An awesome bit of experimentation via Darius Kazemi, who idly wondered why Drop7, and not Drop-any-other-number? and thus set up this entirely flexible web-playable version of the game that runs from drop-3 to drop-14 (or, for the brave of heart, an order of magnitude higher, with drop-49), as well as options to change the number of drops before each new row.

If you’re lost on why this is even an interesting experiment to begin with, you clearly haven’t yet experienced area/code’s brilliant iPhone original — one of Offworld’s first, most-highly-recommended iPhone games — as the middle-ground sliver between Those Who Are Obsessed With Drop7 and Those Who Haven’t Played It Yet is so thin it’s essentially non-existent.

Gamasutra’s got a super nice feature today on the design of Capsule, the Venus Patrol subscriber-exclusive survival horror game from Canabalt creator Adam Saltsman, on the back of his running the Capsule Capsule at GameCity.

Saltsman adds some choice quotes on the Left 4 Dead inspired genesis of not just this latest project, but more on Canabalt‘s aquatic origins, as well (which I’d never before heard!):

Canabalt, for example, was inspired by Super Mario 1 and Sonic the Hedgehog but the game I really wanted to make was a game where you’re a guy running through a city being chased by water. It’s like Escape from New York. There’s a horrible flood, and some particle physics, [you’re] surfing on flotsam and jumping up and parkouring off buildings and rooftops. But it would have been so hard, and especially back then, I had absolutely no patience for projects of that scope. So the slimmed down version of that is Canabalt. I had to take out the water, take out climbing up ledges, and focus on something else.

I always wanted to make a game — that was not even a game. The game would just be: you’re an astronaut on a space walk and your tether breaks. You’re doing an EVA [extravehicular activity] and now you’re floating through space, and that’s it. There’s nothing to do. You would be in first-person view, you would see gloves, and the astronaut control box on your chest, and you can look around. It would just be that until you ran out of oxygen. For like four hours. It would be the worst game, but a little bit of that ended up expressing itself in Capsule. You’re out of fuel, and the consequences of that are not that you die, but that you have to listen to yourself die, which is horrifying and uncomfortable.

Read the full feature over at Gamasutra for more, and, as a reminder, you can purchase a one-year membership to Venus Patrol to play the game for yourself — I’ve even put up a new discount code on the back of the feature going live: use coupon code GAMA5UTRA for 20% off the membership fee.

A PSA that there’s only one day remaining to pick up the launch-special combo of Culty’s ‘Monster Hunter Beginner’s Guide‘, a 50+ page self-published and gorgeously-illustrated guide to the admittedly pretty initially daunting world of Monster Hunter.

Written & illustrated by Roy ‘kotowari‘ Blakely and Sarah ‘everydayfoxlife‘ O’Donnell, the duo behind Monster Hunter podcast My Fair Hunter, the guide is available in both print and digital form (find a four-page preview here), alongside O’Donnell’s unbelievably adorable prints, which you can wrap together in the aforementioned combo for the best deal.

One more Mushroom Kingdom fan-art trip by Daniel ‘Clearlywrong‘ Bressette for good measure. If Bressette’s style seems familiar, he’s the same artist as the previously featured (and still-amazing) Zelda/Little Prince mashup from several weeks back.

Find much more like this at Bressette’s portfolio site.

Link & Samus, set upon by all sides by each others’ arch-nemeses, by Daniel ‘Clearlywrong‘ Bressette, who’s offering a similarly wicked Metroid fan art print via his BigCartel shop.

One of the core tenets of Venus Patrol, and Offworld before it, and really basically all my work over the past several years is that bringing in artists of all stripes not traditionally immersed in the world of games can (and has) only ever resulted in some of the most sublime work videogames can offer.

That’s only one sliver of why I think Honeyslug‘s Vita minigame collection Frobisher Says is so brilliant — there’s also its self-awareness, and its irreverence, and its holistic approach to wringing out basically every absurd interaction you can manage with Sony’s hardware — but it’s a very non-trivial sliver.

For as much as I’ve been a fan of the art Honeyslug and cohort Dick Hogg have produced — going back to their 2010 Gamma IV contribution Poto & Cabenga (and going back even further to some of Hogg’s work for UK design house Airside), and their gorgeous and still in-progress adventure game Hohokum — Honeyslug themselves have as voracious appetite for amazing art, something that shines through blindingly with the dream team of illustrators they assembled for each minigame in Frobisher Says.

And so, to get a better sense of how they hand-picked their lineup, I asked designer and programmer Ricky Haggett (above, right) and Hogg (above, left) to go game-by-minigame to give us the whos and hows and whys behind every artist chosen for what’s become, hands-down, one of Sony’s “coolest” games — in that old, original PlayStation Designers-Republic-doing-art-for-Wipeout sense of “cool”.

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It feels like high time to revive the ‘Weekend Watching’ feature I set forth back in late 2008/early 2009 (as Netflix were debuting their new ‘streaming’ service to Xbox 360, remember before then?), this time with an additional relaxation of my unofficial rule to keep relatively mum about fan-subtitled releases of my real actual favorite TV show, Game Center CX.

This latest fan-subbed installment of GCCX seems slightly more fair game, as it’s a 15 minute installment of Nintendo’s brilliant Iwata Asks series featuring the banana-beholder himself visiting the show for a cross-interview chat, and a mini-challenge where GCCX’s Arino takes on Balloon Fight, the first game Iwata programmed and designed for Nintendo in 1984.

It seems like as perfect an introduction to the series as any, and a good segue to remind you that the previously-featured DVD box set, released stateside as ‘Retro Game Master’ with 14 full-length episodes, has now officially been released and is 100% the best way you can spend a quiet weekend at home.

In an atypically open move, Q-Games have just poured a large can of concept art all over their site, giving us a very early look at their yet-untitled next game in the much-beloved art/game series PixelJunk. Due for release in 2013, and moving away from the PlayStation 3 for the first time to instead target an initial launch on Steam, the only non-visual details the developers have let leak is that the game will primarily be co-op oriented, for “at least” four players.

Well, that, and an apparent deep fixation on the secrets of the soup being produced and possibly used as currency by the in-game “RoboExec” corporation. Q-Games have promised to keep progress on the game, which began over a year ago as a side-project by PixelJunk 4AM producer Rowan Parker, entirely in the public eye as it continues to evolve. In the meantime, below the fold is a handful more bits of concept art, all of which is too beautiful & funny to not feature now.

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First revealed at the Venus Patrol-curated arcade at Portland’s XOXO festival, Big Bucket — creators of 2010 iPhone/iPad/Mac tilt-n-jumper The Incident — have finally let loose with more details about their upcoming adventure game Space Age.

Described by the devs as a cross between “real-time strategy, an adventure game and a stealth action game”, the new videos and screenshots reveal its multi-touch RTS controls with the metal-harvesting ‘MagTrucks’ in the video above, and scripted environmental effects with its ‘right on the tick’ rain engine below.

That still leaves a ton yet to be revealed, but you can follow the newly founded twitter account where Big Bucket promise more regular updates on the game’s progress, in addition to posting longer updates to anyone who signs up for their mailer on the official Space Age website.

And then came an absolutely unreserved recommendation that everyone pitch in to see Big Robot’s procedurally generated ‘tweedpunk’ stealth/survival game, Sir, You Are Being Hunted, brought to the finish I’ve been anticipating for what feels like forever.

The game, being developed in part by former Offworld columnist Jim Rossignol (find an archive of his contributions here), features a world where “robots meet and drink tea in abandoned villages, poachers lurk in reed-beds, and red-eyed hounds patrol the moor”, with a primary focus on “exploration, non-linearity, AI interaction, survival, robots, sinister butlers, and hot drinks.”

Find more information on the campaign and make your contribution at Kickstarter, and see Big Robot’s own development blog on the game here for whole slew more concept art, screenshots and tech talk on its procedural countryside.