After well over a year of build-up and preparation, the day has finally come: Austin indie collective JUEGOS RANCHEROS has officially given the first of its TEXATRON machines a permanent home at Guzu, Austin’s new best designer toy/art/comic shop & gallery.

What this means for you is that now you can go play Messhof’s still-unbelievably-highly-anticipated Nidhogg, for free, whenever you want, during Guzu’s operating hours — as well as a slew of other games on the Winnitron network, including special 2-player builds of Canabalt & Super Crate Box, and much more.

The installation is just the first of what we hope will be many more to come, as well as the prelude to many enhancements to the Winnitron’s front- and back-ends to make machines like the TEXATRON perfect cultural-outreach machines to bring interesting, beautiful videogames to a wider and cross-cultural audience.

If you’re in Austin, drop by Guzu at 5000 N Lamar Blvd — just next door to Austin Books & Comics — and be sure to browse around for a legitimately amazing selection of books & toys while you’re there. Keep your eyes on the TEXATRON site for more news about upcoming locations, and investigate the Winnitron site if you’d like to bring machines like this to your own town.

Previously only been quietly released in small numbers at an event earlier in the year, Gun Godz & Super Crate Box creators Vlambeer have just opened up orders for the Super Crate Bundle to the world at large, as part of a new merchandising push with online seller Level Up Studios.

The Bundle, which comes in an actual Super Crate, is limited to 250 copies and includes a 36-track soundtrack CD for all their games featuring Phlogiston, Kozilek, Doeseone, Alex Mauer, and Brother Android, a Vlambeer T-shirt, a Gun Godz print, buttons, and a thumb-drive with copies of 11 Vlambeer games, including Gun Godz itself (which you, ahem, should probably already have).

If you miss your chance at picking up a Bundle, Vlambeer’s also released the soundtrack CD (you can thank me later for the amazing die-cut cover idea) and various T-shirts separately, including the fantastic front & back Gun Godz design — find all of Level Up’s Vlambeer merch here.

Probably the most exciting neo/retro development that surfaced last week: Paul Koller — formerly responsible for bringing AdamAtomic’s Canabalt to the Commodore 64 as C64ANABALT — fully revealed Super Bread Box, a C64 remake of Vlambeer’s freeware Super Crate Box.

While the latter’s already retro-styled designs might seem an easy task for porting back to vintage hardware, homebrew site RGCD goes into full technical detail here of just how challenging the task of replicating the heavier weaponry & screen-fulls of enemies actually was.

A full 64KB version is expected to be released for sale on cartridge by the end of the year, including, says RGCD, all unlockable progress & online crates-collected counts handled, awesomely, by password generation for each session.

In a late-night quiet push, Sony has just set its stateside PlayStation Mobile store live, giving Vita owners (as well as compatible mobile devices) a new catalog with a handful of games and music apps, most notably Vlambeer’s Super Crate Box, by far now the most essential version of the game (thumbs up for both mobility & real buttons).

To find the game, click the new third option on the Vita PSN Store’s top bar (next to ‘Game’ & ‘Video’), where you can also find games from PomPom, FuturLab, and Tikipod.

This seems as good a place as any to note that the new Super Crate Box Special album by Spelunky composer Phlogiston, which I previewed yesterday, is now also fortuitously available via bandcamp, which you can stream via the player above to get you in the mood.

As you may have already spotted over the weekend, Eirik ‘Phlogiston‘ Suhrke has just announced ‘Super Crate Box Special’, a newly arranged & re-mastered album of his original music from Vlambeer’s Super Crate Box, to be released this Tuesday at Phlogiston’s own site.

Also known as the musician behind Mossmouth’s revamped Xbox 360 version of Spelunky (buy the full 62-track [!]), Suhrke has given Venus Patrol the first full track off the album — the final cut of the Construction Yard arrangement — streamable via the player below.

[mejsaudio src=”https://venuspatrol.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/conmas.mp3″]

Also previewable is the final album art at top, created for the album by artist, animator & game-maker Francis Coulombe, whose art also adorned Phologiston’s Game music 1 collection, featuring a number of tracks composed for games by Cactus & a handful of others.

Below the fold you can find the trailer for the album with snippets of a few more tracks from the album, which will be live on Phlogiston’s website October 2nd.

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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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