Coming the same day as Nicalis has released a revamped downloadable Nintendo 3DS version of Pixel’s indie classic Cave Story (now, honestly, the most essential version of the game, don’t hesitate to pick it up), Nintendo has kept the good news rolling with a breakdown of the games coming to the 3DS’s e-Shop throughout the rest of the year.

Most notable among them is NightSky, the ambient dream-like platformer from Knytt creator Nifflas, long-loved around these parts. The game will be published, like Cave Story, by Nicalis, and is due for release in just three weeks time.

Nintendo has also, somewhat surprisingly, announced that the three of the four minigames known collectively as Guild01 will be released separately as individual downloads, one per month, much in the same way that they broke up Toshio Iwai’s Electroplankton into its constituant pieces.

Originally released in Japan this past Spring as a retail cartridge, the Guild01 collection contains minigames created by a number of big-name designers: Killer7 & No More Heroes producer Suda 51 has contributed the shooter Liberation Maiden, SimTower & Seaman creator has put together the luggage-sorter Aero Porter, and Yasumi Matsuno — best known as a designer on Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story has created the RPG “short story” Crimson Shroud.

Missing from the bunch, somewhat unfortunately, is Omasse’s Rental Weapon Shop from comedian Yoshiyuki Hirai: a rhythm-forger meant to tell the side-story of all the weapon shop owners you encounter in any given RPG.

The games will be joining 3D puzzler Pushmo sequel Crashmo, Virtual Console releases of Zelda II, Wario Land II and Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels as well as demos of WayForward’s Adventure Time: Hey Ice King! Why’d you steal our garbage?!! throughout October, November & December.

Newly released as a T-shirt for Baltimore ‘baroquetronica’ band Bear & Walrus, Mare Odomo (best known for his brilliant Pokemon mini-comic Letters to An Absent Father) explains his design thusly:

The layout mimics the inventory screen for Link’s Awakening. All the items are real world objects you could find in your backyard. Weird little things that your childbrains imbue with magic. A pinecone is a grenade, a stick is a sword, feathers let you fly.

Find the T-shirt here (only 50 were printed!), stream Bear & Walrus’s albums here, dig into more of Mare’s designs here.

Honestly actually on the older side, and apparently no longer available as the T-shirt it was created for, Hector ‘againstbound‘ Mansilla’s tribute to the nostalgic & then seemingly-limitless worlds contained in each little cart is still available as a print of various sizes via his society6 page, as are a ton of other equally fantastic designs.

Back when we were in the thick of the Adventure Time Game Jam, a few people lamented that no one seemed to have been working on a game based on Card Wars — a fictional game played in the Adventure Time episode of the same name from just a few months back — but it appears the wait is now over.

Though it obviously lacks the holographic battlefield in between, Reddit users MpegEVIL & izsaf have put together a PDF ruleset, and user biscuitoman has chipped in with a downloadable set of illustrated cards, that represent the first stab at giving order to the mostly nonsensical play, all of which you can read more about and grab here.

If any of you manage to give this a shot yourself, let us know in the comments below how it works out for you, and whether any friendships are ruined with hypercompetitive antics. [thanks, Rhys!]

I spy a little bit of Glitch‘s free-wandering & subdued landscape, a little bit of GodFinger‘s deformable terrain, a healthy dose of predecessor Plunderland‘s highly physics-based platforming, and maybe just a touch of Spore‘s explorable ecologies in this new gameplay video of Prevail, the latest from UK indies Johnny Two Shoes.

The video gives a good sense of the free-form play that takes place on each mini-planet, and saves its best for last, proving to all who haven’t seen the games’ earlier trailers that yep, vehicles are all man-able, and, yep, you’re totally free to take off at any given moment to head elsewhere in the local solar system.

The game’s been long in development, its first trailer having appeared over a year ago, and subsequently promised as an “early 2012” release in February (with a better look at more technologically evolved areas), but proof of progress is more than enough to whet my appetite — all I really want to know is, why did he have to kill all the deer? [via Phil Stuart]

Toronto’s TIFF Nexus has just put together this very nice video on the past Spring’s Comics Vs Games jam, an initiative headed by Spooky Squid founder & Hand Eye Society member Miguel Sternberg, which paired five comic artists with five indie devs to create five new games, which were then displayed around the city during comics festival TCAF and the TIFF film festival proper.

The five games created were Andy Belanger and Sternberg’s Black Church Brigandage, Jamie Fristrom & Steve Manale’s We’re No Angels, Kyla Vanderklugt & Christine Love’s The Mysterious Aphroditus, Damian Sommer & Emily Carroll’s The Yawhg and Farbs & John Martz’s Cumulo Nimblers.

Of the five, only Nimblers (above) has yet to be made available for public release, which you can get (and see more about the development of) courtesy Farbs’ site here.

The Hand Eye Society and particularly the recent efforts of the TIFF Nexus (which also include Hand Eye-related initiatives like the Difference Engine, widening the community of women making games) have been hugely influential on what we’re attempting to do in Austin with JUEGOS RANCHEROS, so more successes like this are always quite heartening. [via John Martz]

Maybe the fastest turnaround between awesome and awful news: Katamari Damacy & Noby Noby Boy creator Keita Takahashi has just announced the thing we all feared the most (or is it just my own recurring nightmare?), that Namco Bandai will be removing and no longer supporting the Noby Noby Boy iPhone & iPad apps from the App Store next Tuesday, October 9th.

What exactly this means for the service at large is still undetermined: for months now, submitted meters wouldn’t actually be subtracted from the app’s running total, and the Facebook counterpart where you earned badges based on the size of your submission had long since fallen into disrepair as well, but there’s no word yet on whether the servers will continue to run and the PS3 game, at least, will further GIRL’s goal of stretching toward the edge of the solar system.

For now, then, a reminder to grab the app if you haven’t already, which Keita admits is “a totally silly app, but I’m enjoying it sometimes, even now”, signing off simply by saying, “Thank you for playing this silly app.”

London-based illustrator and animator James Gilleard has partnered with Chicago art/culture gallery OHNO!DOOM for an exhibition opening this Saturday, October 6th, featuring 18 original art pieces he’s created in tribute to Fumito Ueda’s PS2 classic, Shadow of the Colossus.

To mark the occasion, Gilleard’s given Venus Patrol permission to feature previews of all 18 pieces, which we present in ultra long gallery format below. Interested & local parties can view all the pieces live at OHNO!DOOM’s 1800 N. Milwaukee Ave. location (recently the site of a similarly amazing Adventure Time tribute show) — if you manage to make it out, take photos of the proceedings!

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Frequently-featured French guerrilla artist Invader — the one behind the pixel-mosaics you’ve undoubtedly spotted just about everywhere throughout Europe & the UK — has officially sent his latest work outside the confines of Earth & back to space itself, as captured by the video extract above, part of a longer movie he’ll be releasing in the future.

The “Space-one” project follows a similar but polar opposite guerrilla invasion in Cancun, where he worked with underwater sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor to bring his characters under the sea, as seen above & below.

Spot more of his invasions throughout Miami (near where he launched “Space-one”) via the space-invaders website.

Possibly one of the classiest mainstream-game-fashion-designs to hit your local Hot Topic (ie. one that doesn’t have “DON’T GO ALL ________ ON ME“/etc. plastered all over it), ThinkGeek offers this official Taito T-shirt, titled Moon Invasion.

The recently-relaunched official Space Invaders site lists a few more new designs in their merchandise section, nearly all of which have unfortunately fallen prey to the game-shirt trope above.