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!

If you’re going to be in or around the Bay Area during this year’s Game Developers Conference and haven’t already picked up tickets for the Wednesday night Venus Patrol / Wild Rumpus party, you’re probably definitely going to want to now: we’re very excited to announce that the night will see the debut of a new multiplayer game created in collaboration with Katamari Damacy & Noby Noby Boy creator Keita Takahashi.

We’re keeping details pretty scarce for the moment, but will be showing more little teasers as the date draws near (expect another teaser from Keita directly in the next couple days) — the above two images (the latter also available in Vine form) are your first look at what the game holds in store.

Wild Rumpus & I will also soon be revealing more about the rest of the games & music lineup for the night, which is nearly complete and is looking very, very exciting.

You can find more information about the party — which is sponsored by our friends at Tumblr and will be held at San Francisco’s Public Works on Wednesday, March 27th — and pick up your tickets at the official website.

Fantastic news for current backers and also the yet-unconvinced: not only has Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward thrown his weight behind the frequently-featured Kickstarter for LA Game Space — the would-be local/online cultural center and residency space for pushing the medium of games — with the amazingly earnest animated appeal above, you guys, but…

Noby Noby Boy and Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi has also just announced that his first game since leaving Namco — a PC/Mac/Linux downloadable he’s currently calling simply My Silly Game — will initially be available exclusively through the Kickstarter campaign.

In turn, the LA Game Space folk have opened up a new entry-level $5 tier if you only want Takahashi’s contribution, and have also added it to all upper levels, including the now (including Silly) 31-game pack for $15, alongside games like the previously featured Inputting.

It seems like probably now you should just go ahead and kick in to the campaign.

Katamari Damacy & Noby Noby Boy creator Keita Takahashi was recently invited to Australia’s Games For Change conference to deliver a speech he called “The Power Of Play: Reasons Why I Like Video Games“.

He used the opportunity to reprise a fantastic speech he gave back in 2006 for GDC’s Game Design Challenge — the theme that year was designing a game that could win the Nobel Peace Prize (which went on to be won by Dishonored designer Harvey Smith, as I covered in this interview with Smith, back in a former life) — but then moved on to cover a wide variety of topics, all revolving around the central idea of spreading peace & love through videogames.

Below the fold you’ll find the entirety of Takahashi’s talk, including musings on the aesthetics of the controller & re-framing the environment around us with play (and with Kokoromi co-founder & designer Heather Kelley‘s glasses), presented here on Venus Patrol with high hopes that it’ll inspire a little more peace and love from designers and players alike.

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It’s been a good year and a half since it was first announced that Katamari Damacy & Noby Noby Boy creator Keita Takahashi would be joining Tiny Speck — the company behind upstart web MMO Glitch — and in all that time, I hadn’t really been able to suss out exactly what he’d be contributing to the project, but then the answer came today, and the answer was dinosaur butts.

Detailed today in a blog post for the game, Takahashi has added a new transportation system to the game in the form of six sleeping dinosaurs scattered throughout its massive land, whose mouths can be crawled to travel to “Shim Shiri”, a decidedly Keita-like area that serves as an exchange where you can get sucked into the opposite ends of each of the dinosaurs and be instantly whisked to your next destination.

From what I have gleaned, Glitch players have given the area the colloquial name ‘Asslandia’ — for his part, Takahashi, says Tiny Speck, offered this new mode of travel simply because it would be “more fun and more crazy” than the game’s existing traditional subway.

A fast public service announcement to note that Katamari Damacy & Noby Noby Boy creator Keita Takahashi has worked tirelessly over the past couple weeks to finish off his previously-featured set of Noby wallpapers for your iPhone.

In addition to the new iPhone 5-compatible ‘battery’ paper above (my old favorite lock-screen image), he’s slightly redesigned the new Noby GIRL image, and made an iPhone 4/4S version of that particular paper available for the first time. You can find all of the wallpapers via his uvula.jp blog, or archived here, below the fold.

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[UPDATE: both of these wallpapers have been updated further to fit properly on the iPhone 5 — click here for the newer versions and one additional wallpaper!]

As if I didn’t have enough latent guilt about impulse-upgrading to an iPhone 5 I didn’t necessarily really need, the first thing I realized on activation was that the extra row of icons had unceremoniously broken my favorite part of the phone: my original Noby Noby Boy wallpaper, which saw BOY playfully looped around each of your icons, and surprises hidden under each which only revealed themselves as you opened an adjacent folder.

And so, I registered my complaint with Katamari Damacy & Noby creator Keita Takahashi, who, even though he hadn’t yet upgraded himself, offered to alleviate the situation by creating an newer, longer version, and even threw in a brand new GIRL version for our troubles.

And so, presented below the fold, both of the wallpapers to adorn your own device, in wistful memory of the game that very shortly will be leaving the mortal coil of the App Store itself. If you’re still working the iPhone 4/4S, you can find the original BOY version here, with the shortened GIRL version promised to appear in the near future.

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Maybe the fastest turnaround between awesome and awful news: Katamari Damacy & Noby Noby Boy creator Keita Takahashi has just announced the thing we all feared the most (or is it just my own recurring nightmare?), that Namco Bandai will be removing and no longer supporting the Noby Noby Boy iPhone & iPad apps from the App Store next Tuesday, October 9th.

What exactly this means for the service at large is still undetermined: for months now, submitted meters wouldn’t actually be subtracted from the app’s running total, and the Facebook counterpart where you earned badges based on the size of your submission had long since fallen into disrepair as well, but there’s no word yet on whether the servers will continue to run and the PS3 game, at least, will further GIRL’s goal of stretching toward the edge of the solar system.

For now, then, a reminder to grab the app if you haven’t already, which Keita admits is “a totally silly app, but I’m enjoying it sometimes, even now”, signing off simply by saying, “Thank you for playing this silly app.”