Filed under “places I sort of desperately would rather be”, this Thursday, September 27, 2012 at 7:00 PM, indie game party presenters The Wild Rumpus will be bringing their latest line-up of multiplayer games to London, featuring a fantastic party/public play selection.

Included in the mix will be Mega-GIRP (above), the four-dance-mat full-body version of Foddy’s rock-climbing finger-Twister GIRP, modded by Joust creator Doug Wilson, Noah Sasso’s low-fi & high-tension sports-brawler BaraBariBall, Michael Brough’s “multiplayer album of games” Kompendium (currently available as a free download to bone up before the show), a tournament of Terry Cavanagh’s Super Hexagon for hexagonal prizes, and much more.

Tickets for the event are £5 and available here, where you can also find more information on the complete lineup. The show will be going down at Cargo, 83 Rivington Street, Shoreditch. Take lots of photos of the prizes and the seagull on a stick (??)!

Another Musho Rodney Alan Greenblat Zen piece, which he summarizes thusly: “Pandatsu was once the head monk of the remote Boo Temple. One day while sweeping he had a moment of insight.”

Available as an original watercolor via his Whimsyload store.

I’ve somewhat inadvertently spent the better part of the morning revisiting the newer, Zen-inspired works of Musho Rodney Alan Greenblat — best known as the artist behind Parappa the Rapper and UmJammer Lammy — and so, offered here is a small peaceful piece featuring his Thunder Bunny.

The illustration is from a larger, wordless book called Thunder Bunny Nature, which you can purchase here, or view in its entirety here, and serves as a companion piece to an iPhone app I’ve only just realized existed called Thunder Bunny Weather, which seems slightly broken on Western phones, but which I somehow have no regrets about purchasing regardless.

With just two days remaining on their Kickstarter campaign, creator Zach Gage — creator of iPhone essentials Spelltower and Bit Pilot — has given us the drop on the bonus cards that will be included for all backers of Guts of Glory, the post-apocalyptic food-eating-contest boardgame he’s created with designer Jesse Fuchs and illustrator Jess Worby.

Glory‘s not the easiest game to introduce in a few short words, so I’ll let Zach explain it to the uninitiated through the video above, and simply add that it’s one of the smartest new card/boardgame designs I’ve seen in quite some time: an unusually funny and alluring narrative structured in a way that allows for chain-reactions that cause amazing reversals of fortune, and — most importantly — a highly accessible design that welcomes all players.

With these bonus cards — the full versions of which you can see below the fold, with commentary on each by Gage himself — the team have taken the opportunity to delve further into that post-apocalyptic narrative, with Gage adding that each contains “hints to the origins of the savage wasteland Guts takes place in.”

Watch the video above to acclimate yourself to the game, and consider pitching in to the campaign: while the funding has already been successful, the team are well within striking distance to include more bonus cards from an incredible line-up of guest artists, including local favorites Dustin Harbin, Lisa Hanawalt, the previously-featured Sam Bosma and more.

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Local Austin indies White Whale are set to release their debut game God of Blades to iPhone & iPad this Thursday, and have marked the occasion with the amazing trailer above, which takes you from their direct inspiration — pulp sci-fi and fantasy novels of the 1960s and ’70s — straight through into the game world itself.

With its fantastic aesthetic all-too-rare in games (at least, not-much-seen since Roger Dean’s phenomenal work on early Psygnosis covers), its rhythmic-slashing spin on swordplay, and its Foursquare integration (which rewards you for delving into long-forgotten stories by visiting your local library), we’ve seen the game evolve over the past year into something super special.

Expect more on the game post-release, which you can get further geared up for by taking a longer look into the strange history of Blades book-series at the God of Blades Shrine, a website which itself appears to have emerged from a parallel past… [via White Whale Games]

Bringing the 2012 Fantastic Arcade to a close, Dennaton’s superbly hyper-violent Hotline Miami was awarded the ‘Most Fantastic’ prize Sunday night, earning it one of the custom trophies above — a real world version of Cory Schmitz’s Fantastic Arcade cabinet, created by Austin’s own Ink It Labs with help from local art-toy studio Shinbone Creative. Terry Cavanagh’s Super Hexagon also earned the festival’s Audience Award, after a weekend of open voting by Fantastic Arcade attendees.

Elsewhere, in an extra-special guest-appearance, Ultima creator, Portalarium founder and real-actual spaceman Richard Garriott handed out the top honor to Fantastic Arcade’s jury-voted top Adventure Time Game Making Frenzy game: Adventure Minute, created by Vlambeer’s JW Nijman and Kitty Calis. Garriott’s prize? A hand-crafted crossbow made by New World Arbalest‘s David Watson, the Austin-based bowyer who served as the inspiration for Ultima series character Iolo.

The full list of Fantastic Arcade 2012 awards for all spotlight games is below the fold, along with the top three winning entries of the Adventure Time Game Making Frenzy.

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Even more brutal than the last, just one image from Raquel Meyers’ bunny/wolf battle that doesn’t end well. Meyers is the curator behind super amazing tumblr TEXT-MODE cataloging text art going back as far as the 1800s, and across a number of retro-future delivery systems like teletext.

Her recent series looking at the ‘χχχ’ industry apparently still-flourishing through Swedish & Spanish teletext broadcasts is particularly fascinating & as non-work-safe as you’d imagine, should you work somewhere where racy pixels are frowned upon.

Here’s how local favorite ASCII/ANSI/PETSCII artist Raquel Meyers does dinner, an image from her “Acid Burger” project with chip musician goto80.

Find more like this in this flickr set, or in motion over here and here at Meyers’ Vimeo account.

Not officially part of the Fantastic Arcade selection, but already one of the games I’m most excited to see here this year, visiting developer Fernando Ramallo has just announced Panoramical, a new “musical landscape” created in conjunction with David Kanaga, the composer behind Ed Key’s Proteus and PS3 puzzle-racer Dyad.

Interestingly, rather than traditional keyboard or game-controller inputs, Panoramical is manipulated with the knobs & sliders of a standard MIDI controller (Ramallo’s announcement post shows the Korg nanoKONTROL above) — quite possibly in answer to the tweet below from this past spring, from UK indie Stephen ‘Increpare‘ Lavelle.

To better acquaint yourself with Ramallo’s work, I highly suggest having a look at You Must Hold On To Your Mother’s Hand, a brief but genuinely unsettling first-person game created a few months back for the “Peter Molydeux”-inspired MolyJam.

The game will officially be debuting, says Ramallo, at this year’s Indiecade, but I’ll hopefully have cornered the creators into giving me a private show as soon as humanly possible. [via Fernando makes games]

Today marks the first day of Fantastic Arcade proper — the yearly indie-game celebration run alongside the Alamo Drafthouse’s genre film festival Fantastic Fest — which means updates to Venus Patrol will become slightly spottier through to the end of the week until I can emerge with a handful of stories to tell of how the event went down.

In the meantime, a brief slideshow from the past several hours, including, above, some of the first screenshots of Hotline Highball, a custom version of Dennaton’s fantastically brutal Hotline Miami that takes place inside the actual locale of Fantastic Arcade itself, featuring the greeting you can see by festival co-organizer Wiley Wiggins, inside its own custom arcade cabinet.

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