[Wednesdays on Venus Patrol are GameToilet Days, where we feature new installments of the brilliant comic series from artist & game dev Jerry ‘King Baggot‘ Carpenter. You can find hundreds more entries in the series at the comic’s new permanent home, gametoilet.venuspatrol.com!]

I’m already deciding which cheesecloth tuxedo to wear when I pick up my award for this TEN YEARS FROM NOW…

Every month, as part of the regular monthly meetings of the Austin, TX independent game community JUEGOS RANCHEROS, we do a very casual & chatty rundown of the ten or so games from the previous month for the audience, to give people — especially those curious onlookers from outside the indie community itself — a look at what they may have missed. The featured games are both local and global, and both indie and, on occasion, a bit-bigger-budget — what binds them together is simply that they’re all amazing.

In keeping with the tongue-in-tobacco-packed-cheek tone, we call these run-downs A Fistful of Indies, which are presented here on Venus Patrol for your reference, each fully-annotated, -linked, and off-the-cuff blurbed, in addition to their home on the JUEGOS RANCHEROS site.

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After a long weekend spent with a couple hundred games, the first selection of games coming to this year’s Fantastic Arcade — the indie game spinoff of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Fantastic Fest film festival — have just been announced, as curated by the founding members of Austin indie collective JUEGOS RANCHEROS (aka Wiley Wiggins, Adam Saltsman & I).

The full list of spotlight games, each of which will be given the full arcade-cabinet overhaul and put on public display for all Fantastic Fest & Arcade-goers from September 19th to 22nd, follows below — with some new, unseen video of some of this year’s entries, as well as games that will be part of Arcade’s daily tournaments.

At top, Beau Blyth’s super highly anticipated Samurai Gunn, which first blipped on radars when we debuted it for tournament play at least year’s Fantastic Arcade, will be returning for open play during the entire week.

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[Wednesdays on Venus Patrol are GameToilet Days, where we feature new installments of the brilliant comic series from artist & game dev Jerry ‘King Baggot‘ Carpenter. You can find hundreds more entries in the series at the comic’s new permanent home, gametoilet.venuspatrol.com!]

I have bought a new notebook from the Atlantis Art Shop and it is LANDSCAPE format. Expect all posts from me now to feature Lots of Long Things that slope down at the ends!

[Wednesdays on Venus Patrol are GameToilet Days, where we feature new installments of the brilliant comic series from artist & game dev Jerry ‘King Baggot‘ Carpenter. You can find hundreds more entries in the series at the comic’s new permanent home, gametoilet.venuspatrol.com!]

Still haven’t played this yet, and I’m sure it’s really good. It’s just those bloody zommers/infected/whatever – I’m just so bored of them. Can we move on to more glamorous antagonists soon, please?

A reminder to developers everywhere that submissions are now open for the 2013 edition of Fantastic Arcade — the Austin-local indie-game offshoot of Alamo Drafthouse’s Fantastic Fest film festival — with a deadline of July 31st to have your game considered to be one of the Spotlight or Showcase games.

Even if you don’t have a game to submit, you’re hopefully already planning your yearly visit to the Arcade, the event, you’ll recall, that last year ran the Adventure Time Game Jam and hosted a number of developer favorites like Vlambeer, Dennaton, Molleindustria & many more, and publicly debuted games like Beau Blyth’s Samurai Gunn.

This year the festival will be taking place at the Drafthouse’s new Lakelike theater from September 19-22 — find more information about the festival at its official website, submit your game here, and browse through video archives of the 2012 Arcade here or at the Arcade’s YouTube channel.

[Wednesdays on Venus Patrol are GameToilet Days, where we feature new installments of the brilliant comic series from artist & game dev Jerry ‘King Baggot‘ Carpenter. You can find hundreds more entries in the series at the comic’s new permanent home, gametoilet.venuspatrol.com!]

It’s my birthday today, so I’m spending the day drunk up a tall tower — it’s all the more handy, then, that my Godson, the Very Talented Bill Learmont has done this week’s GameToilet for me as a present!

Now, I’m going to get outta here before Cage starts LOSING HIS SHIT again :O

A little treat today for game music lovers everywhere: presenting LostHits of LowBits, an hour long mix of underdog classic 16-bit soundtrack selections by Anticon’s Doseone, who you’ll recognize as the theme song artist behind Vlambeer’s Gun Godz, as well as an underground hiphop & freestyle legend from acts like Subtle, 13&God, Themselves & cLOUDDEAD.

Dose put together the mix to debut at our Wild Rumpus/Venus Patrol party at this year’s GDC, where he also performed with Themselves-mate Jel, Gun Godz composer Kozilek & Proteus co-creator David Kanaga, and now the full mix is available to for you for your streaming or downloading pleasure via its Soundcloud page, which also includes the full tracklist.

Says Dose, in his inimitable style:

These Songs and their Creators Inspired me TWICE…
First as a Child with BoredomToBurn..
And again as a Man in the wilds of Music Making…

This is a Blend, Butcher, and Bolster of that Beautiful music,
and a careful 50 minute Thank You, to its sounds.
Love Mr.One…

Dose (pictured above left, being give-it-up-for’d by Kozilek at the aforementioned party) has quietly been collaborating on some very exciting developments on the indie-game-front that I look forward to telling you about soon — in the meantime you can find more of his music at his site or at his online store.

For reasons not necessarily worth bringing up here, I’ve spent much of the past few post-HORIZON weeks laid up & shut-in, which would have been driven me much crazier than it has were it not for the fortuitous timing of the release of Animal Crossing: New Leaf.

Like basically everyone else I know, the past few weeks I’ve been living dual lives in both the real world and in The Village, and, as time has worn on, those two realities have started to happily merge, as a bunch of friendly artists & game fans have brought our favorite bits of the former into the latter.

Above, via Media Center blogger Michael Pang, you’ll find the keys to unlock your very own in-game version of Keita Takahashi’s Videogame Romantics shirt, and below the fold, you can find a number of other amazing submissions from indie game & comic culture to make your Village life feel a little bit more like home.

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[Wednesdays on Venus Patrol are GameToilet Days, where we feature new installments of the brilliant comic series from artist & game dev Jerry ‘King Baggot‘ Carpenter. You can find hundreds more entries in the series at the comic’s new permanent home, gametoilet.venuspatrol.com!]

* boom boom * – this one will go off faster than a pufferfish sandwich.