Osmos

The long-running Humble Indie Bundle initiative has finally made the leap to smartphones.

It's fair to say that gaming on Macs has hardly been Apple's number one priority over the years. But whether it intended for it to happen or not, the vast success of game sales on its various iOS devices has given the Cupertino giant reason to try and tap into Mac gaming as well.

Rather than simply bolt yet another section onto its increasingly clunky iTunes App Store, Apple decided to open a standalone Mac App Store on January 6th, complete with around 200 games to choose from. Most of them are absolute junk, obviously, but there are plenty that are worth checking out if you happen to have a half-decent Mac.

You might reasonably ask why anyone should care. After all, Valve got there first with its Mac game store on Steam, and has a growing selection of over 80 games vying for your attention. The answer to that is price. Following the lead of the aggressive pricing strategy on the iTunes App Store, many titles – whether casual or hardcore – are significantly cheaper on the Mac App Store than you'll find them elsewhere.

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Five top titles, pay what you want.

The Penny Arcade Expo 2009 has announced the collection of indie games that will be crowned The PAX 10.

The Independent Games Festival awards in 2008 made it seem like the sky was the limit for indie gaming, and so this year's IGF contenders face impossibly high expectations. They are competing with our rather recent recollections of Audiosurf, World of Goo, and Crayon Physics. All brilliant concepts that made fantastic games. How can they hope to match up to that?