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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It’s time for that little link at the top to shine a little brighter: I’m very pleased to announce that the Venus Patrol Shop is now, finally, open for business, which also brings even better news — the official, worldwide release of Keita Takahashi’s Videogame Romantics T-shirts.

In addition to the remaining “Sunset” stock we originally made available at our Wild Rumpus / Venus Patrol GDC Party, we’re also introducing two new colorways: “Octopus”, with pink on heather-purple, and “Treasure”, with sparkly gold on black (which, to Keita’s dismay, is not made of actual gold).

The Venus Patrol Shop is also currently stocked with a small selection of other items from friends of the site, including T-shirts, prints and zines from artists & writers like Maré Odomo, Cory Schmitz, Zac Gorman and Mathew Kumar. You’ll even find a few super-premium items in stock, like these hand-woven scarves featuring art from Faraway creator Steph Thirion’s debut game Eliss.

Be sure to let Keita & I know how you like the shirts! Photos for our scrapbook/future Tumblr posts can be submitted care of that Submit link at top. And overall, I genuinely hope you like what you see at the store, and thanks much to our superpals at Fangamer for all the hard work they put into making it a real thing — stay tuned for news on many more things I’m working on bringing to it in the coming months!

Another tribute to the final weekend of the Sportsfriends Kickstarter, this time from local fave comic artist Maré Odomo, with an illustrated breakdown of why you should definitely kick in.

The eagle-eyed will note that not only does Venus Patrol designer Cory Schmitz make a guest appearance, but also chipscene regulars Anamanaguchi (“in someone’s living room”), my Wild Rumpus cohorts from this year’s Wild Rumpus/One Life Left/Venus Patrol GDC party, and David Mauro’s “Babycastles no Fukushuu: Manhattan Fury” & Hilary Florido’s “Codependent No Moe” custom-painted arcade cabinets for NYC game-event group Babycastles.

As before, this is the last weekend to make a difference in bringing all of the Sportsfriends games to a wider audience: donate to the campaign at Kickstarter.

Another piece for the Fangamer VERSUS Attract Mode art show, Mare Odomo‘s more autobiographical ‘DS Club‘ piece illustrates a time where “we spent our lunches playing Mario Kart, having math battles in Brain Age, and pictochatting the things that teenagers pictochat. It was the best.”

The piece is available in limited and limited-er print sizes via Fangamer here, along with more Odomo-related goodness here, and some previously-featured work by Venus Patrol Kickstarter T-shirt artist Mikko Walamies here.

Newly released as a T-shirt for Baltimore ‘baroquetronica’ band Bear & Walrus, Mare Odomo (best known for his brilliant Pokemon mini-comic Letters to An Absent Father) explains his design thusly:

The layout mimics the inventory screen for Link’s Awakening. All the items are real world objects you could find in your backyard. Weird little things that your childbrains imbue with magic. A pinecone is a grenade, a stick is a sword, feathers let you fly.

Find the T-shirt here (only 50 were printed!), stream Bear & Walrus’s albums here, dig into more of Mare’s designs here.