Preview by: Meghan Watt

With giant flat screens, 3D displays, neon orange headset demos and bleach-blondes in stilettos, some of the exhibits at PAX East 2010 were impossible to miss. But, as part of the Boston Indie Showcase, a group of six local developers had little else to offer beyond the games themselves. No free swag, no statues – just TVs on folding tables and the chance to try out some low-budget titles.

Out of those six companies, one in particular caught my eye: Fire Hose Games. I don't know what did it first: the crowd of enthralled onlookers, the colorfully chaotic screen or the developer's plastic fireman's hat. But I had to stop and snag a preview for myself.

Slam Bolt Scrappers is half Tetris, half beat 'em up that, while difficult to understand at first, is relatively simple in execution. For the demo, I teamed up with a random PAX attendee in a heated 2 vs. 2 match on the Xbox 360. Our job was to destroy our opponents' tower while building our own. Strangely enough, construction and demolition require the exact same steps.

First, as beefy mustached brawlers, you have to pummel paunchy winged demons and snatch their beloved Tetris-like blocks. You then have three options: dump the block, get more blocks or rotate and drop the block onto your tower. Dropping the block onto the tower obviously makes it taller, but that isn't your main goal. Instead, you aim to create solid squares of the same color piece. In this demo, the blocks came in red, purple and blue.

Once a square is complete, it transforms into a weapon. Red ones fire enemy-seeking missiles, blues meld into massive shield generators and purples become laser cannons. Even after the weapon has been constructed, you can keep dropping blocks to increase its size. The bigger the weapon, the better. For instance, a 7x7 missile artillery unit is much better than, say, a dinky 2x2 cannon. Once you destroy the enemy's main block, the one highlighted in yellow at the bottom of the tower, you win!

Fluttering about with up to four players, beating up demons (or opponents) and dropping colorful blocks is terribly frantic but in a manageable way. I was reluctant to give up the controller once my team totally kicked the other's rear.