[Wednesdays on Venus Patrol are GameToilet Days, where we feature new installments of the brilliant comic series from artist & game dev Jerry ‘King Baggot‘ Carpenter. You can find hundreds more entries in the series at the comic's new permanent home, gametoilet.venuspatrol.com!]

Bit stream of conciousness this time around – any excuse to draw The Big G, really…

[This post is re-blogged from Venus Patrol sister-organization JUEGOS RANCHEROS, our local Austin indie game collective.]

Ready for another round of multiplayer games from some of the best independent developers in the world? Four new games will be making their Texas debut at Austin’s North Door next Thursday, June 6th, at 7:00PM, as JUEGOS RANCHEROS presents the second installment of South by No Quarter with Split Tree, Killer Queen, There Shall Be Lancing & Bennett Foddy’s Speed Chess.

[ RSVP FOR THIS EVENT AND INVITE YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK BY CLICKING HERE! ]

The No Quarter exhibition is a yearly event created and curated by NYU’s Game Center which commissions new multiplayer games from top indie talent, and responsible for bringing games like Messhof’s Nidhogg and Ramiro Corbetta’s Hokra — now part of Die Gute Fabrik’s Sportsfriends — into the world.

In 2012 we ran the first installment of South by No Quarter here in Austin, bringing Noah Sasso’s BaraBariBall — now also part of the Sportsfriends lineup — Zach Gage’s Guts of Glory (which went on to successfully fund its commercial release through Kickstarter), Margaret Robertson’s Drunk Dungeon, and TENNNES, from Vlambeer’s Jan Willem Nijman.

This year’s lineup will include Bennett Foddy’s Speed Chess, the 16-player high-speed deathmatch chess game from the creator of QWOP, GIRP, CLOP & Poleriders…

… as well as Killer Queen, another massively multiplayer action game from Nikita Mikros & Joshua DeBonis, behind games like Propaganda Lander & Meriwether.

The latest from UK developer Sophie Houlden — the creator of games including Swift*Stitch & The Linear RPG — will also be making an appearance with aerial jouster There Shall Be Lancing…

… and finally, we’ll have the two-player/one-controller “simple, mellow social puzzle game” Split Tree, from Matt LoPresti, designer of iPhone puzzle game hit Async Corp.

Everything will be kicking off Thursday, June 6th, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public — come drink, play, and meet the people changing the way you think about videogames!

[Wednesdays on Venus Patrol are GameToilet Days, where we feature new installments of the brilliant comic series from artist & game dev Jerry ‘King Baggot‘ Carpenter. You can find hundreds more entries in the series at the comic's new permanent home, gametoilet.venuspatrol.com!]

Apologies for the spelling mistakes – can’t spell-check my sketch book.

If this one seems familiar, it’s because there are certain jokes I will always go back to in my weaker moments…

We’re just a couple more weeks away from HORIZON, the alternative press conference being presented by Venus Patrol and MOCAtv, the video channel of Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and so I thought I’d share a bit more about what you can expect.

To that end, we’re lifting the lid just a bit to announce some of the participating studios of the showcase lineup, including Psychonauts, Brutal Legend & The Cave developers Double Fine, LittleBigPlanet & Tearaway creators Media Molecule, as well as Capy, the Toronto indies behind Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, Critter Crunch & Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes.

They, as well as a number of other studios both independent and otherwise, will be presenting a selection of their unreleased and unannounced games as part of the Thursday, June 13th event, which we are also making plans to livestream to the rest of the world.

The HORIZON event will also include an evening mixer, where a number of the participating developers can talk more with the invited press, and where attendees will find an additional selection of new games from the Los Angeles art/game community, curated by Sarah Brin.

Stay tuned for more specifics about the HORIZON event — we’re all really excited about how this is coming together and the lineup of games we’ll be showing off!

[Wednesdays on Venus Patrol are GameToilet Days, where we feature new installments of the brilliant comic series from artist & game dev Jerry ‘King Baggot‘ Carpenter. You can find hundreds more entries in the series at the comic's new permanent home, gametoilet.venuspatrol.com!]

This is the sort of game my teenage self would approve of.

One day I will do a post about the hand-shadow game I used to play called ‘Rabbit Grenade’, which always ended up in a fist-fight at bedtime.

Wondering what’s been keeping Venus Patrol relatively radio-silent the past couple months? Here’s one big reason: Thursday, June 13th, concurrent with this year’s E3 expo, the site will be partnering with MOCAtv, the video channel of Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art, to present HORIZON, a press conference that will highlight a lineup of beautiful games as an alternative to what we’ve come to expect from standard E3 fare.

While we’re still keeping a tight lid on what the actual lineup will entail, the conference will present games from studios both small and large, and will showcase new looks at and details about some games you may have already heard of, as well as brand new games from some of your favorite developers, and very possibly some super secret new surprises that will be entirely unexpected.

If you’re a member of the press, invites to the event will be headed your way shortly — so save the date now — email horizon@venuspatrol.com if you’re especially excited about attending and we’ll do what we can to make sure you’re there!

The genesis of HORIZON came as Cory Schmitz (who is, of course, behind the fantastic HORIZON design) & I sat at home streaming last year’s string of E3 press conferences and instantly decided to “light a candle, rather than curse the darkness” and try to put together the E3 experience we wanted to see in the world.

Through the organizational help and guidance of Double Fine‘s Greg Rice, Mathew Kumar, and especially the involvement of MOCAtv and curator Sarah Brin (who also helped organize the super excellent Ahhhcade exhibition at SFMOMA during this year’s Game Developers Conference), we think we’re putting together something very exciting, which we hope will stand out and become a new E3 tradition.

We’ll have much more to say about HORIZON in the coming weeks — we hope you’ll start looking forward to this as much as we are!

[Wednesdays on Venus Patrol are GameToilet Days, where we feature new installments of the brilliant comic series from artist & game dev Jerry ‘King Baggot‘ Carpenter. You can find hundreds more entries in the series at the comic's new permanent home, gametoilet.venuspatrol.com!]

RIP to the King of the Monsters!

Me and the kids will have a few whisky sours to ‘20 Million Miles to Earth‘ before bedtime tonight…

A week or so on, I wanted to give a quick update from both Keita & me, to say many thanks for everyone that’s supported the Videogame Romantics project so far, and to announce this little site I had a wild hare to put together over the weekend: WeAreVideogameRomantics.com, a mega-site of everyone who’s joined our league to express their “naïve, pure, wonderful, and silly Love“.

If you’ve already received your order — or were one of the many who bought one of the T-shirts at our GDC party this year — we’d love to have you submit a photo of yourself wearing the shirt, as a couple of you already have! You can do so here (it even works directly from your iPhone library through some manner of tumblr magic) — and hopefully soon enough we can crowd out the random package shots I added with some real actual human faces. We look forward to seeing you there!

[Wednesdays on Venus Patrol are GameToilet Days, where we feature new installments of the brilliant comic series from artist & game dev Jerry ‘King Baggot‘ Carpenter. You can find hundreds more entries in the series at the comic's new permanent home, gametoilet.venuspatrol.com!]

Started as something scribbled on bog-paper, and ended up as my entry to Ludum Dare this weekend. Go play here! ALLEZ!

Every month, as part of the regular monthly meetings of the Austin, TX independent game community JUEGOS RANCHEROS, we do a very casual & chatty rundown of the ten or so games from the previous month for the audience, to give people — especially those curious onlookers from outside the indie community itself — a look at what they may have missed. The featured games are both local and global, and both indie and, on occasion, a bit-bigger-budget — what binds them together is simply that they’re all amazing.

In keeping with the tongue-in-tobacco-packed-cheek tone, we call these run-downs A Fistful of Indies, which are presented here on Venus Patrol for your reference, each fully-annotated, -linked, and off-the-cuff blurbed, in addition to their home on the JUEGOS RANCHEROS site.

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