Says Courtney of his piece “Thy Next Foe is…” for the recent Fangamer VERSUS Attract Mode art show, “making a game that’s just sixteen boss fights in a row sounds like the work of a madman. Turning it into one of the greatest games of all time is the work of a genius.”

The piece, along with many several others, is now available as a limited edition print from Fangamer here, with much more of Courtney’s illustrations ready to dig through via his portfolio site here.

And now, the news people have been asking for for over a year: Die Gute Fabrik, Noah Sasso, Ramiro Corbetta and Bennett Foddy have just announced Sportsfriends, a four game collection for PC, Mac and PlayStation 3 that will see the combined release of Hokra, BaraBariBall, an updated version of Foddy’s Pole Riders, and — finally! — a full-featured version of Johann Sebastian Joust.

The four developers have taken to Kickstarter to bring the games to PlayStation 3 (and help port each game around to the various platforms they don’t already exist on), where $15 will net you a copy of the collection on its release sometime in Autumn of 2013, along with a bonus copy of Tennnes, created by Vlambeer’s JW Nijman.

For twice that you get early beta access to all the games in the collection far sooner than the projected release date, and twice that will also get you bonus games from Sasso, Corbetta and Foddy. Higher-level backers can get a Joust ‘starter-kit’ with seven PlayStation Move controllers and custom “charms” (see above for an illustrated example of the Ink-It Labs product) to clasp to & identify your own set, a package of pre-configured Mega GIRP dance mats, or the ultra rare 18-player version of Joust.

At the highest level, you can even get two real-live actual trampolines to play Foddy’s Get On Top, recently featured at the Venus Patrol Training Facility, alongside, totally not-coincidentally, all of the Sportsfriends games. As you might have guessed, the Training Facility was my way to help introduce the games that would eventually make its way into this campaign to a wider audience.

Find more details about the campaign and all of the included games at Kickstarter — with Joust being an instrumental part of Venus Patrol’s own campaign, this is obviously one that I’m incredibly excited for & wholeheartedly endorse.

Do game devs also go through ‘periods’ like Picasso’s ‘blue’? If so, Martin ‘grapefrukt‘ Jonasson seems to be making the most of his ‘Tetris period’, first with Jesus vs Dinosaurs, his brilliantly hectic multiplayer arcade game collab with Petri Purho, and now — on the opposite end of the spectrum — the quiet & contemplative RYMDKAPSEL, coming soon to iOS, Android, the web and, just newly announced, the PlayStation Vita.

A resource-management strategy game at its core, the gorgeously ambient and understated RYMDKAPSEL starts you with the barest of space stations and sees you expanding outward into the surrounding star system, brick by straight-up Tetris brick.

Your progress is hampered not just by the selection of bricks you’re able to choose from to plan your next expansion — which, performed poorly, can block off (no pun) the passageways that connect all rooms — but also by waves of enemy ships that appear at regular, and increasingly rapid intervals, forcing your crew to drop everything they’re attending to and scramble to defense rooms to shoot them down.

For all its soft-synth and simple-shape simplicity, Jonasson’s manage to eke out a ton of life and character from the world, and the game’s nicely forming into a fantastically addictive whole — an early build of RYMDKAPSEL accompanied me on my flight home from GameCity and refused to unhook me until my iPad battery ran dry.

The game is expected to be released on all platforms in early 2013 — you can sign up to be updated on its progress via its home page.

Here’s the lede buried in that last post: alongside the new Android release of Waking Mars, Austin indies Tiger Style have also launched a brand new and greatly enhanced Windows, Mac and Linux version of the game. The new version (which has also just gone live on the App Store as a ‘Director’s Cut’ update) smooths over some of the rough patches on the the original iOS release, and adds full, professionally acted voice work to the game’s cut scenes.

If you haven’t yet played the game, a brief introduction: coming from the same team that brought you the recently-mentioned Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor, Tiger Style’s taken that same approach to incredibly intuitive and approachable touch mechanics (or, in the PC/Mac case, mouse/keyboard & new controller support) and created a complex adventure that takes place under the surface of Mars, where protagonist Liang has just discovered new life.

Your goal in the game is to continue to restore that life to the cave system, in effect, well, “waking” the planet, by creating biological/botanical “machines” that self-sustain its areas: plants watering and seeding new life, and its fauna feeding off of and reproducing based on those flora.

Waking Mars is at its best when it gives you just enough control to creatively construct those “machines”, engendering a strange sense of personal pride, and while its story isn’t as playfully subversive & “below the surface” as in Spider, it’s still an incredibly compelling ride throughout.

Pick up the new Director’s Cut edition of the game on the App Store here, or buy the new PC/Mac version direct from Tiger Style here.

An update for our friends up north that Tuesday, November 13th will mark the Montreal debut of Beau Blyth’s previously-mega-hyped multiplayer game Samurai Gunn at local indie showcase The Prince of Arcade, taking place at Eastern Bloc (7240 rue Clark).

The full lineup will also include Fernando Ramallo & David Kanaga’s previously-featured Panoramical, Noah Sasso’s BaraBariBall, Datatragedy’s Memory of a Broken Dimension, hermitgames’ procedural future-‘snake’ game qrth-phyl, JW Nijman’s Tennnes & Joar Jakobsson’s “feline stealth-em-up” Rain World.

The show kicks off next Tuesday at 8pm — visit The Prince of Arcade site for videos of all the included games and more information, and click below the fold to see the fully amazing alternate lo-poly version of the show poster, which is too good to resist including here.

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Quite big news for the Humble Bundle series, as the just-launched latest Android Bundle features the premiere of Superbrothers/Capy/Jim Guthrie’s Sword & Sworcery EP on the device — something the devs long-maintained would probably never come to fruition — alongside Tiger Style’s Waking Mars, Petri Purho’s Crayon Physics Deluxe, Omni System’s Eufloria, Cipher Prime’s Splice, and Amanita’s Machinarium.

Purchasing the bundle also nets you Steam keys for the PC/Mac/Linux versions of the games, and soundtracks for each, making it one of Wolfire’s most essential bundles they’ve offered so far.

And the other James Harvey tribute to Noah Sasso’s BaraBariBall featuring the game’s “heavy” character, leaving only the, uh… Snow Bro? to complete the trilogy.

Both are posted here today for reasons that will become evident in not too long now…

The first of two fantastic illustrations by James Harvey that feature the main characters of Noah Sasso’s brilliant indie sports/party game BaraBariBall (most recently featured at GameCity’s Venus Patrol Training Facility), following, explains Harvey, a chance meeting with Sasso in Brooklyn’s Barcade this past summer.

In development for over three years, AttractMode‘s Adam Robezzoli and Re:Game Lab‘s Daniel Rehn have just launched the Kickstarter for LA Game Space, a massive undertaking that will overhaul a warehouse space in Los Angeles’s arts district to become a research lab for advancing experimental games, with an indie-focused residency program and space for regular exhibitions, installations, guest speakers, and workshops to help enlist a crop of fresh, more diverse faces from other disciplines into the world of games.

The duo have enlisted a stellar lineup of game makers & artists for the campaign: the entry-level $15 gets you a pack of some thirty experimental games from a slew of recognizable names like Cactus, Samurai Gunn creator Beau Blyth, Santa Ragione, BaraBariBall‘s Noah Sasso, Party Time! Hexcellent, and (most excitingly) QWOP creator Bennett Foddy working with Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward.

There are also a number of other art/print/wearable rewards from familiar faces like Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley & a chance to make an appearance in Gaijin’s upcoming Runner 2 — visit the Kickstarter page for the full rundown on what to expect from the space should it meet its $250,000 goal, and to pitch in to see this thing that we’d all love to see happen actually happen.

Quietly announced in October at his own site, and just revealed via the trailer above, the upcoming iPhone game Dragon’s Dream will mark the first time fantasy artist Roger Dean has moved away from simply providing the cover art & design for games (as with his early Psygnosis work) and provided assets for something truly interactive.

Details are still light beyond the presumably tap-to-flap orb collector pictured at top — developer Moshen adds only that players will be able to “fly beyond the borders and travel through the extraordinary and inspiring panoramas like never before” when the game is released in apparently not-too-long now. [trailer via Kotaku]