Arcade's Robert Khoo. "We're happy that we could support these amazingly talented developers and want to thank everyone who voted for their participation."

"The intense sense of purpose and camaraderie amongst The PAX 10 was astonishing," commented Michael Wilford of Twisted Pixel. "We feel extremely lucky to have been chosen from such an august group and grateful to have been a part of the PAX experience."

The Maw is a 3D action-adventure game in which players take control of Frank, a simple alien that must partner up with The Maw, a cute little blob with an insatiable hunger. Players will need to harness The Maw's unstoppable growth and incredible powers in order to help Frank find his way home. The game is expected to debut on Xbox LIVE® Arcade in early Q1 2009 and has been rated "E10+" for Everyone 10 and older by the Entertainment Software Rating Board for this platform.

The complete list of 2008's The PAX 10 (in alphabetical order):

- The Amazing Brain Train by Grubby Games (puzzle/strategy)

- Audio Surf by Dylan Fitterer (rhythm/action)

- Chronotron by Scarybug Games (puzzle/platformer)

- Impulse by a team of Rochester Institute of Technology students (puzzle)

- The Maw by Twisted Pixel Games (action/adventure)

- Polarity by a team of Carnegie Mellon University students (platformer/puzzle)

- Project Aftermath by Games Faction (tactical/action)

- Schizoid by Torpex Games (action/strategy)

- Strange Attractors 2 by Ominous Development (puzzle/strategy)

- Sushi Bar Samurai by Molly Rocket (exploratory puzzle)

You have until Friday to enter. Hit up the link for the rules.

Win Our Penny Arcade Expo Swag for Pennies a Day [Kotaku]

But I'm also in the midst of planning trips to New York and Tokyo over the next few weeks, so I don't have time to be cruel. Instead, I'm going to allow you to be creative. We have, at Adam's house, a backpack of Penny Arcade Expo swag that need to get into the hands of a faithful reader but quick.

When I asked around in Kotaku Tower for ideas for a contest, Fahey was quick to come up with something equal parts diabolical and fun. Recreate a scene from a video game with pennies. I think he may have been joking, but I'm not. Make sure to include, when you snap your picture, something that says Kotaku on it in the image, so we know you're on the up and up.

Deadline is Sept. 26. Mail all entries to KotakuContestATGmailDOTcom with "PAX" in the subject line and the photo in the body. We'll announce the winner that Monday. Here's what you have a chance of winning:

Among the freebies that we are giving away with our schwag bag are tons of t-shirts (including pretty sweet Fruit Fucker and The Maw shirts) , a Fallout 3 survival guide, a World of Warcraft pet card from this year's WWI in Paris (the Blizzard guys were kind enough to hand one over to us), a ping-pong gun, a Champions Online backpack and plenty of other little do-dads.

And yes, I'm giving away my one and only Vault Boy puppet. Oh the things he has seen.

UPDATE: If you live in a country free of pennies you can use coins of the penny variety from your homeland.

With little time left to get new lanyards together, the PAX folks just ran with it, thus creating the sad little Ghostbusters promotional items. There's a bright side at least. As Variety's Ben Fritz points out, whoever winds up publishing the game just got a boatload of free advertising courtesy of Sierra.

The deal with those Ghostbusters lanyards at PAX [Variety]

It was still free-roaming and featured detailed 3D avatars. It still had plenty of running and gunning. But the vibe, the feel of the game didn't have the same GTA-ness to it that, to many, marked the first Saints Row a Grand Theft Auto clone.

I actually mentioned this to the Saints Row folks on hand and they agreed with me. Even the marketing for the game has been geared toward differentiating the free-roaming shooter from GTA.

But it's hard to put your finger on exactly how the games are different when playing Saints Row 2. It sort of feels that GTA and Saints Row were both heading down the same road and at some point GTA veered off in one direction and Saints Row headed off in another.

The chunk of demo I played through had me playing around with a skinny bald chick escaping from a prison. (I'll avoid the obvious Britney jokes.) The controls for shooting felt fairly tight and melee combat was a joy. I could also, I discovered, run up on a hapless victim, using them as a shield before dispensing them.

The game was packed full of humor both of the developers making and my own. For instance, after one particularly fierce battle with a guard I back-hand bitched slapped him to the ground, killing him.

I'm not quite sure yet how well Saints Row 2 is going to hold up once I have the full title in my hand, but I do know with absolute certainty that more games need fatal bitch slaps.

But that's a problem easily solved, and the PA folks are all over it.

The bigger problem, as I see it, is in the expo's name and its association with Penny Arcade.

Penny Arcade Expo has the potential, the very likely potential, to become the one preeminent video game show in the country. It has the exuberant backing of developers and publishers, it has more than enough willing participants to go around and it has the blessing of the many folks who cover the gaming industry for a living.

But what it doesn't have is a neutral jumping off point. PAX has the words Penny Arcade in the title and while for me, and tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people like me, that's a bonus, there are still lots of people out there who hate the strip, the people associated with it and anything whatsoever that has to do with Penny Arcade, Gabe, Tycho and, yes, even Fruit Fucker.

What this means is that they have a fractured potential audience. While most PAX attendees are unified by their love of gaming, they're more unified by their love of Penny Arcade. Sadly I think that means the show's potential audience will remain fractured as long as Penny Arcade is the central theme, preventing PAX from becoming the Games Convention or Tokyo Game Show of the United States.

There are some solutions. I think that it would be easy enough, especially with a second, east coast, PAX looming a few years away, to just change the name of the show and let it grow into its own entity. Another option, presented to me by one of many industry types I talked to about this during the show, is to just officially rename the show PAX. In other words remove the meaning behind the acronym and have it take on a meaning of its own. In a few decades, maybe just a few years, people would wonder what PAX stood for and why the show is called that.

While most of the people I spoke to at the show eventually came around to my way of thinking, acknowledging, no matter how grudgingly, that yes there are PA haters out there and nothing will ever get them to the show, I do wonder how true that really is.

How many among you didn't attend PAX strictly because it's the PENNY ARCADE expo as opposed to a video game expo? How many of you would have gone if it was called something else?

What I think everyone can agree on is that the U.S. needs a single video game show for the public, and not the many that now litter the gaming landscape. We need a TGS, a Leipzig. The real question is will E3 get it's act together and fill that shrinking void or will a show like PAX become the show to rule them all.

Although the general feeling was that the con was a big success, there were complaints that some panels and demos were difficult/impossible to get in to due to overcrowding and the organizers admit that there is work to be done for next year.

"We finally stopped doubling our attendance," said Penny Arcade Business Development manager Robert Khoo, "but lord I'm not sure if we could have handled any more people if they showed up. Key learnings for next year? Better line management and more space!"

For the 2009 event, Khoo told BigDownload.com that they were going to introduce some practical crowd management measures.

"We have a few ideas to manage that problem for 2009 including wristbands for popular events or just a straight-up hard count of people in line."

Penny Arcade Expo 2008: 58,500 attendees [BigDownload]

Graphically, the game delivers, but I was a little surprised, slightly disappointed even, at how simplistic the controls were.The four face buttons let you throw high punches, low punches, strong punches and perform a grab and throw. To block a punch you pull a trigger and to duck a punch you hold in the corresponding punch button.

While you can move your fighter around with the joystick, this doesn't really seem to come into play much. Mostly you want to be close enough to duke it out and I found myself relying on the duck buttons to avoid blows, rather than moving my fighter away from the fight.

What stripping down the controls so significantly does it create a button-mashing brawling that can be fun to play at times, but that may not deliver a game that with a lot of staying power.

I had fun bashing in the face of Tristan's pugilist, and occasionally having mine bashed in, but I can't imagine it would be a game I'd want to play for any length of time. And while the simple controls seem like a perfect fit for young gamers, the over-the-top cartoon violence and T-rating seems like it will filter out most of the people who will most want to keep playing the game.

Among the freebies that we are giving away with our schwag bag are tons of t-shirts (including pretty sweet Fruit Fucker and The Maw shirts) , a Fallout 3 survival guide, a World of Warcraft pet card from this year's WWI in Paris (the Blizzard guys were kind enough to hand one over to us), a ping-pong gun and plenty of little do-dads.

OK, so how should we do this. Any suggestions?

Bethesda had thousands of copies of The Official Vault Dweller's Survival Guide to give away. They also had friggin Vault Boy puppets. Puppets, that were Vault boy!

Cryptic, on the other hand, had a whole bag of goodies that gamers could score from drawings at the show. The goodies included a full-sized Champions Online backpack, a gun that shot glow-in-the-dark ping pong balls, a t-shirt, a personalized super hero ID card and a Champions Online skateboard deck.

Which do you think was better?

Stranger still was the fact that there were almost no lines for the beautifully crafted 2D platformer. I handed the controller to Tristan and watched him take to the title like a gamer thirsting for some old-school, hardcore fun on a casual gaming platform.

The game plays mostly with the D-pad and buttons but you do have to pull off the occasional motion-activated slam. Wario Land Shake It seems fairly straight forward, but Nintendo has buried plenty of hidden items and side quests to make the game fun to replay.

The thing most captivating about the game is its clean, hand-drawn look. It's simply beautiful to behold in action.

At the final round of the Omeganauts, (which was played on"Vs. Excitebike" for the Famicom Disk System) a group of gamers rocked out in unison to "Just Between You and Me" by April Wine and "The Final Countdown" by Europe with a shitload of Pip Boy Puppets.

Even Gabe said "Wow. That's a lot of Fallout puppets".

[Video by Chris Person]

Hit the jump for a tasty selection of the cosplayers I captured on digital film. Gotta get them all.

As I mentioned earlier, the Airstream was completely gutted and refitted with a wonderful blending of 50s and Fallout 3 era knick knacks. The center piece to the whole thing wasn't the working mini-fridge packed with Nuka Cola, but the flat-screen television installed in the back wall, complete with faux woodgrain framing and a mammoth wall mounted speaker.

Now you should be getting enthused about the Nuclear Airstream too. Turns out that Bethesda plans to donate the amazing piece of schwag to Child's Play following the launch of the game. Can you imagine winning this bad boy and parking it in your front yard for late night gaming sessions. The whole thing, I'm told, even runs on electricity.

How do i know?

Tristan was so mesmerized by the game that he pushed through a crowd of onlookers to play the game on the Ubisoft stage. He even risked certain exposure to Frag Dolls-based cooties to get some ass-time with the Balance Board driven game. The particular mini-game he played had him steering a cow down a snowboard course by shifting his weight back and forth on the balance board. Sitting up on stage, his full attention locked on the flat screen, he didn't even seem to mind that he was book-ended by two of the FGs while playing the game as a third tried to harass him off his course.

A free haircut and video game apparently seemed like a sweet deal to a lot of people, even if it did turn them into walking billboards. There was a line. A long, long line. For this.

"Cooking Mama is like cooking with your friends and family at home," said Lisa Mason, the game's lead designer. "We wanted to do things that home cooks don't do: fillet whole fish, quarter chicken.

"The (TV) show is so ridiculous and we wanted to get that across in the game as well."

And while the game is based on the American version of the game, the developers also strove to include some of the wackiness that made the original Japanese show so much fun to watch.

The game will include 320 mini games, 15 themed ingredients and a 2,500 lines of dialog.

Playing around with the game I found it to be surprisingly fun. You use the Wii's motion controls to work your way through a batch of recipes, preparing food as the judges watch and Alton Brown talks color. While the Wii game was amusing, the DS version is the one I think will really strike a chord with gamers.

Not only does it match the Wii version (but without all of that talking) it will sell for a paltry $20 and include both pass the DS multiplayer and multi-card multiplayer.

The controls seemed tighter on the DS as well and there's something a bit more satisfying about slicing and dicing with stylus strokes as opposed to swiped in the air with a remote.

I was worried that a Valve game built to be a PC experience would lose some of its luster when it hit the Xbox 360. So I sat down yesterday to play through one of the game's 20 or so maps.

I was happy to find that Left 4 Dead on the Xbox 360 looks and feels pretty much like the PC experience. The controls are, of course, slightly tweaked, but in general the differences are negligible.

The aiming, Valve's Chet Faliszek told me, includes a very slight auto-aim feature. Actually, it's more like a weighted aiming system, the game helps you lock on when you move the reticle toward a target and it's so subtle I didn't notice it even after I was told it existed. The designers also built in a 180 turn button (one of the bumpers) so you can quickly spin around to take on the ever present Zombie threat.

Graphically the game looked fairly similar. I wasn't able to do a side-by-side comparison and I'm sure graphic snobs will notice a difference, but it wasn't anything jarring for me.

After playing around with the 360 version of the game for a bit, I bugged Faliszek about the PlayStation 3. Why no PS3 version for the game, I asked.

Faliszek said that it's mostly a matter of development time. Creating the Xbox 360 version of the game is close enough to creating the PC version that it's "almost like pushing an A button," he said. The PS3 version, though, essentially requires starting from scratch.

That doesn't mean the game won't be coming to the PS3, but I suspect it will be awhile.