My favorite comic the unusually talented and previously-featured Zac Gorman‘s produced in forever, not least because it highlights one of Nintendo’s most under-sung series, Chibi-Robo.

If you haven’t yet experienced it, track a copy down as quickly as you can: not only is it one of that generation’s best 3D adventures, but, as the comic does a masterful job of expressing, it’s got one of the most cutely tragic portrayals of domestic turmoil under-pinning the entire game, a fantastic and trademark humanistic touch from director Kenichi ‘Route24‘ Nishii.

Browse the rest of Gorman’s work via his Magical Game Time blog here, and join me in ruing the fact that Nintendo never localized Robo‘s “New Play Control” Wii re-release for stateside players.

Friend of the site & comic artist extraordinaire James ‘American Elf‘ Kochalka finds himself with entirely unique day-one quad-arbor Wii U troubles. Those especially concerned will be pleased to learn that a replacement is on its way & should be received by the beginning of next week.

Katamari Damacy & Noby Noby Boy creator Keita Takahashi was recently invited to Australia’s Games For Change conference to deliver a speech he called “The Power Of Play: Reasons Why I Like Video Games“.

He used the opportunity to reprise a fantastic speech he gave back in 2006 for GDC’s Game Design Challenge — the theme that year was designing a game that could win the Nobel Peace Prize (which went on to be won by Dishonored designer Harvey Smith, as I covered in this interview with Smith, back in a former life) — but then moved on to cover a wide variety of topics, all revolving around the central idea of spreading peace & love through videogames.

Below the fold you’ll find the entirety of Takahashi’s talk, including musings on the aesthetics of the controller & re-framing the environment around us with play (and with Kokoromi co-founder & designer Heather Kelley‘s glasses), presented here on Venus Patrol with high hopes that it’ll inspire a little more peace and love from designers and players alike.

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Shortly after basically entirely redefining what “a success on Kickstarter” looks like, Double Fine have just announced a brand new campaign to publicly fund the next round of Amnesia Fortnight games, the long-running process where all Double Fine devs shuffle around into new teams and take two weeks to prototype new ideas.

It’s the process that would spawn Costume Quest, Stacking and the Sesame Street licensed Kinect game Once Upon A Monster, and, for the first time, they’re letting the public in to guide the process. By visiting the just launched Amnesia Fortnight page, you can watch over twenty short and extremely broad pitch videos, which, by donating any amount, you can then vote on, to whittle the selection down to just four.

When those four have been chosen, 2 Player Productions, the same video house that have been doing an amazing job of documenting the Double Fine Adventure process, will be filming daily updates of the progress of all the games, and Double Fine will deliver the final prototypes to all backers at the end of the campaign.

Everyone who donates also gets two prototypes from earlier Fortnights: the original Costume Quest demo, as well as Happy Song, the game that would become Once Upon A Monster. Visit the Amnesia Fortnight site to learn more and to help kick off the process.

[Every Friday on Venus Patrol, designer Dominique ‘Dom2D‘ Ferland presents TIGSource DevLog Magazine, a visual guide to the newest & most interesting in-development games making the rounds on the invaluable TIGSource forums. Looking for inspiration, or just the very first look at the amazing games we’ll be talking about in the future? Click any image to learn more, and come back each Friday for the latest picks!]

This week, game makers are still working hard on the Sports game making competition, and the list of participants keeps growing. We now have incredibly wide variety in the competition: strategy football (or “Footbrawl”), cake fighting, parkour platforming, rabbits and bees (sic)…

We’re also quite intrigued by some non-sports games on the forums, like Fran Bow, a brutally dark point and click adventure, and Papers, Please, described by its designer as a “dystopian document thriller”.

Back in late January, I was stopped short by a single screenshot that emerged from Toronto’s local hub of the 2012 Global Game Jam, the one you see directly below, for Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, a game self-described as “Jumpman meets Asteroids meets Han saying “Don’t get cocky”:

Though, to be honest, it wasn’t too big a shock, as in addition to illustrator Jamie Tucker and programmer Adam Winkels, the Spacetime team also included Matt Hammill, whose work I’d been consistently floored by going back to his original student game Gesundheit (which later saw commercial release), and who you might also recognize as the ASCII master behind Jim Munroe’s recently-featured (and newly award winning!) adventure Guilded Youth.

The team, now joined by musician Ryan Henwood & officially re-grouped as Asteroid Base, haven’t stopped there: they’ve taken the past year to prepare the game — in which two players frantically ward off waves of enemy attack by manning various battle-stations on their cross-sectioned ship — for commercial release next year.

Most recently, Hammill put together a fantastic look at the various & awesomely unusual visual inspirations for the game, which — in the spirit of recent inspiration posts by the God of Blades team and the artist-lineup behind Honeyslug’s Frobisher Says — he’s given Venus Patrol permission to feature here, included below the fold, with Hammill’s own commentary.

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Even though I haven’t had a chance to play with another human, I’m more or less instantly crazy charmed by Christian ‘Reduktion‘ Schnellmann’s Human Aerobics, which there’s little other way to describe than a mashup between Dance Dance Revolution & Chris Hecker’s SpyParty.

The strictly 2-player game takes the latter’s “reverse Turing” mechanics, where one player tries to sniff out which is the human in a line-up of computer-controlled players, and sets it in a retro-jazzercize studio, where the other is frantically trying to keep their cool with a standard pattern-matching rhythm game.

It’s a dead-simple idea perfectly executed, and easily the week’s best free download — be sure to stop by his Reduktion site where he’s got many more beautiful art/games to explore, including Flight Simulator 0 (shown above), a goal-less iOS diversion that sees you piloting a paper plane through a near note-for-note replica of the low-poly landscape I’d always hoped someone would crib from Takuya Hosogane’s gorgeous motion-graphics piece Vanishing Point. [via IndieGames]

Though the group was a mainstay in early Offworld days, I haven’t yet taken the time out to give Gaijin Games their due in recent months, but they’ve just given me the perfect opportunity with a wave of new videos detailing Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien, slated for release next February.

The follow-up to their low-bit styled BIT.TRIP RUNNER, Runner 2 has, as is clear by even a cursory glance at the above, been given a massive aesthetic overhaul, showing the full extent of what the team are capable of when not working through their 8-bit mythology.

But what’s also clear is that the team’s visual/kinetic-overload hasn’t lessened a bit: even that world-1 playthrough at top is a non-stop frenetic series of hair-trigger interactions from start to finish. That continues in the world two and three videos included below the fold, which you should watch before heading over to Gaijin’s Runner 2 blog for more.

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One more hit of Patrick Smith awesomeness for the day, this time his Caterpillar, another fractured creature that should be right at home to anyone that’s been following his Vectorpark work.

If you’ve only played Windosill, you also need to stop what you’re doing and pick up his similarly amazing iPad app Feed the Head (also available in miniature iPhone form), and then Levers and smaller toys Acrobots and Carousel, at which point all your iOS devices will be at maximum (read: proper) wonder-levels.

Following a conversation earlier today about the enduring brilliance of Patrick Smith, best known as Vectorpark, I thought it was long past due to feature some of his non-interactive work, here with a 2007 painting called Cabin, which, along with this Citadel pencil drawing, should look somewhat familiar to anyone that’s played through his fantastically enchanting Windosill.

See more of his sketches & paintings via his Smithpix portfolio site, get Windosill for iPad here, or sample a bit of the PC version here.