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 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, in addition to their home on the JUEGOS RANCHEROS site.

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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.

(more…)

On top of the already-shattering news that I’ll never get to visit Keita Takahashi’s isle of dinosaur butts, one of the saddest parts of the shuttering of Tiny Speck’s web MMO Glitch (which officially shut down over the weekend) was the thought that no one was going to be able to see the amazing spin-off work being done right here in Austin by local audio heroes GL33k.

But then! From out of nowhere, Tiny Speck announced that GL33k’s contribution, the iPad music-creation tool known as Glitchamaphone, will still be soon available on the App Store, as a final digital memento of the service.

I played with an in-progress build a few months back, and it’s as slick as the video at top leads you to believe, though it’ll now be obviously stripped of previously planned functionality to send your music into the MMO itself, where you would have been able to share and remix your friends’ tracks.

The project’s not a half-mile away from another big original project being concurrently worked on at GL33K: Cosmic DJ, about which you can expect more on soon.. In the meantime, sign up at the Glitchamaphone site to be notified when the app goes live.