As a tyke, I had the extreme fortune of having at my disposal a number of art-history survey textbooks (thanks, dad) which I pored over daily — an early, self-guided & very valuable education in art appreciation — and I have very distinct memories of continually returning to one artist: Hieronymus Bosch, whose landscapes were littered with cartoonish-ly caricatured monsters, animals and half-humans that wouldn’t at all be out of place in a children’s TV show if they weren’t so overtly representative of grim morality tales.

It’s with that said that I count myself super lucky to having been asked to be involved with a new art/game initiative from the Jheronimus Bosch 500 Foundation itself — an organization founded to honor the artist on the 500th anniversary of Bosch’s death.

The foundation has just announced its open call to all game designers to pitch new ideas inspired by Bosch’s work through the end of 2012, which will then be narrowed down to five finalists, who will each receive €2500 to prototype their game. One of those five will be chosen as the winner, who’ll get assistance to complete the work and officially present it internationally along with the rest of the 500-year happenings.

The jury panel, other than myself and Bosch 500 Foundation artistic manager Adriaan ‘s-Gravesande, includes Global Game Jam co-director Zuraida Buter, Hide&Seek New York managing director (and my old boss at Edge magazine!) Margaret Robertson, and Proteus creator Ed Key.

To investigate further and pitch your own idea — which I genuinely hope errs more toward interesting ideas like, “what does a videogame in triptych feel like” and less “a modern FPS/third-person-adventure set in the hellscape of Earthly Delights” — visit the Jheronimus Bosch 500 Foundation’s game competition site.

Several years back, a handful of us received cryptic instructions to visit a particular office on a particular floor of an otherwise nondescript high-rise in San Francisco’s financial district. What happened next, as soon as we entered the seemingly unremarkable Jejune Institute Center for Socio-Reengineering offices, was one of the strangest trips we’d go on: an unravelling mystery-tour through the city that was most remarkable because it was landmarked by clues that we and everyone else in the city nonchalantly walk past every single day.

Nonchalance, it turned out, also happens to be the name of the group that produced the real-world adventure, which sadly closed its doors last year before we had a chance to complete the expanded quest. Enter Cardhouse, which has just published an exhaustive breakdown of every step of the journey, fully annotated with photos and video of each locale — my most recommended read of the day. [Jejune Institute (Where Else?), via Ricky Haggett]

A rough cut of a Samus portrait created by Joshua Agerstrand for Jimmy Giegerich‘s recently-Kickstarted “Bits in Multiples of 8” zine, which I actually almost prefer to the cleaner completed version. [via Joshua Agerstrand]

A 4chan user makes the ultra-severe Dark Souls a touch more approachable with ‘chibi‘fication. [via Anamanaguchi‘s Peter Berkman]

Ready to pick your favorite game from the Adventure Time Game Making Frenzy? A B.M.O. update has just been pushed live that gives players (not just developers/participants) the opportunity to log in, download & play all the games (including, at top, Must Party Forever, from Austin-local dev One and a Half Beards), and mark all of your favorites into a handy personal list.

As previously mentioned, fan and local favorites will be featured in their own arcade cabinet for the duration of Fantastic Fest later this week — looking forward to seeing what everyone’s been digging out of the nearly 100 entries that have come in over the past 24 hours! [via Adventure Time Game Making Frenzy, thanks Brett for all the tireless updates!]

Give a warm ‘thuncan‘ to master supercut creator Duncan Robson (previously featured way back when) for this awesome blend of Super Hexagon and a clip from BBC comedy classic Look Around You (more on that also from way back when), provided as a bonus to the previous post. [via dunk3d]

“Didn’t the original come together in like four hours one morning?”, I ask. “Sometimes it just works like that,” Terry Cavanagh demures.

Having launched just days before this site opened its doors, a super-strong recommendation of Cavanagh’s updated and fantastically feature-complete Super Hexagon for iPhone & iPad is long overdue, and in the intervening time, the game’s gone on to be as well received as it richly deserves.

Sometimes it just happens that a game pops into the universe and makes you wonder how it’s possible that something so simple hadn’t materialized yet in all of videogaming’s past, at the same time as you wonder how it’s possible it’s not a time-travelling relic from videogaming’s future.

I’ve described the game probably ad nauseum as a “27th century space-disco teen-laser-punk arcade hit”, but it’s still how I see the game, and having run it at a few live events over the past few months, it’s amazing at how perfect a portable party it is. Providing its own ultra-hypnotic visuals and blasting its own fantastically forward-focused beats courtesy Chipzel (grab her soundtrack EP here), it’d nearly be danceable were it not stop/starting every 15 seconds in unskilled hands.

If you haven’t played it yet, do not hesitate a moment longer: your hands will initially be even exponentially more unskilled, but patience and zen-training (borrow my mantra & embrace the negative space) will pay off, and you may find yourself in as much an ultra zone as the nearly unbelievable player above. [Super Hexagon (App Store), coming to PC/Mac soon]

Having tackled survival horror, Superflat‘s Jasper Byrne, creator of early-2012 retro-styled adventure Lone Survivor (as well as 2011’s excellent puzzle-platformer Soul Brother), has just teased the first work-in-progress shots for what will likely become his next game, a still-unnamed dungeon fantasy he’s tantalizingly described as “Zelda x Demon’s Souls“.

Explains Byrne:

It has two-handed combat, equipable weapons and rolling (I love rolling), but I’m now writing an engine to make this sort of Zelda-Phantom Hourglass type projection to try and make the environment more exciting, but unlike that game it will use sprites to convey the characters.

You can see more early screenshots of various experiments Byrne’s been through to arrive at the current look above at the Superflat blog, which hopefully he’ll show more of in a few short days when he arrives for Fantastic Arcade, where Lone Survivor will be a showcase game. [via superflat]

Probably the best videogame/Zelda-inspired mixtape since 2009’s Ocarina of Rhyme, WAVVES side-project Sweet Valley’s just-released Eternal Champ occasionally dips in and out of overt samples, but tracks like Spirit Temple and Gold Gauntlet wear their influence on their sleeve.

Listen below, or download for free via Bandcamp. [via RCRDLBL]

Already renowned amongst certain circles of the indie community, TheCatamites became even more an instant cult favorite developer with the release of last year’s anarcho-adventure Murder Dog IV: Trial of the Murder Dog, a short, brutal and deceptively brilliant and funny point & click game that went deep into the remorseless mind of a dog given over to his own raging and vengeful id (don’t miss the game’s trailer).

The Pleasuredromes of Kubla Khan, just released as a free PC download, continues right where Murder Dog left off: a brief but hilarious interactive history lesson of the Mongol emperor’s Xanadu.

Like a modern-day punk Encarta (and as with Murder Dog), its best feature is its frantic and entirely unreliable Muppet-esque narrator, providing meta-commentary on all your actions (toss yourself off the edge of the world to smash further through the fourth wall), as you find yourself headed straight into the hedonistic heart of the pleasuredrome.

The fact that the game has instantly crashed out at the peak of the insanity in every one of my playthroughs is, I hope, awesomely intentional, and puts the game high on my list of 2012’s greatest. [The Pleasuredromes of Kubla Khan, via GameJolt]

Still desperately missed on Twitter, TheCatamites has also just launched his new website Harmony Zone, where you can find all of his previous releases (see also especially: Space Funeral), as well as precious resources for would-be devs, and one of the best definitions of ‘game’ in recent memory. [via @doougle]