While I’m still patiently awaiting the Mac version to fully tuck into Dennaton’s Hotline Miami (not least so I can finally reach the Fantastic Arcade bonus level, Highballer), its release is already paying off with the amazing fan-art starting to trickle in, like Jouste‘s tribute to its resident drill-killer, Carl.

Writer Tevis Thompson’s “Saving Zelda” essay — published earlier in the year, shortly after the release of the Wii’s latest Zelda installment, Skyward Sword — seemed to solidify that everyone else was also thinking the same thing: with rare exception, there’s been something missing in the franchise, a sense of diminishing returns, a growing and distinctive lack of the mystery and magic that made the series beloved in the first place.

And so, partnering with David Hellman, most notably the artist behind Jon Blow’s Braid, the two took to Kickstarter to help restore that sense of wonder as best they could with Second Quest, an upcoming, hard-bound graphic novella “for those who love videogames but want more compelling worlds and a sense of real discovery” and “anyone who’s felt the pull of distant landscapes and longed to explore a world full of mystery.”

While the project has already exceeded its Kickstarter goal, with just two days remaining, the pair have prepared a new bonus for backers with ‘Side Quest’, a six-page digital mini-comic companion story to the main Second Quest that they’ll be sending to everyone who’s supported the campaign.

And so, presented below is the first two pages of Side Quest — which you can dive further into by supporting their Kickstarter campaign at any level here — and a short note from Hellman as the project draws to a close.

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grottsville city here we come – thanks @mooonmagic @mister_raroo #boogerPatrol ! Thanks for the lovely inspiration lads, all drawn here on bench in tranquil Inner Temple gardens in London town..

While some of his older titles are finding new life on new platforms — see, specifically, the excellent 3DS conversion of his Night Game, also quietly being prepped for an iPhone port — creator Nicklas ‘Nifflas‘ Nygren has relatively quietly been gearing up for something even greater, Knytt Underground, announced this past summer for a launch on PC & Mac, as well as PlayStation 3 & Vita.

The original freeware version of Knytt has already made its mark as a lo-fi ambient masterwork (and, with Knytt Stories, one that players themselves could extend), but Nifflas has made it clear that Underground represents the magnum-opus-type culmination of everything he’s learned about storytelling through games, claiming that this latest will be “about the big questions; trying to understand life and our place in it – and failing completely.”

Stylistically, it’s another sort of aesthetic mash-up, working with a similar photo-surreal style as his 2010 game Saira, and with some of the same characterization as some of his earliest work like Within a Deep Forest.

Still due for a PlayStation Network launch later this year, consider this your first peek into something that we’ll be exploring here further. Below the fold you’ll find four more PS3 screenshots of the game, with more coming soon via Nifflas’s official Underground site.

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I haven’t worked the toy beat as hard as I did back in the day, but I may have to pick up the mantle again if I’m missing out on stuff like this newly revealed model Galaga ship, awesomely sculpted by Maschinen Krieger creator Kow Yokoyama, and due out in March (Hobby Link Japan seems to have the best price if you’d like to pick it up for yourself).

If nothing else, it’s a reminder that I never really did think to extrapolate the sprite into 3D, nor, for that matter, has Namco in any overt way, which then leads me down the rabbit-hole of remembering how they axed the above experiments to bring Xevious back to life in the Ace Combat engine, and it’s all blackness from there. [via Tomopop]

Super great motion-graphics work, well spotted by Evan Shamoon, that covers the entire A-Z of games and hews happily more toward the obscure than the obvious, and bonus points for the ad-hoc leaderboard to score yourself with at the end there.

The clip comes by way of Evan ‘banana-bird‘ Seitz, who’s quietly been doing a lot of fantastic motion work on games, if you peer back through his Vimeo account — I’m especially taken by his idea for a Yellow Submarine/Starfox mashup around the 45 second mark in episode 2 of Jamais Vu.

Here’s the major lede buried in this video showcase of all the games coming November 24th to VERSUS — the live music/game/amazingness mega-show being hosted at Rotterdam, Netherlands venue WORM: a brand new look at what creator Mark ‘Messhof‘ Essen has been cooking up under deep cover for the past couple years with his still-commercially-unavailable swordfighting cult-hit Nidhogg.

While the main thrust (no pun) seems to be the same, you’ll see new arenas and updated versions of the one you’re used to, new dynamics, and a new sorta kooky-eyed version of the game’s titular wyrm starting at around the 10 second mark.

Not to be too far upstaged, the event will also be bringing a number of the games much ballyhooed about around here, including Fernando Ramallo & David Kanaga’s Panoramical, minimalist racing game Chalo Chalo, Beau Blyth’s Samurai Gunn (also sporting a freshly updated tile set), and Super Space ______, a “couch co-op arcade shooter about competition, cooperation, communication and the democracy of physics”.

You can find much more about the lineup and event specifics via WORM, which having watched this trailer I’m now deeply despairing about missing.

And one more dose of AJ Hateley’s Dishonored art, this time the wispy, brushy spectre of Dishonored‘s Corvo, both well spotted over the weekend by one of the game’s writers, novelist Austin Grossman, and both already available in print or card form from Hateley’s Redbubble store.

Posted here as a tribute to How I Spent My Weekend, and not just because it’s super gorgeous, the frequently-featured AJ Hateley posts this illustration (which I’d happily sit straight next to the best work Ashley Wood did for Metal Gear) of The Outsider from Arkane’s Dishonored, still totally my top pick for big-budget game of the year (neck & neck with Dragon’s Dogma).

As I mentioned last week, this past Sunday’s meetup of our Austin indie collective JUEGOS RANCHEROS featured the local debut of Hundreds, the next game from Canabalt developers Semi Secret along with Greg ‘aeiowu‘ Wohlwend — creator of the original Hundreds prototype and co-designer of games like Solipskier — and local-favorite musician Loscil.

If you haven’t seen Hundreds before, it’s a fantastically austere & ambient action/puzzle game which I described at greater length a month back, and which — I predict — will likely be one of the next big App Store hits. That’s not just a hunch, as mentioned in my last Hundreds post, there hasn’t been a single person who I’ve seen casually start to play that hasn’t become instantly, deeply hooked.

And so, presented here is the full 30 minute talk Saltsman gave the assembled crowd (an abbreviated version of his overseas debut of Hundreds at GameCity) that goes into both the genesis of the project and the long, arduous task of taking such a simple and refined idea to its deepest logical conclusions, and paring down on all the ideas that creep in in the meantime and initially seem worthwhile but ultimately prove to be unnecessary complications and distractions.

After Adam’s talk, you also get to hear — remotely, via Skype — from Wolhwend, who takes questions not just on Hundreds and its cryptic narrative, but of his more recent game, Gasketball, and what the future holds for Mikengreg, his collaborative company with developer Mike ‘fucrate‘ Boxleiter.

As a bonus, and because I haven’t managed to edit them more cleanly into the video, below the fold are a number of Saltsman’s slides that show his early design sketches for Hundreds and early art tests from Wolhwend, to refer to directly, rather than squinting at the clip.

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