Craig ‘ishisoft‘ Forrester’s tribute to the quieter side of Polytron’s Fez: quietly sitting with a notebook and slowly wending your way through its puzzles.

The process is best documented by the fantastic (and super spoiler heavy) Fez Notes blog from many months back (my own notes reached up to six, dense pages). (via TigTumblr, who also spotlighted this amazing ‘A Fez Odyssee’ illustration)

One of the rare indie games voted in by the public, conductor Andrew Skeet and the London Philharmonic Orchestra have teased this snippet of their fully orchestrated version of Disasterpeace’s Adventure, a key track from the soundtrack to Polytron’s Fez.

The arrangement will be featured alongside pieces from games like Skyrim, Castlevania, Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Metroid, as well as tracks from Portal and Little Big Planet, on the full ‘Greatest Video Game Music 2’ compilation, due for release in just a few short weeks on November 6th. Keep your eyes on the compilation’s twitter feed for information on the release.

Now in its second year, the GameCity Prize is meant to do for the videogame world what British institution Tate does for the art world with their Turner Prize, by choosing a shortlist of “the most brilliant, interesting and meaningful” games from the prior year and having them judged by “cultural commentators” from outside the games industry — to give the broader world a perspective on what’s happening in games somewhat underneath the surface.

This year, the just-announced shortlist includes a number of familiar faces, including Polytron’s Fez, Ed Key & David Kanaga’s Proteus (at top), thatgamecompany’s Journey (above), and Die Gute Fabrik’s Johann Sebastian Joust, up alongside more mainstream entries like Catherine, Super Mario 3D Land, and Mass Effect 3.

This year the top prize will be chosen from the list by a jury chaired by the film maker Lord Puttnam and including Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway, comic artist David Gibbons, UK designer Wayne Hemingway, BBC journalist Samira Ahmed, writer Ekow Eshun, actress Louise Brealey, actor Charlie Higson and BBC Radio DJ Jo Whiley.

The winner will be announced on October 24th at a ceremony at GameCity, where Venus Patrol will be attending with AdamAtomic’s Capsule, as well as a few more surprises up our sleeves… Visit the GameCity Prize website to learn more about the Prize & its nominees and jury.

Via sort of honestly the last place I’d expect to find a wellspring of interesting information, Fez programmer Renaud Bédard (currently working on mech arena shooter Waiting for Horus as part of Les Collégiennes) has just posted an extensive writeup to Formspring that catalogs a number of features eventually scrapped from the finished product.

At top, an alternate-perspective camera move that would keep things “visually interesting” during long hikes against bridges, which would eventually become a user-controlled easter egg, and below, floating elevator platforms which would move in prescribed directions based on camera-angle switches.

You can find more videos and a handful of screenshots available in Bédard’s writeup, including “a huge holographic golden cube receptacle”. [FEZ Lost Features, via Renaud Bédard]

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.

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