Previously only been quietly released in small numbers at an event earlier in the year, Gun Godz & Super Crate Box creators Vlambeer have just opened up orders for the Super Crate Bundle to the world at large, as part of a new merchandising push with online seller Level Up Studios.

The Bundle, which comes in an actual Super Crate, is limited to 250 copies and includes a 36-track soundtrack CD for all their games featuring Phlogiston, Kozilek, Doeseone, Alex Mauer, and Brother Android, a Vlambeer T-shirt, a Gun Godz print, buttons, and a thumb-drive with copies of 11 Vlambeer games, including Gun Godz itself (which you, ahem, should probably already have).

If you miss your chance at picking up a Bundle, Vlambeer’s also released the soundtrack CD (you can thank me later for the amazing die-cut cover idea) and various T-shirts separately, including the fantastic front & back Gun Godz design — find all of Level Up’s Vlambeer merch here.

A reminder for all our Toronto indie friends and an update for those that might not have yet seen: this Friday, December 7th will see the latest meetup of the city’s Hand Eye Society — the progenitors of hyper-local indie game meetups — with a series of talks on the subject of roguelikes.

On hand will be N+ co-creator Raigan Burns of Metanet, who’ll discuss how the genre’s “minimalist proceduralism inspired indie hits like Spelunky” and debunk the myth that it “introduced the notion of permadeath as an antidote to the poisonous excess of infinite lives” with his “trademark intensi-passion”.

Metanet’s also brought in Kornel Kisielewicz from his native Poland to discuss DoomRL, his conversion of id’s classic first-person-shooter into a top-town turn-based spacebase-crawler, with pixels by none other than Spelunky creator Derek Yu.

Everything kicks off at 7pm at Toronto’s Monarch Tavern, and we desperately hope someone’s got an iPhone camera handy with a little tripod to bring us video after the event.

Pretty much the adorablest tribute to one of the best mini-games in the already-incredibly-adorable Rhythm Heaven Fever — the last, greatest swan-song game Nintendo created for the Wii — from Cucumber Quest artist Gigi D.G.

Find more of D.G.’s sketches like this at her tumblr and porfolio blog, and if you somehow have slept on Rhythm Heaven Fever itself, correct that massive error as quickly as you can.

Mt. Triforce, a tribute by the previously-featured “8 Bit Dreams” artist Campbell Whyte depicting Legend of Zelda‘s “collecting of the wooden sword, the meeting that begins the entire quest of the hero”.

The piece was originally created for Jimmy Giegerich’s art zine Bits in Multiples of 8, and now available from Whyte as a standalone print, alongside a number of other of Whyte’s holiday gift ideas.

And the other new development I’ve had in store for this week: introducing Slayers, a new multiplayer (or single-player vs. AI!) game set in the God of Blades universe that creators White Whale Games have released as a free PC/Mac download, in partnership with Venus Patrol.

As you can see on the new Slayers site, White Whale describe the game as the love-child of Robert E. Howard, football, and Bushido Blade, where two players take the role of God of Blades‘ enemy Champions, sending out a stock of foot-soldiers in to do battle “on a desolate bridge for the favor of their blasphemous gods.”

With subtle hints of Nidhogg, Slayers is a deadly tug-of-war to reach your opponent’s side of the bridge — when you do, you can immediately call out your opponent’s Champion (negating any remaining foot-soldier stock), or defeat all of their soldiers to do the same — and face-off, Champion to Champion, for victory.

Even better, when you successfully complete the game, Slayers generates an amazing 70s pulp-fantasty-esque magazine cover, showcasing your victory. We’ve run tournaments of the game both at an earlier meeting of JUEGOS RANCHEROS, and at the most recent Fantastic Arcade, and it’s always gone over amazingly with the crowd, both players and spectators.

The release of Slayers not coincidentally coincides with an update to the original iOS God of Blades, where you’ll find new player-customization features, as well as a new asynchronous multiplayer mode that sees you challenging your friends’ heroes through Game Center. White Whale’s also just set the game at an all-time low 99 cents, so now’s the best time to step into their epic pulp-fantasy-inspired world (as you may have spotted in this earlier Venus Patrol feature).

This is the first, but definitely not the last, partnership of this kind to release games to Venus Patrol’s members and readers — I’ve got a couple more surprises like this lined up through the new year. I look forward to you, as readers, letting us know what you think, and, as developers, if there’s a game you’d like to partner with the site to release like this, drop me a line and we can talk about it more!

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!

Nottingham-based filmmaker Matthew Taylor got in touch with this video he shot at this year’s GameCity of ‘Wild Proteus‘, the live & improvised concert-type playthrough of Ed Key & David Kanaga’s game that I supplied some honestly not super great iPhone footage of a month or so ago.

Taylor ups the ante considerably, as you can see above, and captures a number of magic moments, like a.) the guy so lulled by the lullaby ambiance that he literally nods off, and, on the opposite side of the spectrum, b.) Fez creator Phil Fish, captivated and wide-eyed, drinking in the scenery along with his coffee.

See more of Taylor’s video work — including this similar clip of former thatgamecompany (now Funomena) producer Robin Hunicke “performing” Journey live at GameCity 2011 — at Vimeo.

As if you needed any more enticement to get on the bandwagon for Japan’s games-fashion label King of Games, the company has just revealed that any orders placed between now and December 22nd will receive a copy of a limited King of Games 10th Anniversary Special CD, featuring a nice lineup of music, chip & otherwise, including musician & Sound Shapes producer Jason ‘6955‘ Degroot.

You can stream clips of each of the songs above, and order via King of Games, who will also be giving a randomly selected number of orders a bonus, special edition silver-printed version of their ROLY-POLY HERO Kirby tribute shirt. There’s no word yet on whether the CD will see digital release following the promotion, but I’m on the hunt to find out more.

Created for Gallery 1988‘s upcoming Judd Apatow tribute show, I sort of can’t imagine that anything there will best this ‘Smear Weir’ contribution from the oft-featured Jude Buffum, which perfectly mashes up Technos’s classic Super Dodge Ball line with Apatow’s early cult hit show Freaks and Geeks.

See Buffum’s blog for more details & background on the piece, and visit Gallery 1988’s opening for the show Tuesday, December 4th, at 7PM for a chance at grabbing the original.

A fantastically and appropriately chaotic version of the transformations at the heart of under-dog (wolf?) arcade classic Altered Beast by Rory ‘Puppytube‘ Morris, a special color version of her submission for the previously-mentioned Sega-tribute art-zine coming from Ted Martens, Paul Veer, Corey Lewis & Ashley Davis.

While further submissions have now been closed, I mention it here because it’s sneak peeks like these that’ve got me super-hyped for the final product — keep your eyes on the SegaZine tumblr for more information on its eventual release.