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In addition to the remaining “Sunset” stock we originally made available at our Wild Rumpus / Venus Patrol GDC Party, we’re also introducing two new colorways: “Octopus”, with pink on heather-purple, and “Treasure”, with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!

My favorite comic the unusually talented and previously-featured Zac Gorman‘s produced in forever, not least because it highlights one of Nintendo’s most under-sung series, Chibi-Robo.

If you haven’t yet experienced it, track a copy down as quickly as you can: not only is it one of that generation’s best 3D adventures, but, as the comic does a masterful job of expressing, it’s got one of the most cutely tragic portrayals of domestic turmoil under-pinning the entire game, a fantastic and trademark humanistic touch from director Kenichi ‘Route24‘ Nishii.

Browse the rest of Gorman’s work via his Magical Game Time blog here, and join me in ruing the fact that Nintendo never localized Robo‘s “New Play Control” Wii re-release for stateside players.

One final Zelda tribute for no good reason other than they were all amazing: Zac ‘Magical Game Time‘ Gorman, best known as “the guy who does those amazing animated Nintendo fan comics” has just released the Seafarer Combo, a print/T-shirt/square-pin combo for Fangamer that pays tribute to classic GameCube entry, The Wind Waker.

You can buy all the items together or separate at Gorman’s own Magical Game Time shop, where you can also still find the print that put him on the map, the sweet & sad Earthbound/Mother 2 ‘Everything Was Perfect’ strip.

Bonus points will be doled out for anyone who wants to take the time/effort to translate the Hylian on the shirt design at top.