TOP 10 BEST INDIE GAMES OF 2010 – INDIE GAME REVIEWER’S FAVORITE GAME PICKS OF THE YEAR

This, was difficult. Selecting ten games from the plethora of independent comers in a watershed year for the indie gaming community was made even more difficult because of our desire to showcase those creative and adventurous minds that are helping to break molds and old patterns and often we have to separate the developer from the game and base our decision on the game itself – its playability, narrative, ease of use, originality, execution and not the potential of its creators.

Top 20 Best Xbox 360 Live Indie Games of 2010

It was an interesting year for the XBOX Live Indie (formerly known as community and XNA respectively) game platform: first Microsoft made the grave mistake of hiding the XBOX Indies inside some esoteric marketplace tab away from the central gaming area. Then the came the backlash. Then the indie devs organized and stormed the gates with the Indie Games Winter Uprising which stated as it’s MO that it would fight against crappy massage apps clones and mediocrity. All told, the foibles and shenanigans galvanized the commitment and momentum of the little guys who deserve better.

So we send out proper respects to all the independent game developers out there who are making it happen – and we believe you are a force to be reckoned with – heck that’s why this site exists! It’s a little home for you. It’s a lighthouse, attempting to illuminate the dark quarters of the valley. Which makes choosing 20 of the best even harder.

Yep, we are certain not all of you will agree with all of our choices, and even more certain that we missed some games that merited placement in this list. But we do our best and hope this helps lead more eyeballs your way. Microdevs, we salute you!

The 50 Best Albums of 2010 – MusicZeitgeist.com’s Favorite Spins

Alright 2010, thank you for helping ease out all the hand-clapping and xylophones. This year it was time to get down and dirty.

Special thanks to Truffle Jones, Tragic Josh and Daniel Waters for their invaluable input in compiling this list and covering the huge selection of excellent options for another very eclectic year in excellent recorded music.

It would be impossible to give a comprehensive overview of all the new ideas, ambitions, technologies and concepts presented, but part of the magic in the world’s largest tech and media conference comes from interfacing with others who were there and hearing from them what discoveries they made.

HOT PRODUCTS FROM NAB 2010

Some of our own highlights included the many seminars, tutorials and breakdowns around the new Adobe CS5 Production Premium Suite that becomes available before summer 2010. From a complete 64-bit rewrite of Adobe Premiere, that showed RAW footage from a RED cam alongside Panasonic P2 footage and Quicktime H.264 files rom Canon’s DSLR playing from the same timeline (without transcoding) to the mind-boggling technologies introduced in the latest iteration of Adobe Photoshop (like smartfill, or dry brushes that show an animated three dimensional paint brush that animates as you paint) to the rotoscoping brush in After Effects – the new software promises to be a complete game-changer. Adobe has acknowledged some of it slightly disappointing attempts in earlier versions, but seem to really have nailed it this time around.

Harris showed a very interesting new vertical technology called Fanscape (working title?) that simplifies the generation of discounts, contests and call-to-action incentives that uses Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other social media for on-fly conversion strategies while handling all of the behind-the-scenes logistics including point of sale management.

Canon unveiled its latest camcorders – the new XF305 series featuring 4:2:2 colorspace, 3 CMOS sensors, SMPTE generation and a lot more. The camera’s MSRP is presently $8K.

TVLogic's TDM-150W

TVLogic showed off what may be one of the first 3D OLED monitors. The TDM-150W is a 15″ 1366×768 15′ (16:9) OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) with 3D Shutter Glass, a 100,000:1 Contrast Ratio, built-in waveform and vectorscopes and SDI/HDMI 10-bit support. Just, wow.

Litepanels – the runaway star of the mini LED lighting world, demonstrated an amazing hyrid LED that doubles as a flash strobe with a burst rate up to eight frames per second (8fps).  In case this doesn’t amaze in text form, check out this demonstration video from the NAB show floor:

NAB 2010 BUZZWORDS

If you follow us on Twitter, you may have caught some tweets about this year’s buzzwords: last year they were 3D, DTV and social networking, and these were replaced, or updated in 2010 to “broader-casting” (a term trademarked by NAB to include the new broadband broadcasting revolution), “transmedia,” “metadata,” “broadband spectrum,” “mobile,” “colorspace,” “time-shifting” and “multi-platform.”

Add to which, we were treated to talks from Michael J. Fox, Raymond Kurzweil, Stan Lee and many other industry leaders and an amazing preview of Discovery Channel’s upcoming 4-hour series based on the ideas of Stephen Hawking -Into the Universe at the SONY 4K Digital Content Theater.

We will be discussing all of these buzzwords and expanding significantly on this year’s highlights at our very own podcast available on iTunes, or via the main site at http://keramcast.com in the coming weeks.

As usual, it was a breathtakingly huge show that proved very informative and fruitful – a sentiment echoed by anyone with whom we spoke. Kudos to all the event organizers and the NAB for pulling it off.