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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After a long weekend spent with a couple hundred games, the first selection of games coming to this year’s Fantastic Arcade — the indie game spinoff of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Fantastic Fest film festival — have just been announced, as curated by the founding members of Austin indie collective JUEGOS RANCHEROS (aka Wiley Wiggins, Adam Saltsman & I).

The full list of spotlight games, each of which will be given the full arcade-cabinet overhaul and put on public display for all Fantastic Fest & Arcade-goers from September 19th to 22nd, follows below — with some new, unseen video of some of this year’s entries, as well as games that will be part of Arcade’s daily tournaments.

At top, Beau Blyth’s super highly anticipated Samurai Gunn, which first blipped on radars when we debuted it for tournament play at least year’s Fantastic Arcade, will be returning for open play during the entire week.

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With just two weeks to go until the full Game Developers Conference madness officially kicks in, Wild Rumpus & Venus Patrol have just released the first wave of lineup announcements for our 2013 party, with both some familiar faces and some brand new additions.

Sound Shapes co-creator & star I Am Robot And Proud will be performing a live set including his own brand-new reactive visuals (get a little sneak peek of that here), and Super Hexagon‘s own Chipzel (above) will be part of a lineup that also includes Dyad/Proteus musician David Kanaga, and Gun Godz & Luftrausers‘ Kozilek.

Also returning will be Anticon superstar Dose One, now with his Themselves, 13&God & Subtle bandmate Jel (see why he’s the “MPC emperor” in the video above). After the performances, Fez‘s Phil Fish & former Uncharted designer Rich Lemarchand will be playing out the night with their usual fantastic dance set as Phillipe Lemarchand.

On the games side, not only will we be debuting the previously mentioned new game from Keita Takahashi (which we are now also teasing as a game about “love, hygiene, monsters, and finding discarded erotic magazines in the woods”), but showcasing Super Space ____, the ever-amazing Samurai Gunn, and a new mashed-up version of Panoramical & SoundSelf (above), the latter just announced from Capsule & Antichamber sound artist Robin Arnott.

If you’ll be around the Bay Area on March 27th & haven’t yet purchased tickets, we’ve just opened up another round which can be purchased by clicking right over here. We’ll have more info coming soon as the date draws even more dangerously near!

Our upcoming party won’t be the only time you’ll be seeing UK multiplayer game party-collective The Wild Rumpus during March’s Game Developer’s Conference: the group have just announced Rumpus Royale MMXIII, a set of daily indie game tournaments that’ll be running throughout the entire week.

Included in the tournament lineup are Bennett Foddy’s keyboard-climber QWOP, Ramiro Corbetta’s SportsFriends entry Hokra, Terry Cavanagh’s Super Hexagon and, super excitingly, Teknopants’ upcoming local favorite, Samurai Gunn.

Find more information & sign up for more detailed tournament specifics on the official Rumpus Royale MMXIII site.

[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! ]

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Here’s the major lede buried in this video showcase of all the games coming November 24th to VERSUS — the live music/game/amazingness mega-show being hosted at Rotterdam, Netherlands venue WORM: a brand new look at what creator Mark ‘Messhof‘ Essen has been cooking up under deep cover for the past couple years with his still-commercially-unavailable swordfighting cult-hit Nidhogg.

While the main thrust (no pun) seems to be the same, you’ll see new arenas and updated versions of the one you’re used to, new dynamics, and a new sorta kooky-eyed version of the game’s titular wyrm starting at around the 10 second mark.

Not to be too far upstaged, the event will also be bringing a number of the games much ballyhooed about around here, including Fernando Ramallo & David Kanaga’s Panoramical, minimalist racing game Chalo Chalo, Beau Blyth’s Samurai Gunn (also sporting a freshly updated tile set), and Super Space ______, a “couch co-op arcade shooter about competition, cooperation, communication and the democracy of physics”.

You can find much more about the lineup and event specifics via WORM, which having watched this trailer I’m now deeply despairing about missing.

My original writeup on Teknopants’ brilliant upcoming brawler Samurai Gunn managed to drum up quite a bit of the attention it so richly deserves, with a number of people commenting that they very much wanted more video. And so, presented here is ten-ish more minutes of the other matches held at the game’s first ever official tournament at this year’s Fantastic Arcade.

Above you can see how the action expands as the number of players increases to three, with some more 2-4 player matches included below the fold. As before, click the ‘gear’ at the bottom of the player to up the resolution to 720 or 1080p for the best pixel clarity, and enjoy the ongoing commentary by Karakasa Games‘ Wiley Wiggins & Vlambeer‘s Rami Ismail.

For more information on the game itself, browse through the original post about the game.

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I’m not one given easily to bold hyperbole, but I’m about to let loose here: Samurai Gunn, the latest game from Beau ‘Teknopants‘ Blyth, is easily the best local-multiplayer game I’ve played since those halcyon days of our youth huddled around a Nintendo 64.

Like Fernando Ramallo and David Kanaga’s Panoramical, Gunn became an instant, unofficial favorite at this year’s Fantastic Arcade, brought to town and urgently pressed upon us by JW & Rami of Vlambeer, who ended up convincing Arcade coordinators to host the world’s first official tournament of the game.

0Space, Blyth’s freeware arena shooter (still available for download & purchase here) was met with similar high praise from most indie devs I came across in 2011, but it’d never fully clicked with me — something about its plodding zero-grav pace (admittedly key to keeping its battles more cerebral) left me slightly too impatient.

All that’s gone with Gunn, whose 2-4 player matches are as quick, clean and concise as the centuries of sword-play mastery that inspired it, as you can see for yourself in video of the tournament winning match below, between indie devs Evan Balster and Terry Cavanagh (be sure to switch to 720 or 1080p mode to better pick out pixel precision).

The gist is simply this: each player has a sword and (as you might’ve guessed) a gun, loaded with only three bullets per life. Bullets can be deflected with well-timed swings of the sword, and sword-strikes themselves can be parried, suddenly (and deeply satisfyingly) throwing both players quickly backwards. The rounds are battles to 10 kills, and any non-winning players who have a kill-count near 10 will trigger a lightning-round-type & gloriously-staged swords-only sunset showdown to determine the true victor.

Stages range from thick bamboo forests, all of which can be chopped down to reveal the rocky outcropping beneath and provide platforms for attack, to pure, barren, vertically-looping chasms of stone, all that of which can be sharpened with sword strikes to create sharp traps to catch and wound careless players.

And careful play is Samurai Gunn at its best: unlike Smash Bros‘ frenzied free-for-all brawls, the most memorable matches in Gunn are the ones where players more or less role-play as the Kurosawa characters that have defined what we think of as samurai — still, silent, allowing opponents to move in for the kill before throwing perfectly timed, razor-sharp moves that slice them down before they know what hit them.

Gunn is still a good distance out from final release, and thus far has only been publicly shown a very small handful of times, but keep a keen lookout for it as it draws nearer — it’s perfectly placed to go down as one of indie games’ greatest.