Queasy Games & its associated Sound Shapes partners celebrate the wrap and release of the game (an easy contender for one of the best of 2012) with this screen-printed cinema-style poster designed by art director (and Venus Patrol designer!) Cory Schmitz, that for now remains unavailable to the outside world and ridiculously covetable.

Organizers of Freeplay — a yearly festival that brings together game devevelopers indie and otherwise both Melbourne local and from around the world — have just announced their 2012 lineup, a program that most notably brings Rez & Child of Eden creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi in for a panel on tension & balance in games, following an appearance at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image that will “explore how his vision has evolved over his career, and demonstrate his pioneering application of music and visuals through live gameplay.”

The guest list this year will include Emily Ridgway, audio director on games like BioShock and Double Fine’s Brutal Legend, Stacking & Costume Quest, as well as Bryan Ma, former 2K developer now behind indie initiatives like the Shanghai Winnitron and curator of the most recent Lunarcade Sydney exhibition (also brother of FTL creator Justin & editor of a pretty wicked mostly-games-related tumblr), and an arcade that will include perennial indie faves like Nidhogg, Proteus, GIRP & Johann Sebastian Joust.

Check the Freeplay website for more information, including more of the above super amazing artwork by Pachinko Pictures (they of the recent Passion Pit Pitchfork game & secretly awesome Chupa Chups advergame Lol-a-Coaster).

How do you follow up three of the most heart-achingly adorable iPhone games of the past few years? If you’re Simogo (creators of the universally excellent Kosmo Spin, Bumpy Road and Beat Sneak Bandit), you do the obvious: go full on horror with a twist of Swedish folklore.

After relentless teasing fans with a series of ever more complex opaque riddles (follow along with the best clues here), Simogo’s finally revealed the above video for Year Walk, calling it “a little bit of interactive art, a little bit of intuitive touch navigation, a little bit of a picture book, a little bit of an adventure game, a little bit of mystery and horror, a little bit of occult and supernatural phenomena, and a lot of folklore.”

We’d add that it’s a little bit Jon Klassen, which more videogames could definitely stand to be.

[via Simogo]

[VP Rewind is a quick look back at the important events of the past week or two that should have been on Venus Patrol had it actually been alive.]

Publicly revealed for the first time ever at New York’s recent Babycastles Summit, this pitch video for what could have been Guitar Hero III, had legal-entanglements not stripped the franchise from Harmonix before landing it at Activision.

Created by Joe ‘@codeloss‘ Kowalski and Steven Kimura over the course of a weekend in the summer of 2006, Rockapocalypse was going to take all of the awkwardness of Guitar Hero‘s narrative (aka “why is a what essentially amounts to a half-decent cover band rising from nothing to go platinum?”) and give it amazing form.

In its post-apocalyptic future, where rock has been banned, a literal band-of-outsiders emerges to take the mostly-forgotten anthems-of-yore, passed down through generations like folktales, and give them back to the population at large.

So, in essence, kind of the coolest game ever, and — if you’re paying close attention — probably not the biggest leap to learn that Kowalski’s next post-Harmonix job was at Double Fine, where he spearheaded the fantastic “gatefold album” user interface for Brutal Legend, viewable for your remembering below the fold.

Expect more on Kowalski’s upcoming indie effort Third Rail soon, because he’s promised me a look, and the Santa Ragione boys say it’s shaping up to be real, real nice. [via Joe Kowalski]

(more…)

[VP Rewind is a quick look back at the important events of the past week or two that should have been on Venus Patrol had it actually been alive.]

Toronto indie-megaforce Capy effortlessly shows up pretty much just about everyone working in videogames right now by not only releasing an amazing pixel-ragdoll-enabled trailer for its upcoming Xbox Live game Super Time Force, but couching it in a TV-quality animated series, and spawning its own new catchphrase meme (and quite possibly an upcoming T-shirt?), to boot. [via Capy]

[VP Rewind is a quick look back at the important events of the past week or two that should have been on Venus Patrol had it actually been alive.]

Beautiful, brutal, and honestly not even the most shocking depiction of violence from Dennaton’s upcoming I’m-just-going-to-go-ahead-and-already-call-it-a-hit-game Hotline Miami, this new poster image by Niklas Åkerblad (also one of the game’s musicians, and artist behind fantastic & totally polar-opposite iPhone meditative-adventure Kometen) at least gives you fair warning for what you’re about to get yourself into.

Below the fold, the Hotline Miami trailer itself, just to basically prove out everything I’ve just said above. [via @ElHuervo]

(more…)

[VP Rewind is a quick look back at the important events of the past week or two that should have been on Venus Patrol had it actually been alive.]

I’m not sure why it should have surprised me as much as it did: it’s just, I suppose, that we’ve spent so long — years now — staring at those dot-eyed mannequins that I was starting to think of it as an aesthetic.

In either case, Chris Hecker has revealed the final character designs for his upcoming 1-on-1 reverse-Turing mindgame SpyParty, and the results are fantastic. A nod, says Hecker, to classic illustration in every sense of its relative timelessness, the new designs (by artist John Cimino) convey a strong sense of individual character and an overall aristocratic flavor without dipping into overly-broad spy fiction.

It’ll still be some time off, Hecker admits, before the characters make it into the ongoing open beta (that I, like, somehow still am not a part of), so get your last good ganders at those dot-eyed dollar-store dolls before they’re gone forever. [via SpyParty]

[VP Rewind is a quick look back at the important events of the past week or two that should have been on Venus Patrol had it actually been alive.]

Already available for discounted pre-orders (due for release in just a few short months) or for getting Greenlit on Steam, if that is your wont, Incredipede is the latest from globe-trotting developer Colin Northway, first seen around these parts several years back having found somewhat overnight success with his very first Flash game, Fantastic Contraption, now a multi-platform powerhouse in its own right.

Incredipede doesn’t fall too far from the Contraption tree-of-knowledge, as it were, still apparently being primarily concerned with creating ambulatory creatures that traverse from one side of a level to another, but what’s most worthy of note here is just how much adding just one reactive eye can elicit real empathy & tension from a player — as the video above amply proves.

As a side note, I won’t take too much credit, but I definitely can still recall an old email thread where I ranted, “you gotta make it look like the Codex Seraphinianus!”, mostly because I can’t find the email anymore, but also because Incredipede artist Thomas Shahan went into so much more fantastic territory than I could have even anticipated, and all I had to offer was a pile of words. [via Northway Games]

Brought to you from journals the blockiest version of the HMS Beagle you can imagine, an artist’s rendition (here, the artist being A.J. Hateley, she of the popular & similarly-antiqued videogame book covers) of the innocuous birth of a monster.

Toronto comic artist & illustrator John Martz supplies a wallpaper for Spooky Squid’s just-released brawler They Bleed Pixels with an image that passes for Sanrio/Colorforms/Dolly Madison-cute in a horrifying negaverse.