A little Friday afternoon art interlude: Starting in early 2011, illustrator Campbell Whyte set himself up for a gargantuan task: taking all of the nearly 800 games released for the NES and doing a watercolor sketch a day based on each, more or less in alphabetical order. Surprisingly, it’s a pace he’s actually kept quite well, and the results are an awesomely stylized take on each, giving even the duds a fantastic facelift.

Above is a retrospective of the first 375 of the “8 bit dreams”, which you can browse more leisurely on Whyte’s blog, or find many still up for sale at his Etsy shop. If he hasn’t already covered one you’d like to see, commission him to prioritize via the shop & end up with the original itself.

Exciting news long hinted at that can finally be revealed: AdamAtomic’s Capsule Capsule won’t be the only Venus Patrol related activity that this year’s GameCity7 festival. As announced on the festival blog this morning, the site will be taking over a large chunk of Nottingham’s Old Market Square for an entire week, and converting it into The Venus Patrol Training Facility (featuring an amazing remixed logo by Dick Hogg).

The Training Facility, open October 20th through the 27th from 10am to 5pm, will house a number of games loosely bound together with a quasi-athletic theme from a handful of local favorites including QWOP & GIRP developer Bennett Foddy, Frobisher Says & Hohokum creators Honeyslug, and all of the games included in the recent Sportsfriends Quadrathalon.

Most excitingly, the Training Facility will house the public premiere of two games recently developed during a Danish countryside retreat controlled by trampoline jumps. The first will be The Proteus Frog God Mod, in which players instead experience Ed Key & David Kanaga’s Proteus from the perspective of the magical twinkling frogs, co-created with George Buckenham.

We’ll also be showcasing Get On Top, a new competitive trampoline game by Foddy & Joust creator Doug Wilson, where players take on the role of two sumo champs locking hands and trying to leap into the air and pin their opponent.

Videos of all of the games that will be available (and GameCity’s pithy commentary on each) are below the fold, and more details can be found on GameCity7’s website (see also: the full schedule of all other activities coming to the festival). Looking forward to seeing everyone there!

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Iced tea & assorted refreshments, check; a replacement controller for the one he got a little ahead of himself and smashed through the coffee table last weekend, check — another quick shot of Adam Ferrando, who’s ready for the Nintendo 64 sleepover and promises he’ll keep it together this time. [via Pencil Mode]

Concept artist Adam ‘editmo.de‘ Ferrando turns the tables and lets the final bosses have their day in this faux Famicom cover art created for this year’s Famicase exhibit, an oft-covered perennial favorite.

See more of Ferrando’s concept work (including an alt-take on a Mega Drive Gauntlet cover) via his official portfolio site.

Though footage of its portable counterpart has made many appearances over past several months, above is the first glimpse of the Wii U version of Capcom’s Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, a revamped version of the Wii’s Monster Hunter Tri expected for both systems in March of next year.

Somewhat upstaging its previously featured & cartoonier breakdown of the game’s cross-play compatibility, the new video comes as the game makes its stateside debut at this weekend’s Comic Con, and is part of an apparently revamped push to make this entry in the franchise the one that might finally “stick” in the West, previous attempts never having received even a fraction of the traction they’ve managed in Japan.

Visit the newly rejuvenated official Twitter & Facebook pages to keep abreast of developments over the next several months.

Or, how to convince me that WayForward’s upcoming Nintendo 3DS game Adventure Time: Hey Ice King! Why’d you steal our garbage?! — pre-orderable in deluxe collector’s form and due for release in just over a month — might be as subversively funny as the show itself in a single screenshot.

New footage of the game is being shown off by the team in advance of its public appearance at this weekend’s New York Comic Con, including the trailer above, which shows off more gameplay throughout its heavily Zelda II-inspired world, and a handful of additional screenshots included below the fold.

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Looking every bit like an even further abstracted & awesomely organic take on Nintendo’s bit Generations cult-classic dotstream (the younger sibling of WiiWare’s light trax), Chalo Chalo is a new game from Sparpweed, the Dutch indies behind the recently featured co-op platformer ibb and obb.

Coming just as highly recommended by Vlambeer’s JW Nijman for local-multiplayer play as was the incredible Samurai Gunn, Chalo strips its courses to a single screen and replaces the slip-stream effect from dotstream with minimalist and vaguely Constructivist terrain that can either slow or speed your racer.

The game will also include additional items and powerups, which, as proved in the video above, can turn what initially seems like wild veering into instant reversals of fortune — an exploit that will likely get balanced out of the finished product.

Still heavily in development and having primarily been showcased as part of Dutch Game Garden’s Indigo exhibitions, you can follow Chalo‘s progress via Sparpweed’s blog here.

Seeing as how my previous post on low-poly masters Geo A Day seemed to go great guns in propelling their art into the wider sphere, let’s see if we can’t do the same with this gorgeous nightscape from Voyager3, a work-in-progress by Australia’s Brendan ‘bjzaba_‘ Zabarauskas, that’s eschewing G-A-D’s filtered luminosity for razor-sharp vectors, to just as beautiful results (zoom in here for full-crispness).

See more of Zabarauskas & co.’s ongoing sketches & experiments at the Voyager3 blog or via his flickr, all of which is hugely inspiring world building.

Because it’s always a great day when new Superbrothers art comes your way, presented here is Vending Machine, a new illustration for a Washington Post article profiling Eyjólfur Guðmundsson, in-game economist for Eve Online, and newly hired Valve economist Yanis Varoufakis.

Freshly updated, and thus providing me the perfect opportunity to give it my highest recommendation, is Etienne Perin’s Gauge, a game hasn’t seemed to receive the attention it richly deserves, even after some six months on the market.

Like Terry Cavanagh’s Super Hexagon, it’s a game that knows exactly what it is and does that one thing with fantastic style. In this case, that thing is a single-input interaction that asks players to press the screen to widen a loading-bar style ‘gauge’, coming as close to the outer edge without touching it as possible for the highest score, and never allowing it to fully drop back to its center walls.

Touching either edge will cause you to lose a life, an obstacle that would seem to be easily avoided, were it not for the fact that, over time, the game taunts you with bonus point lines that emerge from the center, tempting you to drop back just pixels away from death, before going on to distract your laser focus with epileptic and ‘psychédélic’ effects.

Though its new update has refreshed its difficulty curve, as well as added “new jokes”, a new ending for players that reach 35 billion points, and a “newborn baby mode” (“for the babiiiiiizzzz!!! LOL”), what’s good about Gauge now is the same thing that was always good about Gauge: it’s risk and reward stripped bare and self-aware, as compulsive and (through Game Center leaderboards) fiercely competitive as all the iPhone’s finest.

Better still, the bulk of Gauge is available as a free download, with an in-game upgrade to unlock all the extra modes that play off the basic formula with limited tap and limited time runs, making it a true iOS essential. [Gauge, App Store; Etienne Perin’s homepage]