NEW ADDITIONS TO THE FAMILY TREE: MEET VENUS PATROL MICRO & VENUS PATROL B-SIDE

As I previously hinted at earlier in the week and have finally polished to near-perfection, you’ll find a few new additions to the Venus Patrol family have just gone live. The first, pictured above (and teased in the top bar since the site started rolling), is Venus Patrol B-Side.

Think of B-Side as just that: a selection of only quasi-game-related findings I dig up on a daily basis through my trawls across the way-too-many-thousands of sites in my Google Reader. You’ll find music, art, animation, motion graphics, illustration, comics and a whole bunch more, from a wide variety of insanely talented people.

I often get asked if I know any artists or musicians who might be willing to jump in and give a new indie game an aesthetic overhaul to set it a step above the rest, almost as often as I get asked by artists if they know any developers who might need a hand with the same: B-Side‘s one way that I hope to bring both of those worlds together more formally.

I totally don’t expect that you’ll love absolutely everything there, but it’s a way to highlight more of that ‘greater culture sandwich’ Capy’s Kris Piotrowski promised in the Venus Patrol Kickstarter video. It may not be for everyone, but it might just be for you.

The other new branch of the tree is Venus Patrol Micro. When I first launched Venus Patrol, a surprising amount of you requested that the site figure out a way to work its way into Tumblr more formally, as the Dashboard there was one of their main daily sources of keeping abreast of what’s going on.

The only thing holding me back was that just weeks before Venus Patrol launched, the top cross-posting plugin, Tumblrize, had just fallen prey to new API changes at Tumblr, and it looked like there was no hope in sight. Enter Ari Velazquez, who, over the past couple weeks, has been invaluable at updating the plugin so that everything that gets posted here gets ported to Tumblr in micro-form. It’s perfect!

All of this work means that not only do you have a way to directly follow both Micro and B-Side from your dashboard, but that Venus Patrol is now one of Tumblr’s own “Spotlight” gaming sites, as of a few hours ago, right alongside the official Day-Z site, the super rad Box Vs Box blog, Zac Gorman’s Magical Game Time, and our pals at the ever-essential Tiny Cartridge.

As always, if you have anything you’d like to see featured on either Micro or B-Side, or have any feedback on how it all works now, don’t hesitate to get in touch!