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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One more HORIZON post for posterity’s sake: if you missed the Twitch.tv livestream of Venus Patrol & MOCAtv’s alternative E3 conference last week — graciously provided and masterminded by the super excellent production team at AREA5 — we’ve uploaded the conference in its entirety to YouTube so you can view it again at your leisure and on your device of choice.

As a reminder, you can also find more information, video, and big, gorgeous screenshots of all the HORIZON games at the conference’s website, as well as all the additional games curated by LA’s Sarah Brin for its post-show party.

Thanks again to all who have supported our efforts to showcase a selection of beautiful games to E3 — we hope to have more news soon on what’s next for HORIZON!

It’s been almost a week since we ran HORIZON, the alternative E3 press conference co-presented by Venus Patrol & MOCAtv, and to be honest, I think we’re all still recovering. Reaction to the conference has been more or less universally positive, and we’re super grateful both to everyone who made it happen and for all the kind words that have been coming in over the past few days from outfits like Polygon & The Verge.

That also includes photographer Brian Erzen, who documented the entire conference as it was happening, which we’re presenting here in slideshow form for those that couldn’t make it the day of. Above is the group shot or HORIZON’s presenters & participating developers that immediately followed the conference, and below the fold, a slew of other great photos of nearly everyone that took part.

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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.

The Polytron Portable Pro gets its first hardware upgrade since its original inception, following Fez designer Phil Fish’s discovery of Teenage Engineering’s super sexy OP-1 synthesizer (with one more bonus concept model below the fold).

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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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HEY MONTREAL: GO SEE THE DEBUT OF POLYTRON/INFINITE AMMO’S POWER PILL SEPT. 30TH

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9.24.2009

Brandon Boyer

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As part of Montreal’s latest Pecha Kucha Night, coming Wednesday, September 30th to the SAT (1195 Saint-Laurent), Fez creators Polytron will be on hand to talk about the “highs and lows of designing a multi-touch game for fun and profit”: specifically, their long-teased Infinite Ammo collaboration Power Pill. If you go, take lots of photos and forward them kindly to brandon@offworld.com, please.

I GET YOUR FEZ: POLYTRON SHOW 2 YEARS OF FEZ-RELATED FAILS

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9.9.2009

Brandon Boyer

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And sticking around Montreal for just a second: inspired by the anonymously-run bug/comment/build error blog I Get Your Fail, Polytron have just published this showcase of 26 images highlighting some of the worst fails in Fez history.

Well, they’re not all bad: the worst of the bunch are interspersed with some legitimately wicked new looks at the inside of Gomez’s trixellated world, and even some of the worst end up being some of the best, see like for instance my new electroclash-error desktop wallpaper here.

GAMMA-GO: KOKOROMI BRINGING INDIE GAME SHOWCASE/PARTY TO GDC 2010

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9.9.2009

Brandon Boyer

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Montreal art/game collective Kokoromi have just announced that they’ll be bringing the latest installment of their yearly Gamma showcase (traditionally reserved for the Montreal Game Summit) to GDC in March of 2010.

The theme for this year’s indie game showcase has yet to be chosen (you’ll recall that last year’s was the 3D theme that spawned both the original version of Infinite Ammo’s Paper Moon and Kokoromi’s own early-Offworld-exclusive super HYPERCUBE, and that 2007 was the year where Jason Rohrer first made news with the debut of Passage), but the group says submissions will open in November, and will give prospective indie game devs 6-8 weeks to build their games.

The chosen games will be “featured on large screen projections, and accompanied by the music of local and international DJs” at Gamma’s San Francisco opening party, and then be “playable in a special GDC-donated booth on the Game Developers Conference Expo floor from March 11th to 13th.”

Watch Kokoromi’s site for more information throughout November.

[pictured above: Bubblyfish spinning her chiptunes at 2007’s Gamma256]