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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[This post is re-blogged from Venus Patrol sister-organization JUEGOS RANCHEROS, our local Austin indie game collective.]

Multiplayer games have been undergoing a beautiful renaissance over the past couple years, and we’ll be bringing three of the best examples to Austin’s North Door next Thursday, May 2nd, at 7:00PM, as JUEGOS RANCHEROS presents Monaco, Towerfall and a brand-new version of Nidhogg.

[ RSVP FOR THIS EVENT AND INVITE YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK BY CLICKING HERE! ]

A long-standing staple of JUEGOS RANCHEROS events, we’ll be celebrating the debut of our first permanently-installed TEXATRON cabinet by bringing a brand-new version of Messhof’s brilliant lo-fi sword-fighter Nidhogg, complete with a visual overhaul, a fantastic new soundscape, and a stack of new moves that’ll make this round feel fresh, even if you’ve faced off against a local rival a thousand times before.

We’ll also be debuting Towerfall, the “retro archery platformer” by Canada’s own super prolific developer Matt Thorson, who you may recognize from his frequent contributions to Adult Swim, including Give Up Robot, Fat Wizard and, most recently, Planet Punch. Fans of Spelunky‘s deathmatch or Beau Blyth’s Samurai Gunn will feel right at home here.

And last, but certainly not least, we’ll be featuring Pocketwatch Games’ long-anticipated and just-released multiplayer heist game Monaco — winner of 2010′s IGF Grand Prize, and near-universally praised as a new gold standard in multiplayer games.

Everything will be kicking off Thursday, May 2nd, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public — come drink, play, and meet the people changing the way you think about videogames!

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.

[This post is re-blogged from Venus Patrol sister-organization JUEGOS RANCHEROS, our local Austin indie game collective.]

It’s been years since we’ve last seen a new game from Keita Takahashi — most famous for his Namco cult classic Katamari Damacy and the even cultier PS3/iPhone game Noby Noby Boy — but this Thursday, April 4th, at 7:00PM, JUEGOS RANCHEROS will be showing not one but two brand new works from the esteemed designer at the North Door.

[ RSVP FOR THIS EVENT AND INVITE YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK BY CLICKING HERE! ]

The first will be Tenya Wanya Teens — the co-production of Takahashi’s indie studio Uvula, UK-based multiplayer event group Wild Rumpus, and Venus Patrol — which just made its world debut to great acclaim at last week’s Game Developers Conference.

Tenya Wanya Teens, which we describe as “a coming-of-age tale about love, hygiene, monsters and finding discarded erotic magazines in the woods”, is also maybe also best described as “a very silly party game for two players armed with sixteen buttons each.” This will be its first showing outside the conference as it starts to make its way around the globe playing in various multiplayer arenas.

But Austin will also be the first place anywhere in the world that gets to see another new game from Takahashi, this one titled A͈L͈P͈H͈A͈B͈E͈T͈ (those little marks are important) — a co-production of Takahashi and JUEGOS’ own Adam Saltsman, creator of iPhone superhit Canabalt — being put together for the recently-Kickstarted LA Game Space.

Everything will be kicking off Thursday, April 4th, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public — come drink, play, and meet the people changing the way you think about videogames!

[This post is re-blogged from Venus Patrol sister-organization JUEGOS RANCHEROS, our local Austin indie game collective.]

LittleBigPlanet and the upcoming Tearaway are among the most creative & beautiful games to land on the PlayStation platform, and their creators, Media Molecule, will be right here in Austin Thursday, March 7th, at 7:00PM at the North Door.

[ RSVP FOR THIS EVENT AND INVITE YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK BY CLICKING HERE! ]

Flying in all the way from Guildford, UK, the Media Molecule team will be presenting — for the first time ever — the results of its own first-ever internal game jam, with, says the company, “photos and videos of things we made — games yes, but a whole load of weirdness, too.”

The team will talk through the process of running a game jam and the weird stuff they did alongside it, and then “a bit about how we applied it to our real dev process.”

Before that, the night will open with the first look at the upcoming SoundSelf, a game that “combines your own voice with evolving fractal graphics and mind-altering auditory feedback” being created by local sound designer Robin Arnott, with live musical accompaniment by Austin electronic guitarist Michael Garfield.

Following the presentations, the night will conclude with more music by JUEGOS RANCHEROS’ own resident Cosmic DJ, and more! Everything will be kicking off Thursday, March 7th, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public — come drink, dance, and meet the people changing the way you think about videogames!

[This post is re-blogged from Venus Patrol sister-organization JUEGOS RANCHEROS, our local Austin indie game collective.]

Want to get the first look at some of the best independent games of 2013? Then join us Thursday, February 7th, at 7:00PM at the North Door as JUEGOS RANCHEROS brings five games nominated for top awards at this year’s Independent Games Festival.

[ RSVP FOR THIS EVENT AND INVITE YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK BY CLICKING HERE! ]

In addition to the recently released and soul-achingly gorgeous Kentucky Route Zero, from Cardboard Computer, and Droqen’s beautifully abstract Starseed Pilgrim (previewed at bottom), JUEGOS RANCHEROS will also be presenting three more still-unreleased games heading to the Independent Games Festival ceremony in March.

This will include Teknopants’ brilliant & brutal bushido deathmatch game Samurai Gunn, which already made a strong, surprise debut at this year’s Fantastic Arcade…

…Asteroid Base’s neon-lit co-op space shooter Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime…

… and Super Space ________, the co-op arcade shooter about “competition, cooperation, communication and the democracy of physics” from David Scamehorn and Alexander Baard.

Everything will be kicking off Thursday, February 7th, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public — come drink, dance, and meet the people changing the way you think about videogames!

[This post is re-blogged from Venus Patrol sister-organization JUEGOS RANCHEROS, our local Austin indie game collective.]

Want to meet the creators of 2012′s breakaway hit Dishonored, learn more about Sony’s first-person paint-em-up The Unfinished Swan and take the role of a Cosmic DJ in a late-night dance party? Then join us Thursday, January 3rd, at 7:00PM as JUEGOS RANCHEROS returns at its new night and ND Austin venue, where we’ll be featuring an unbelievably awesome triple-header bill.

[ RSVP FOR THIS EVENT AND INVITE YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK BY CLICKING HERE! ]

We’ll kick off the night with directors’ commentary from Raphael Colantonio and Harvey Smith, co-creators of Arkane’s Dishonored, more or less unanimously praised as the 2012 Game of the Year. They’ll be in conversation with Tiger Style’s Randy Smith, and will be on hand to answer all of your questions about the mechanics, the conception and the lore behind the wildly imaginative & viscerally thrilling adventure through Dunwall.

Following that, we’ll be joined by special guest star Ben Esposito, lead level designer on Giant Sparrow’s PlayStation 3 exclusive The Unfinished Swan, who will guide us through its fantastically charming storybook world, as well as give us a taste of the other independent game creations coming from this rising indie star developer.

As if that weren’t enough, we’ll then kick off the night in full dance-party style with a live performance of Cosmic DJ, the upcoming iPad game from Austin’s own GL33K, self-described as “a drum machine that loves you”, which will allow you, the player, to help create the music in real-time, as you can see near the end of GL33K’s preview video above.

And finally, as part of the city’s “Free Week” series of free, live music performances, we’ll also be joined by Austin’s own Total Unicorn, who’ll finish out the night in their own inimitable electro-psychedelic style demonstrated above.

Everything will be kicking off Thursday, January 3rd, at 7:00PM at ND Austin, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public — come drink, dance, and meet the people changing the way you think about videogames!

As I mentioned last week, this past Sunday’s meetup of our Austin indie collective JUEGOS RANCHEROS featured the local debut of Hundreds, the next game from Canabalt developers Semi Secret along with Greg ‘aeiowu‘ Wohlwend — creator of the original Hundreds prototype and co-designer of games like Solipskier — and local-favorite musician Loscil.

If you haven’t seen Hundreds before, it’s a fantastically austere & ambient action/puzzle game which I described at greater length a month back, and which — I predict — will likely be one of the next big App Store hits. That’s not just a hunch, as mentioned in my last Hundreds post, there hasn’t been a single person who I’ve seen casually start to play that hasn’t become instantly, deeply hooked.

And so, presented here is the full 30 minute talk Saltsman gave the assembled crowd (an abbreviated version of his overseas debut of Hundreds at GameCity) that goes into both the genesis of the project and the long, arduous task of taking such a simple and refined idea to its deepest logical conclusions, and paring down on all the ideas that creep in in the meantime and initially seem worthwhile but ultimately prove to be unnecessary complications and distractions.

After Adam’s talk, you also get to hear — remotely, via Skype — from Wolhwend, who takes questions not just on Hundreds and its cryptic narrative, but of his more recent game, Gasketball, and what the future holds for Mikengreg, his collaborative company with developer Mike ‘fucrate‘ Boxleiter.

As a bonus, and because I haven’t managed to edit them more cleanly into the video, below the fold are a number of Saltsman’s slides that show his early design sketches for Hundreds and early art tests from Wolhwend, to refer to directly, rather than squinting at the clip.

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[This post is re-blogged from Venus Patrol sister-organization JUEGOS RANCHEROS, our local Austin indie game collective, where we'll be hosting the previously-featured game Hundreds for our latest regular meetup.]

Want to play the next hit game by the designers that brought you super stylish successes Canabalt and Solipskier before anyone else? Then join us this Sunday, November 4th, at 4PM for our sixteenth edition of JUEGOS RANCHEROS at The Highball, where we’ll be presenting the Texas premiere of Hundreds, the upcoming iPhone and iPad game from designers Greg Wohlwend (Solipskier, Gasketball), Austin’s own Semi Secret (Wurdle, Canabalt, Gravity Hook) and ambient electronic musician Scott Morgan, aka Loscil.

[ RSVP FOR THIS EVENT AND INVITE YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK BY CLICKING HERE! ]

Semi Secret describe the game as “an abstract, minimalist, arcade-puzzle game designed specifically for touch screens featuring 100 carefully crafted levels” which “teaches a variety of increasing complex gameplay ideas without tutorials, tells a strange story in an unconventional way, and allows players to play at their own pace, cooperatively or solitaire.”

I describe it as one of the best iPad games I’ve played in ages, which instantly ensnares you into its gorgeously & clinically austere universe — every single person I’ve seen that’s laid just a tentative finger on it has immediately fallen down its rabbit hole and not emerged for hours. Now it’s your chance to find out why!

Everything will be kicking off Sunday, November 4th, promptly at 4PM at The Highball, 1142 S Lamar Blvd, Austin, TX 78704! Come early to get a head-start on unravelling the mystery of Hundreds, enjoy the Highball’s Happy Hour drink specials, and say hello to the people changing the way you think about games!

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 will now be presented here on Venus Patrol (even a bit tardy as this one is) for your reference, each fully-annotated, -linked, and off-the-cuff blurbed, in addition to their home on the JUEGOS RANCHEROS site.

(more…)