[This post is re-blogged from Venus Patrol sister-organization JUEGOS RANCHEROS, our local Austin indie game collective.]

It was one of the first best surprises and then a central fixture of the past two Fantastic Arcades, and now we’re bringing it back to debut a night of never-before-seen new scenes & music: join us next Thursday, March 6th, at 7:00PM at Austin’s North Door, as JUEGOS RANCHEROS presents Fernando Ramallo and David Kanaga’s interactive musical landscape generator Panoramical.

[ RSVP FOR THIS EVENT AND INVITE YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK BY CLICKING HERE! ]

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The first of two new album drops worth noting today: Proteus & Dyad musician David Kanaga has just let loose a small flurry of EPs, including Dinosaur Planet Remixes, a downloadable version of the set he performed live at our Venus Patrol / Wild Rumpus GDC party.

If the name Dinosaur Planet only half-rings a bell, you may know it better by its eventual commercial release: Starfox Adventures, the GameCube title eventually Rare re-branded and released it as, after its long lead as a Nintendo 64 original IP.

The source material comes from effects gleaned from leaked video of the original Planet footage (an hour of which is below the fold), as well as the actual score from superstar composer Grant Kirkhope, famous for his work on basically every great Rare franchise including GoldenEye, Perfect Dark & Banjo-Kazooie.

The remixes are available now for streaming above or purchasing for any amount via Kanaga’s Bandcamp — also worth grabbing while you’re there is Frog Plays His Videogames, Kanaga’s set from our 2012 party.

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With just two weeks to go until the full Game Developers Conference madness officially kicks in, Wild Rumpus & Venus Patrol have just released the first wave of lineup announcements for our 2013 party, with both some familiar faces and some brand new additions.

Sound Shapes co-creator & star I Am Robot And Proud will be performing a live set including his own brand-new reactive visuals (get a little sneak peek of that here), and Super Hexagon‘s own Chipzel (above) will be part of a lineup that also includes Dyad/Proteus musician David Kanaga, and Gun Godz & Luftrausers‘ Kozilek.

Also returning will be Anticon superstar Dose One, now with his Themselves, 13&God & Subtle bandmate Jel (see why he’s the “MPC emperor” in the video above). After the performances, Fez‘s Phil Fish & former Uncharted designer Rich Lemarchand will be playing out the night with their usual fantastic dance set as Phillipe Lemarchand.

On the games side, not only will we be debuting the previously mentioned new game from Keita Takahashi (which we are now also teasing as a game about “love, hygiene, monsters, and finding discarded erotic magazines in the woods”), but showcasing Super Space ____, the ever-amazing Samurai Gunn, and a new mashed-up version of Panoramical & SoundSelf (above), the latter just announced from Capsule & Antichamber sound artist Robin Arnott.

If you’ll be around the Bay Area on March 27th & haven’t yet purchased tickets, we’ve just opened up another round which can be purchased by clicking right over here. We’ll have more info coming soon as the date draws even more dangerously near!

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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Totally taken with this new, hour-long mixtape produced by Dyad, Panoramical and Proteus composer David Kanaga in advance of his live-performance of the latter with designer Ed Key (featured here just a short while back) at GameCity7.

It’s a nicely tuned blend of jazz/folk/piano/electronic, with just enough of Kanaga’s own material for Proteus (some of which, says Key, is sampled from the mixtape’s tracks) that it gives the awesome effect of lazing with a disc-man under one of the game’s low-bit trees, with cheap enough headphones that the ambient sound of the in-game world occasionally bleeds through and fades away.

[mejsaudio src=”http://venuspatrol.com/ofiles/proteusgamecity7mix.mp3″]

You can stream the whole thing above, or download it via this new post by Key on the Proteus Live event itself, about which he adds, intriguingly, that the god-like manual controls that helped sculpt the hour-long experience will likely come to the final released version of the game, creating a multiplayer experience where “one person could play on mouse or joypad, whilst someone else controlled the environment via the keyboard.”

Swedish designer & developer Adam Henriksson — last seen providing video documentation of the debut of Mega-GIRP — has just uploaded a beautifully shot longer look at the 48-hour game he helped create at the 2012 Nordic Game Jam with Thomas Perl, Johann Sebastian Joust creator Doug Wilson, and Proteus musician David Kanaga.

Originally known as Awkward Tarzan Grinding Game, before I had the dubious distinction of suggesting it should be renamed Edgar Rice Frotteur (to put it in line with Joust, obviously), the game was played — as so many of Wilson’s creations are — with the help of a slew of PlayStation Move controllers, all precariously hung with long rope from the ceiling.

The rules stipulated that all players must be hanging on to two like-colored “vines” at any given moment, and the object was to corner other players into tangled positions where it was impossible for them to do just that. Any player holding the button of just one of their colored “vine” had their health quickly drained until they managed to grab another, and any player not holding any vine at all was disqualified.

So far as I know, the game hasn’t been installed at any location since, though Wilson’s expressed interest in waterproofing the controllers and making it a swimming pool installation: any interested parties should probably contact him toot sweet to make that happen (& invite Adam and his camera along). [via Adam Henriksson]

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]

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 — both local and global, and both indie and occasionally a bit-bigger-budget — for the audience, to give people — especially those curious onlookers from outside the indie community itself — a look at what they may have missed.

In keeping with the tongue-in-tobacco-packed-cheek tone, we call these run-downs A Fistful of Indies, which are be 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.

(more…)