Attention indies both local and global: this is your two week warning that the deadline for submissions for the 2012 Fantastic Arcade is May 31st, so submit your games now for the third annual festival, taking place here in Austin, TX from September 20th-27th.
Who should submit? With actual converted cabinets and a field of laptops loaded with multiple games & an audience (typically already one or [many] more drinks in) that mills around like a traditional arcade, Fantastic Arcade tends to focus more on shorter-form, highly approachable single- and multi-player games that people can get easily pick up and get attached to, rather than longer-form games that require deeper attention. See the 2011 spotlight and showcase lineups to get a better sense of what that means.
To help entice you to submit, we asked some former Fantastic Arcade attendees to take the time to tell you why you should submit & visit in September, and this is what they had to say: [Read more →]
Hey Austin game-lovers: missed the SXSW screenings of INDIE GAME: THE MOVIE? We’ve got good news: Blinkworks is bringing back the film for one night only, Wednesday, May 23rd at 6:45pm, to the South Lamar Alamo Drafthouse!
Put together with the help of Kickstarter supporters, INDIE GAME: THE MOVIE spent two years documenting the development of Team Meat’s SUPER MEAT BOY & Polytron’s FEZ, alongside a look backward at Jonathan Blow’s work on BRAID, all set to a beautiful soundtrack by Jim Guthrie of SWORD & SWORCERY EP fame.
At least a few of us from the JUEGOS community will be attending, and leading a short Q&A following the film.
It’s true we haven’t been the best at documenting our regular monthly meetups over the past year, but we’re working on it! In addition to new photo galleries over on the Facebooks (soon, hopefully, also to be ported over here), we have the above: 10 minutes of Rachel ‘Party Time! Hexcellent!‘ Weil’s self-intro from our most recent edition of JUEGOS RANCHEROS at the Highball.
Also, if you still can’t get enough PT!H!, there’s an awesome, lengthy interview with her over at The Mary Sue (given big-ups by none less than Jezebel), discussing her personal past history playing & interacting more directly with games, and more on what she plans to do with the Femicom Museum, the site she’s just set up to catalog both the personal and professional history of “games for girls”.
Chalk up another victory for Austin indies: ahead of her appearance at this coming Sunday’s meetup of the JUEGOS RANCHEROS, Rachel ‘Party Time! Hexcellent’ Weil has landed her own cover feature in the latest issue of the Austin Chronicle, out on news-stands all over the damn town as of this morning.
The feature covers her rise from teen hobbyist NES-rom fiddler to full on Assembly-empowered 8-bit hacker, straight up to creating TRACK & FEEL II, the 2-player “Power-Pad”-enhanced audio/visual installation piece that lets players remix 80s-8-bit-aesthetic iconography, itself the centerpiece of this Sunday’s show.
What’s it like to create new games in 2012 for a machine built in 1983? Come find out Sunday, May 6th, at 4PM at our eleventh edition of JUEGOS RANCHEROS at The Highball, as we present the best of home-brewed & bedroom-coded 8-bit games from around the world, and from Austin’s very own PARTY TIME HEXCELLENT.
Quietly more or less the coolest person in Austin, Rachel ‘PARTY TIME HEXCELLENT’ Weil has been cooking up her own brand of 8-bit glitched-out amazingness for years, after teaching herself Assembly in order to tweak Nintendo’s first console — the NES — to do her bidding.
You may have seen her visuals gracing the stage behind bands like Anamanaguchi or at chiptune music mecca Blip Fest, and this month’s meetup will mark the debut of TRACK & FEEL II, a reactive art & music installation piece that lets players remix 80s-8-bit-aesthetic iconography using a Power Pad — the Dance-Dance-Revolution-mat predecessor that you probably recall jumping on in sock feet 25 years ago.
In addition to Weil’s work, we’ll also be giving Austin the chance to play other new/old games like ZOOMING SECRETARY, an NES “platformer-meets-office-sim” released just a few months ago from Moscow developers Shiru & Pinwizz, which feels essentially one of the best games Nintendo never made.
PARTY TIME HEXCELLENT will be in attendance to tell us a bit about her work on games, installation pieces, and also the Femicom Museum, her newly-founded repository archiving the overlooked & otherwise hidden history of “games for girls” (see, we told you she was one of the coolest people in Austin).
Everything will be kicking off Sunday, May 6th, promptly at 4PM at The Highball, 1142 S Lamar Blvd, Austin, TX 78704! Come hang out, enjoy the Highball’s Happy Hour drink specials, and say hello to the people changing the way you think about games!
Attention indies both local and global: submissions have been opened for the 2012 Fantastic Arcade — taking place here in Austin, TX from September 20th-27th — with an May 31st deadline already rapidly approaching.
This’ll be the third Fantastic Arcade, which has drawn indies from all across the globe to Austin — names like Vlambeer, Polytron, Derek Yu, Cactus, Messhof, Jon Blow, Molleindustria and Superbrothers — for a week of talks, demonstrations and debuts of new and otherwise unseen games and prototypes, and general carousing.
Here’s how the festival — operated by our friends, partners and generally favorite theater organization ever, Alamo Drafthouse — describes itself:
Fantastic Arcade fuses the world of independent film and independent gaming. We bring together artists and professionals who are telling stories and creating experiences in film, games and online entertainment simultaneously. At Fantastic Arcade, we showcase a curated selection of brand new independent games as well as a larger sampling of important groundbreaking independent games from the last couple of years.
Attendees are invited to play the games as well as interact with the game developers via panels and nightly parties and happy hours. We also feature both panels with independent filmmakers side by side with game developers and intimate demo sessions by independent game developers. Lastly, we feel that video games rightfully belong side by side with shorts and feature films at Fantastic Fest. The artistic merit of these games will be honored with both audience awards and a juried competition.
Selected games will proceed to the second round of submissions and will be asked to provide a playable version of the game for Fantastic Arcade festival programmers. Official selections for the Arcade will be made based on each game’s art, story, characters, gameplay and, most importantly, connection with the character of Fantastic Fest.
Submit your game to be a part of this year’s festivities by clicking here!
After some goofy off-months, we’re now officially back up to date, and so, presented below is the latest in our regular series of indie games both local and global worth paying attention to, fully annotated & linked up for your pleasure.
Various forces have conspired to keep us from doing a full on Fistful of Indies in many, many months, and then conspired to keep me from posting our last roundup for the past couple months. Nevertheless, presented below is the latest in our regular series — with the latest selection of indie games both local and global worth paying attention to.
Check back next week for something much more up to date, but — better late than never — this one’s a roundup of the games that came out between December 2011 & February 2012:
How do you navigate a videogame world when the game itself keeps re-writing the rules around you? Come find out this Sunday, April 1st, at 4PM at our special tenth edition of JUEGOS RANCHEROS at The Highball, as we give Austin its first chance to play ANTICHAMBER, Demruth’s upcoming mindbending game of psychological exploration, with creator Alexander Bruce in attendance.
ANTICHAMBER comes to Austin fresh off its win at the 14th annual Independent Game Festival a few short weeks ago, where it took home the prize for Technical Excellence — the latest in a long string of recognition which also includes accolades from IndieCade, Penny Arcade and Japan’s Sense of Wonder Night.
Alexander Bruce’s deliciously devious rabbit hole doesn’t set out to trick you so much as it wants you to stop tricking yourself. You don’t have to jump over everything…just walk instead. It can get frustrating if you stubbornly hold fast to everything video games ever taught you, but take a breath, step off the path, and do something that doesn’t feel quite right just to see if it works. That’s how you play Antichamber.
Come hear from and meet creator Bruce — visiting Austin from his native Melbourne — and take the opportunity to dive down this rabbit hole yourself!
Everything will be kicking off Sunday, April 1st, promptly at 4PM at The Highball, 1142 S Lamar Blvd, Austin, TX 78704! Come hang out, enjoy the Highball’s Happy Hour drink specials, and say hello to the people changing the way you think about games!
What does an Oxford bioethics teacher and a former member of Cut Copy (?!?) know about videogames? Come find out this Sunday, February 12th, at 4PM, at The Foddy Winter Olympics: our ninth edition of JUEGOS RANCHEROS at The Highball that will show you exactly why Bennett Foddy‘s become one of indie gaming’s most notable (and funniest!) cult-hit creators.
A little background: it all started with QWOP, a free web game (later ported to the iPhone) that took the button-mashing simplicity of 8-bit classics like TRACK & FIELD to its totally illogical polar extreme, giving you direct control of each muscle of your athlete’s legs and asking you to learn how to walk all over again. A true viral hit, soon YouTube & Tumblr were full of people attempting to do just that, as well as some inspired cosplay and the best animated Cosby-sweater-photo of all time.
Then came GIRP, which turned rock-climbing into a game of Twister for your keyboard, WINNER VS LOSER, a competitive, slapstick return to TRACK & FIELD for drunks, and, most recently, POLERIDERS, a two-player polo game played out using hyper-realistic vaulting-pole physics.
We’ll also be debuting: multiplayer QWOP! — a head-to-head version that sizes up just who the real muscle-manipulating champion really is. And we’ll obviously also have lots and lots of pole-riding and winning versus losing: give all of them a try via the links above & get your fingers (and whole body) limbered up to take the championship!
Everything will be kicking off Sunday, February 12th, promptly at 4PM at The Highball, 1142 S Lamar Blvd, Austin, TX 78704! Come hang out, enjoy the Highball’s Happy Hour drink specials, and say hello to the people changing the way you think about games!
In partnership with the Alamo Drafthouse & Fantastic Arcade, the RANCHEROS meet during the first Sunday of every month at The Highball to showcase & play the best in independent games both local & global. See above for the current schedule of upcoming shows.
Currently the RANCHEROS are also hard at work on the TEXATRON, an initiative to bring a Winnitron-based network of indie game arcade machines to several Austin locations.
