When wandering around the exhibition hall at PAX, it's hard to not be dominated by Duke, titillated by TRON and blown away by BRINK. These games have huge edifices announcing their presence and forcing their way into your consciousness whether you like it or not (go ahead and try and ignore the ENORMOUS dinosaur glowing above the Fallout: New Vegas kiosk). But the real gems and only real surprises of the show can be found by touring around the outer edges of the hall, where the understated, but brimming with genuine enthusiasm booths of the indie game developers reside. Here, rather than talking with marketing people who gleaned much of their knowledge from press releases (ok, there are also the occasional developers in the big name booths), you instead find the CEOs and entire teams that worked so painstakingly on their love letters to gaming. These are the folks that are genuinely excited to see you, and whose games don't need 10 minutes of credits at the end. Of all the things I saw at PAX (and there was a LOT there), my time with the Indie developers was by far the most rewarding. In fact, my favorite game of the show might just have been Slam Bolt Scrappers.

You probably haven't heard of Fire Hose Games, or their "Fire Chief" Eitan Gilnert, but if you have friends and like fun, then you should get to know them. We got some hands on time with Slam Bolt Scrappers, a game which is very difficult to describe, but it boils down to a mix of Tetris, Super Puzzle Fighter and arcade track-ball classic Rampart, with a little bit of Castle Crashers tossed in. In the "traditional" 4-player battle, you and a teammate battle nasties on the top of the screen and they burst into Tetris pieces, which you then place in your tower. As you form larger and larger squares of a similar color, they turn into varying guns and shields which then launch their own attacks on the opponents tower. In the meantime, your opponents are of course doing the same, and you are free to go battle them and steal their piece before they place them in the tower. Powerups let you rearrange your tower pieces or steal bits from your opponents towers, and other nefarious acts. Before each round, you select what 3 tile colors will be available (our game featured Shields, Missiles and Lasers, and I saw a glimpse of snowballs and a few others as I watched). There were around 10 different tile types on display at PAX, and Eitan promised there were several more they were keeping hidden, so the game can change quite a bit from round to round. If there ever was a game built for couch co-op, this is it, and one can easily see friendships destroyed like the foundation of your towers before they come toppling down.

Even if that were all there was to it, it would be a blast, but there are a few other modes to play through. There is a single player campaign (that can also be played co-op) that has you battling large bosses that require you to find out how to lower their shields before your attacks have any effect on them, while at the same time building your tower to both attack them and defend yourself from their relentless onslaught. In addition, there is a 4 player co-op versus the computer that has you and your pals building two towers simultaneously in the center, while the CPU builds their own towers on the edges of the screen. The big catch is that your towers are precariously balanced above a pool of lava (shades of Joust!), and if you add too much to either side without balancing it out, your towers will fall to their hellish burning doom. Given the amount of fun we had just messing around with these on the show floor in their limited forms, I think the fun quotient is through the roof on this game, and it has rocketed to the top of my "must buy" list for upcoming games. Fans of any of the games that inspired Slam Bolt Scrappers will find themselves drawn in. Hell, the game even includes a "beverage mode" that allows you to play with one hand whilst you consume your (alcoholic) beverage of choice and lambast your friends for putting that damn brick in the wrong spot. Stay tuned for more about this little gem as it gets closer to release!