Sushi Bar Samurai is a unique entry among the innovative games in the PAX 10. There is no platforming, no physics, and no combat. Instead there’s a chef (you), his trusty stock of sushi ingredients, and a pile of spirits who are owed a last meal.

Sushi isn’t made a la Cooking Mama. Instead, the eponymous bar of sushi ingredients scrolls across the top of the screen, and you simply click to queue your stock to make combinations that will result in palatable sushi. The game is perhaps a distant relative of Tetris, but because you can see the ingredients in advance, the emphasis shifts from tactical to strategic. In a nutshell, Sushi Bar Samurai is about mastering the arcane intricacies of sushi, and using them to plan an optimal path through a stream of ingredients.

We make a great deal of fuss about accessibility around here, and transparency is a part of that. You might predict that we’d be critical of a game that revolves around secret codes written in meat and rice, but hit the jump to discover sole developer Casey Muratori’s intriguing counterpoints about transparency’s place in puzzle games. We also chat about the language of sushi and reasons to make a game aside from cash. There’s not presently a public demo, but stop by his website to read more about his development philosophy and check out some media.

Strange Attractors 2 is a top-down game about navigating an avatar from place to place using attraction and repulsion mechanics. It wasn’t the only game in the PAX 10 to use the environment to pull and push the player around, but it was the only one to use gravity to model those forces. So instead of using specially designated objects, everything in the environment pulls and pushes everything else. Controlling the game is like controlling the gravitational constant. It defaults to 0, but you can turn it up high, or flip it into negative numbers using the two mouse buttons.

We talked to Christoper McGarry of Ominous Development about how Strange Attractors 2 grew out of the first game, their distribution model, and the charmingly tortured cries of the game’s enemies. Hit the jump for all that and then check out the demo.

Longtime readers may recall a post bemoaning that cooperative multiplayer is hard to come by and harder to do right. Schizoid disagrees. It’s a top-down two-player game where each player controls either a red or a blue avatar. Enemies are color-coded too, and colliding with like-colored baddies destroys them while other colors destroy you instead. You arguably could control both avatars (and there’s a game mode called Überschizoid that lets you try just that: one analog stick per avatar), but it’s not recommended unless your corpus callosum has been severed.

Schizoid is presently available on XBox Live, though the XBLA strictures on demos don’t allow multiplayer. Still, you can fake it by grabbing a significant other and snuggling together to share one controller on Überschizoid, so give it a shot anyway.

We talked to Schizoid’s Richard Garfield about the game’s roots, cooperative gaming in general, and digital distribution. Hit the jump for the details.

If you’re a MMORPG player, have ever known a MMORPG player, or just known anyone who just might spend a little bit too much time playing video games, thenThe Guild is for you. The award winning show consists of ten brief webisodes, and chronicles the trials of a MMORPG guild that decides to meet in person to defeat a real life problem. Wackiness ensues.

Written by and starring Felicia Day (who recently starred as Penny in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along-Blog), the show is a great example of what happens when entertainment moves from big-budget Hollywood to donor-funded internet productions. Just about everything you could want to know about making the show is available linked from their website, like the fact that Felicia has been an avid gamer her whole life, and decided to make The Guild when she noticed that she was turning down professional opportunities to raid Molten Core. With her alt.

I had a chance to speak with Felicia Day and her costar Sandeep Parikh (writer of the NSFW Legend of Zelda parody, The Legend of Neil) about their show, about MMOs, and about the future of modern entertainment. Read on to discover how writers are getting frustrated with Hollywood, how Felicia Day addicted her fellow cast members to WoW, and how MMOs are changing the face of the gaming community as a whole. She puts her finger on why MMOs and other ways of gaming together are resonating so well with the gaming community: “Being in a walled garden isn’t enough anymore.” Don’t think for a moment that the meek characters you may have seen Felicia Day portray recently reflect her personality at all: she has a tremendous force of personality, and fights to be recognized for independent work like The Guild.

While Project Aftermath might appear at a glance to be a typical Real Time Strategy game, it’s not. Get your hands on it and you’ll realize it isn’t just about winning and losing—it’s about points. The idea sounds weird, but it’s really a self-correcting difficulty selector that makes room in the genre for neophytes and experts a like. Starting armaments cost points, and good performance earns them. There’s no cap on the special abilities that units can use, but they cost you a bit of score with each use. Neophytes can play armed to the teeth (and in deep point debt), actually winning games and having fun, while experts who win with little more than sticks and harsh language score big on the leaderboards.

Lee Hickey stopped by from England and told us all about this and other ways that Project Aftermath makes the RTS genre more accessible. Read on for that, Lee’s thoughts on explosions and their importance to design, and what you can do to bring skilled players and new players together without a one-sided bloodbath. Check out the demo too.

PAX is big. PAX is really big. Big Download is reporting that the final total for PAX 2008 attendees was 58,500. Given PAX 2007 attendance was 37,000, and this year’s projected estimate was between 45,000 and 50,000, that’s a lot of nerds. Our one-man content provider turned to his trusty web monkey, let her loose with a camera and (when needed) an audio recorder to help generate content. Our reporting staff now doubled, we felt empowered to cover a bit more of PAX than one person could have covered alone. A tiny bit more.

Independent developers have a hard lot. They can be under-funded, minimally marketed, and outright missed in the endlessly chattering internet. However, their sometimes-low profile frees indie devs to do some of the most creative gaming work available today.

This PAX, ten of them were recognized for their innovation, dedication, and development excellence. Pixelsocks.com was lucky to have a chance to chat with team members from each of the PAX 10. Check back daily for each interview.

• The Amazing Brain Train with Ryan Clark
• Audiosurf with Dylan Fitterer
• Chronotron with Joe Rheaume
• Impulse with Andrew Williams and Andy Ray
• The Maw with Mike Henry
• Project Aftermath with Lee Hickey
• Polarity with Daniel Bryner, Howard Braham, and Przemyslaw-Iwanowski
• Schizoid with Richard Garfield
• Strange Attractors 2 with Christopher McGarry
• Sushi Bar Samurai with Casey Muratori

A rogue alliance of guerilla confectioners known as the cookie brigade dispensed baked goods at PAX in exchange for donations to Child’s Play. When the flour settled, the group earned well over $5000 from the generous expo-goers at PAX. The Child’s Play charity donates gaming resources to hospitals that benefit the children there.
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Ken Levine’s talk to open PAX didn’t stray terribly far from last year’s Keynote. He walked us through his childhood, his budding nerdery, and how he ultimately found his way into design. Along the way, he brushed against some nerd culture ephemera (Logan’s run, the Atari, etc.), and the underlying message was a constant, “it’s ok to be a nerd.”

This is just our second time at PAX, and two keynotes does not a pattern make, but it’s not terribly surprising that a community event is about making the community feel good about itself. It’s just that a big part of being a gamer is the basement-dwelling socially inept stereotype, and shame is really the low-hanging fruit. Nevertheless, it seems like a tired trope to trot out—if there’s no reason to be ashamed, then why do we dwell on it so much?

Regardless, he gives a smart and funny talk, so go looking for it on YouTube. We’ll try to post a grainy mp3 when we return.

Pixelsocks.com is going to PAX! Stay tuned as we:
•Deliver “on the ground” gaming news
•Pester developers with questions
•Stare dourly at new games
•Stalk the PAX 10
•Don’t sleep

Who knows? Maybe we’ll see you there!