I’m not one given easily to bold hyperbole, but I’m about to let loose here: Samurai Gunn, the latest game from Beau ‘Teknopants‘ Blyth, is easily the best local-multiplayer game I’ve played since those halcyon days of our youth huddled around a Nintendo 64.

Like Fernando Ramallo and David Kanaga’s Panoramical, Gunn became an instant, unofficial favorite at this year’s Fantastic Arcade, brought to town and urgently pressed upon us by JW & Rami of Vlambeer, who ended up convincing Arcade coordinators to host the world’s first official tournament of the game.

0Space, Blyth’s freeware arena shooter (still available for download & purchase here) was met with similar high praise from most indie devs I came across in 2011, but it’d never fully clicked with me — something about its plodding zero-grav pace (admittedly key to keeping its battles more cerebral) left me slightly too impatient.

All that’s gone with Gunn, whose 2-4 player matches are as quick, clean and concise as the centuries of sword-play mastery that inspired it, as you can see for yourself in video of the tournament winning match below, between indie devs Evan Balster and Terry Cavanagh (be sure to switch to 720 or 1080p mode to better pick out pixel precision).

The gist is simply this: each player has a sword and (as you might’ve guessed) a gun, loaded with only three bullets per life. Bullets can be deflected with well-timed swings of the sword, and sword-strikes themselves can be parried, suddenly (and deeply satisfyingly) throwing both players quickly backwards. The rounds are battles to 10 kills, and any non-winning players who have a kill-count near 10 will trigger a lightning-round-type & gloriously-staged swords-only sunset showdown to determine the true victor.

Stages range from thick bamboo forests, all of which can be chopped down to reveal the rocky outcropping beneath and provide platforms for attack, to pure, barren, vertically-looping chasms of stone, all that of which can be sharpened with sword strikes to create sharp traps to catch and wound careless players.

And careful play is Samurai Gunn at its best: unlike Smash Bros‘ frenzied free-for-all brawls, the most memorable matches in Gunn are the ones where players more or less role-play as the Kurosawa characters that have defined what we think of as samurai — still, silent, allowing opponents to move in for the kill before throwing perfectly timed, razor-sharp moves that slice them down before they know what hit them.

Gunn is still a good distance out from final release, and thus far has only been publicly shown a very small handful of times, but keep a keen lookout for it as it draws nearer — it’s perfectly placed to go down as one of indie games’ greatest.

Already mastered all of Foddy’s wacky-olympic oeuvre like QWOP, PoleRiders & Winner Vs Loser and in desperate need of another physical sport fix? Enter Captain Games, aka Justin Smith, who’s just released the PC version of his Realistic Summer Sports Simulator as a free download.

Smith is the creator behind PC/iOS classics like local-favorite ursine driving-sim Enviro-Bear and indisputable best Oregon Trail remix So Long, Oregon, and Realistic itself is the latest former App Store release gone free.

See the iOS trailer above for a breakdown of the Summer Sports events, and don’t hesitate to grab the release — as one of the selection at this year’s Fantastic Arcade, I can say first-hand that it was the near-sole cause of a lot of awkward, sudden laughing-out-loud from a number of otherwise silent, headphoned arcade-goers throughout the weekend. [via Foddy]

Was there something in the water? Something in the air? As the year draws to a close, Calvin French, creator of the previously-highlighted adventure The Real Texas celebrates “a banner year for indie games” by linking all the past 9 months’ greatest in handy list format, chronologically ordered, over at twntytwlv.com.

One quick look and you’ll realize that it really was a banner year, and there’s still months left to go. [via Calvin French]

As you may have already spotted over the weekend, Eirik ‘Phlogiston‘ Suhrke has just announced ‘Super Crate Box Special’, a newly arranged & re-mastered album of his original music from Vlambeer’s Super Crate Box, to be released this Tuesday at Phlogiston’s own site.

Also known as the musician behind Mossmouth’s revamped Xbox 360 version of Spelunky (buy the full 62-track [!]), Suhrke has given Venus Patrol the first full track off the album — the final cut of the Construction Yard arrangement — streamable via the player below.

[mejsaudio src=”https://venuspatrol.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/conmas.mp3″]

Also previewable is the final album art at top, created for the album by artist, animator & game-maker Francis Coulombe, whose art also adorned Phologiston’s Game music 1 collection, featuring a number of tracks composed for games by Cactus & a handful of others.

Below the fold you can find the trailer for the album with snippets of a few more tracks from the album, which will be live on Phlogiston’s website October 2nd.

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Furthering their commitment to give the Oddworld legacy new life in the 21st century, London’s Just Add Water has just debuted the first video footage of Abe’s Oddysee New ‘N’ Tasty, a full 3D remake of the first Oddworld game due for downloadable release in 2013.

The game will be the latest in a line of reboots that includes the just-HD-ified re-release of the super essential first/third-person adventure Stranger’s Wrath, and the upcoming Hand of Odd, a long-since-canceled real-time-strategy entry into the franchise being revived by Just Add Water.

Compare the video above to the 1997 original to see what a massive overhaul this new update actually is, which, timing-wise, also happily gives me a better excuse to include the two original concept art pieces posted to the PlayStation blog a few days back, which give the ‘world an amazingly almost Roger-Dean-ish atmosphere.

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Some awesome news finally starting to surface surrounding GameCity 7, the latest yearly festival taking place in Nottingham, October 20th through the 27th: Adam Saltsman & Robin Arnott’s Venus Patrol-exclusive game Capsule will be turned into “an exclusive theatrical presentation… with sensory deprivation elements taking place in a refrigerated area.”

Dubbed “the world’s slowest theme park ride ever”, GameCity explains that the so-called “Capsule Capsule” will see players “undergo special training on Earth before stepping into their spaceship to explore the dark, cold confines of space, battling dwindling oxygen and power levels while searching for answers to a slowly unravelling mystery.”

Venus Patrol Kickstarter backers & subscribers will probably immediately understand exactly how & why this is going to be amazing: the rest of you may want to consider a membership to the site for a copy of the game to better prepare yourself for the event later this month.

You can find more information about the Capsule Capsule at GameCity’s site, where there might also be some other interesting news coming in the next few days…

A new painting by the ultra-prolific Deth P Sun (who you may recall previously partnering with Cactus on an artXgame), which proves that his feline adventurer takes a break now and then the same way as the rest of us.

The piece is part of the Giant Robot Biennale 3 exhibit which just opened at LA’s Japanese American National Museum and runs through January 20th. Pieces from the show — including this one — should be showing up for sale at Giant Robot in just a few days time.

A Poke-pun tribute to Rian Johnson’s latest by Paul Robertson, creator of ‘Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006′ & ‘Kings of Power 4 Billion %’ as well as art-lead behind Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game & the recently-Kickstarted Mercenary Kings.

The poster’s posted here as a reminder to head to your local cinema this week, if you haven’t already, if you like being pleasantly surprised by subtle sci-fi that’s even smarter than you expect.

Back in mid-2011, Christoffer Hedborg — developer of the starkly beautiful Toys, currently working on Might & Delight’s similarly pretty Pid — offered me a bet, that even though he wasn’t going to be able to finish in time for the 2012 IGF, by the festival’s finalist announcement, he’ll have made a game that would make me cry.

Though the deadline’s slipped a bit, by early 2012, he’d offered up instead the teaser video above, cryptically titled only “eleven” and with a score by Dallas-based musician Datahowler, which didn’t bring a stream of tears per se, only because I was in a coffeeshop at the time and wanted to mask my emotions in front of strangers — suffice it to say that it walloped me straight in the gut regardless.

I’ve deliberately never asked Hedborg to give me any more details about the game, even as he’s quietly let slip more photo evidence of its progress, because I legitimately don’t want to know. I’m completely satisfied simply with the knowledge that it’s still on its way, and that it still appears to be almost my Platonic ideal of the perfect game: gorgeous low-poly & saturated-color mystery wrapped in laid-back beats, that instantly makes me want to spend time in its world.

Hedborg & ‘Howler have just published one more video teaser above, simply titled ‘transmission’, all of which I offer as the first peek at what surely will be much more as Eleven officially comes closer into view.

Suddenly actually probably the Wii U launch title I’m looking forward to the most, Nintendo’s latest communique on the system’s lineup through next year included one extra exciting entry: Little Inferno the debut game from Tomorrow Corporation.

Tomorrow Corporation themselves are an all-star team of World of Goo creator Kyle Gabler, Henry Hatsworth designer Kyle Gray and Allan Blomquist, former EA dev and — with Gabler & Gray — the co-founder of Carnegie Mellon’s Experimental Gameplay Project, the student group from which Goo sprang, and the re-launch of which would spawn Adam Saltsman’s Canabalt.

While the Corp have been coy since their inception on what exactly Inferno will entail, it’s safe to assume from the trailer above (and from what little snippets I’ve heard through various grapevines) that the game will concern the burning of various items, perhaps in some Noby Noby Boy-esque passively-multiplayer effort to save the world from a new ice age?

Either way, the launch will successfully bring one of latter-day-Offworld’s burning mysteries, and those interested in finding out can do so even earlier by pre-ordering a copy of the game for Windows/Mac/Linux, where the Corporation are offering beta-access to the game, which is due to release on those platforms alongside the Wii U version. Visit the Corporation to learn more. [via Tomorrow Corporation]