Top Hat Sasquatch

If you’re in the Indianapolis area and you love games as much as the Horrible Night crew and I do, you should plan on attending a screening of Indie Game: The Movie at the Indianapolis Museum of Art on Wednesday, May 23rd at 7pm. I’ve been hearing nothing but awesome things about this documentary lately, and I can’t wait to see it.

The film started as a Kickstarter project and went on to win awards at Sundance and SXSW. It chronicles the making of three indie games; Super Meat Boy, Braid, and Fez. Here’s the official description:

With the 21st-century comes a new breed of artist: the indie game designer. Refusing to toil for major developers, these innovators independently conceive, design, and program their distinctly personal games with the hope of connection and success. Indie Game: The Movie (2012, dirs. Lisanne Pajot & James Swirsky, Canada, 96 mins.) portrays four developers, three games, and one ultimate goal: to make the video game a supreme form of expression.

The characters: after years of work, designer Edmund McMillen and programmer Tommy Refenes work toward the release of their first major game for Xbox, Super Meat Boy. At a big video game expo, developer Phil Fish unveils his highly anticipated game, FEZ. And designer Jonathan Blow considers a new game after creating one of the highest-rated games of all time, Braid. Indie Game: The Movie won Best Editing Award at 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

Special thanks to our sponsors at the Canadian Consulate. Consul General Roy Norton is scheduled to attend this exclusive screening! Learn more: http://www.connect2canada.com/

I’ve only played one of those three games but I love the whole indie game culture that’s popped up in the last few years, and this film seems to be a great portrayal of the passion that goes into creating games like these.

If you’d like to come, you can RSVP on Facebook, order tickets online, read Horrible Night’s announcement post, and check out the trailer after the jump.
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If there’s one thing I can’t get enough of, it’s some awesome Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle inspired artwork. I’ve posted a lot of examples over the years, and I never get tired of seeing the heroes and villains of the TMNT cartoon and toys in varying styles.

Thanks to our friend Alex Deligiannis, I found artist Matt Kaufenberg through Instagram, posting awesome in-progress and final versions of TMNT art. You can follow his progress at his blog, An Illustration a Day.

So far he’s completed the four turtles, Shredder, Krang, Bebop, and Rocksteady. He mentioned that these will all be available soon as prints, and I can’t wait to get them and frame them up next to the other TMNT art in my collection.

And of course I can’t post TMNT art without putting in some suggestions. I’d love to see Matt’s version of Metalhead, Slash, Fugitoid, and Ace Duck.

You can check out Matt’s blog, his store, and follow him on Twitter.

If you’re a late 80s, early 90s kid like me, you probably watched the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers show on TV. In my case, Power Rangers was decidedly uncool in my grade, so I had to hide my love for the show from my friends and pretend not to like it during school. I was into the first three seasons of the show and was very excited when the movie came out.

I’ve went back and watched some of the early episodes in the past few years out of curiosity, and they are surprisingly rewatchable as long as you’re in an ironic state of mind. The horrible English dubs from Rita Repulsa and all the other characters from the foreign clips are hilarious, and the monsters keep getting more far fetched. Basically, it’s evidence from my childhood as to why I’m so weird now.

It’s been available to stream on Netflix for a long time, but this August it’s coming to DVD (kind of) for the first time. Shout Factory is releasing ‘Season One, Volume One’ on August 21st. Normally, a company breaking up seasons into volumes is bad news, but I was shocked to find out there are 60 episodes in this season and 30 in this set.

Needless to say, I’ll be picking up this DVD so that someday I can force my kids to relive the Green Ranger/White Ranger saga with me again.

Pop culture mashups are nothing new in the t-shirt world, and often they’re more annoying than they are clever, but every once in a while someone creates one that really works and begs to be part of my shirt collection. That can be said about this great shirt up for voting on Threadless featuring Charlie Brown as Link from the Zelda games. It’s a mashup that almost seems obvious after you’ve seen it, but it was executed perfectly.

Kudos to winter_the_artist on Threadless and make sure to vote his design up so we can see it get made.

Over at the Bubble Pipe Network we just posted an episode all about Nintendo, featuring Jeff Ryan, the author of Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America. Jeff got in touch and was kind enough to sit in with Rob and I and we talked the history of Nintendo and had quite a few laughs.

If you’re a fan on Nintendo you should head over to Bubble Pipe Network and check it out.