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 for the audience, to give people — especially those curious onlookers from outside the indie community itself — a look at what they may have missed. The featured games are both local and global, and both indie and, on occasion, a bit-bigger-budget — what binds them together is simply that they’re all amazing.

In keeping with the tongue-in-tobacco-packed-cheek tone, we call these run-downs A Fistful of Indies, which are 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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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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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 for the audience, to give people — especially those curious onlookers from outside the indie community itself — a look at what they may have missed. The featured games are both local and global, and both indie and, on occasion, a bit-bigger-budget — what binds them together is simply that they’re all amazing.

In keeping with the tongue-in-tobacco-packed-cheek tone, we call these run-downs A Fistful of Indies, which are 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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It only took us like six or so months to get everything online, but the day’s finally come: Venus Patrol’s proud to present the first installment of Fantastic Video, a new, regular series showing off all the talks from last year’s Fantastic Arcade.

In this first video, Rami Ismail & JW Nijman of Vlambeer give an hour-long look into the genesis & evolution of their upcoming Supermarionation-inspired dog-fighting game Luftrausers, a game that can be traced all the way back to 2007’s Airhound, a 3-hour game-jam game that since seems to unfortunately have disappeared from the internet, but which you can see a bit more of here.

Enjoy the video above & the rare chance to peek into JW’s consistently amazing pitch-docs & sketchbooks, and stay tuned for the next Fantastic Video installment!

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.

Fernando Ramallo — developer of the recently-featured MIDI-controlled soundscape Panoramical — and Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail have just announced Fuck This Jam, a black-hearted week-long worldwide game jam that asks devs to “make a game in a genre you hate”.

The duo add their hope that “through utter ignorance for conventions and hate for the established rules of a genre, beautiful things will happen”, which may seem naive and slightly cynical, until you remember that the last time someone tried to tackle a genre they despised — namely Bit Pilot creator Zach Gage — the resulting Spelltower near instantly became an iPhone & iPad smash success.

The jam’s also notable for being the second application of the Beautiful Mess Organizer, the web platform Brett Chalupa originally developed for our Adventure Time Game Making Frenzy, hopefully eking its way toward worldwide game jam standard.

The jam will start November 9th and end November 17th — interested parties can sign up for more information at the official Fuck This Jam site.

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.

(more…)