I haven’t worked the toy beat as hard as I did back in the day, but I may have to pick up the mantle again if I’m missing out on stuff like this newly revealed model Galaga ship, awesomely sculpted by Maschinen Krieger creator Kow Yokoyama, and due out in March (Hobby Link Japan seems to have the best price if you’d like to pick it up for yourself).

If nothing else, it’s a reminder that I never really did think to extrapolate the sprite into 3D, nor, for that matter, has Namco in any overt way, which then leads me down the rabbit-hole of remembering how they axed the above experiments to bring Xevious back to life in the Ace Combat engine, and it’s all blackness from there. [via Tomopop]

Super great motion-graphics work, well spotted by Evan Shamoon, that covers the entire A-Z of games and hews happily more toward the obscure than the obvious, and bonus points for the ad-hoc leaderboard to score yourself with at the end there.

The clip comes by way of Evan ‘banana-bird‘ Seitz, who’s quietly been doing a lot of fantastic motion work on games, if you peer back through his Vimeo account — I’m especially taken by his idea for a Yellow Submarine/Starfox mashup around the 45 second mark in episode 2 of Jamais Vu.

Here’s the major lede buried in this video showcase of all the games coming November 24th to VERSUS — the live music/game/amazingness mega-show being hosted at Rotterdam, Netherlands venue WORM: a brand new look at what creator Mark ‘Messhof‘ Essen has been cooking up under deep cover for the past couple years with his still-commercially-unavailable swordfighting cult-hit Nidhogg.

While the main thrust (no pun) seems to be the same, you’ll see new arenas and updated versions of the one you’re used to, new dynamics, and a new sorta kooky-eyed version of the game’s titular wyrm starting at around the 10 second mark.

Not to be too far upstaged, the event will also be bringing a number of the games much ballyhooed about around here, including Fernando Ramallo & David Kanaga’s Panoramical, minimalist racing game Chalo Chalo, Beau Blyth’s Samurai Gunn (also sporting a freshly updated tile set), and Super Space ______, a “couch co-op arcade shooter about competition, cooperation, communication and the democracy of physics”.

You can find much more about the lineup and event specifics via WORM, which having watched this trailer I’m now deeply despairing about missing.

And one more dose of AJ Hateley’s Dishonored art, this time the wispy, brushy spectre of Dishonored‘s Corvo, both well spotted over the weekend by one of the game’s writers, novelist Austin Grossman, and both already available in print or card form from Hateley’s Redbubble store.

Posted here as a tribute to How I Spent My Weekend, and not just because it’s super gorgeous, the frequently-featured AJ Hateley posts this illustration (which I’d happily sit straight next to the best work Ashley Wood did for Metal Gear) of The Outsider from Arkane’s Dishonored, still totally my top pick for big-budget game of the year (neck & neck with Dragon’s Dogma).

As I mentioned last week, this past Sunday’s meetup of our Austin indie collective JUEGOS RANCHEROS featured the local debut of Hundreds, the next game from Canabalt developers Semi Secret along with Greg ‘aeiowu‘ Wohlwend — creator of the original Hundreds prototype and co-designer of games like Solipskier — and local-favorite musician Loscil.

If you haven’t seen Hundreds before, it’s a fantastically austere & ambient action/puzzle game which I described at greater length a month back, and which — I predict — will likely be one of the next big App Store hits. That’s not just a hunch, as mentioned in my last Hundreds post, there hasn’t been a single person who I’ve seen casually start to play that hasn’t become instantly, deeply hooked.

And so, presented here is the full 30 minute talk Saltsman gave the assembled crowd (an abbreviated version of his overseas debut of Hundreds at GameCity) that goes into both the genesis of the project and the long, arduous task of taking such a simple and refined idea to its deepest logical conclusions, and paring down on all the ideas that creep in in the meantime and initially seem worthwhile but ultimately prove to be unnecessary complications and distractions.

After Adam’s talk, you also get to hear — remotely, via Skype — from Wolhwend, who takes questions not just on Hundreds and its cryptic narrative, but of his more recent game, Gasketball, and what the future holds for Mikengreg, his collaborative company with developer Mike ‘fucrate‘ Boxleiter.

As a bonus, and because I haven’t managed to edit them more cleanly into the video, below the fold are a number of Saltsman’s slides that show his early design sketches for Hundreds and early art tests from Wolhwend, to refer to directly, rather than squinting at the clip.

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It’s been a good year and a half since it was first announced that Katamari Damacy & Noby Noby Boy creator Keita Takahashi would be joining Tiny Speck — the company behind upstart web MMO Glitch — and in all that time, I hadn’t really been able to suss out exactly what he’d be contributing to the project, but then the answer came today, and the answer was dinosaur butts.

Detailed today in a blog post for the game, Takahashi has added a new transportation system to the game in the form of six sleeping dinosaurs scattered throughout its massive land, whose mouths can be crawled to travel to “Shim Shiri”, a decidedly Keita-like area that serves as an exchange where you can get sucked into the opposite ends of each of the dinosaurs and be instantly whisked to your next destination.

From what I have gleaned, Glitch players have given the area the colloquial name ‘Asslandia’ — for his part, Takahashi, says Tiny Speck, offered this new mode of travel simply because it would be “more fun and more crazy” than the game’s existing traditional subway.

A late contender for web game of the year squeaking in under the wire, but with an amazingly strong showing, comes Save The Day, from Scottish indies Denki, who you may recall as the creators of the fantastic strategy word game Quarrel (previously profiled here in 2009 and released this year for both XBLA and iOS), or even further back with the under-sung Game Boy Advance gem Go! Go! Beckham! (which is so much better than any David Beckham-license game has any right to be).

Save The Day‘s their debut for upstart HTML5 platform Turbulenz, and likely will serve as its new flagship title: a fantastically frenetic and compelling arcade game that gives you just minutes to pilot your rescue helicopter through a volcanic disaster, rescuing hapless citizens who, collectively, grant access to more perilous sections buried deeper within its world.

You’ll note traces of Choplifter, H.E.R.O. and maybe, more recently, PixelJunk Shooter, but what puts Save The Day over the top is its reliance on time & score, rather than environmental damage and enemy attack, and its constant blare of super satisfying information overload, that makes it a perfect, replayable three minute morsel.

Denki have confessed to but not elaborated on “grand plans for the game”, and it’s certainly something I wouldn’t mind being able to play away from the desk, but you’ll be very happy to have gotten in on the ground floor now by spending the rest of your day playing on Turbulenz right here.

As the previously-mentioned Fuck This Jam — a weeklong global game jam dedicated to making a new game in a genre you hate — kicks off right around just now, the organizers, Vlambeer‘s Rami Ismail & Panoramical creator Fernando Ramallo, have just released the jam keynote.

The video features Spelltower creator Zach Gage and Cow Clicker developer Ian Bogost, the two most prominent developers to have found surprising success tackling word- and Facebook-games originally mostly somewhat out of spite.

It’s highly worth watching the two wax nicely philosophical about why the process was ultimately intellectually fruitful and the underlying love in even the most biting of satire, even if you’re not about to embark on the journey yourself. If you would like to, though, you can still sign up for the jam — which will run from today to the end of Saturday, November 17th, at its new Beautiful Mess Organizer installation here.

Another piece for the Fangamer VERSUS Attract Mode art show, Mare Odomo‘s more autobiographical ‘DS Club‘ piece illustrates a time where “we spent our lunches playing Mario Kart, having math battles in Brain Age, and pictochatting the things that teenagers pictochat. It was the best.”

The piece is available in limited and limited-er print sizes via Fangamer here, along with more Odomo-related goodness here, and some previously-featured work by Venus Patrol Kickstarter T-shirt artist Mikko Walamies here.