After another month’s break, and a little bit too much time since I showed these games live, 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.
Hey all, some short-notice awesome news: this Saturday, June 16th, from 8pm-9pm, JUEGOS RANCHEROS and Church of the Friendly Ghost are teaming up for a game night featuring everyone’s favorite baroque slow-motion dueling game: JOHANN SEBASTIAN JOUST! Best of all: the event is free!
The hour-long JOUST-a-thon will take place at the Beauty Ballroom from 8-9pm, as part of the Dance Party portion of Friendly Ghost’s 2012 New Media Art and Sound Summit, which will also feature music by Flying Turns, Hieroglyphic Being and Woolfy, performance art by Quick Draw Photobooth, and visuals by Stephen Hal Fishman and JUEGOS’s own Party Time! Hexcellent!
Following JOUST, from 9-10pm, JUEGOS will also be showing HEXAGON, the brilliant “27th century space-disco teen-laser-punk arcade hit” (that’s how I describe it, anyway) by Terry Cavanagh, creator of indie favorite VVVVVV. HEXAGON’s easily one of the most instantly addictive and infinitely replayable games I’ve put my hands on this year — get warmed up and ready to show us your skills on Saturday by playing it online here! There’s even a chance we’ll be bringing along a version no one’s played before…
Looking forward to seeing you Saturday, June 16th, from 8-10pm at the Beauty Ballroom, located at 2015 E. Riverside Dr! Remember: while the Dance Party itself is normally $10 at the door, if you come for JOUST & HEXAGON at 8pm, you can stay all night for free!
As excited as we are for this weekend’s meeting of the JUEGOS RANCHEROS featuring all of the games of NYU Game Center’s NO QUARTER exhibition? Help us spread the word!
Our dedicated flyer-maker extraordinaire Dale Austin has prepared two PDFs of the poster above and its alternate (seen on the last post) for you to distribute however you’d like: print, hand out, email, or hang around Austin at all the places where the cool kids hang out so they know about the show! Download a ZIP of both PDFs by clicking this link here!
Also: since our time will be necessarily sort of limited on Sunday, we’ve got two more PDFs that will let you get an early look at the rules behind Zach Gage’s post-apocalyptic eating-contest card-game, GUTS OF GLORY (download PDF here), and Margaret Robertson’s labyrinth creator DRUNK DUNGEON (download pdf here).
Feel free to show up to the Highball a bit before 4PM on Sunday, if you’d like to get a head-start: we’ll all be there helping to get new players acclimated! See you then!
A post-apocalyptic food-eating-contest card game, a dungeon that grows more complex the drunker you get, the game of tennis, reimagined, and an ancient bloodsport-brawler-ballgame: this Sunday, June 3rd, at 4PM at a very special twelfth edition of JUEGOS RANCHEROS at The Highball, we’ll be bringing you all of these at once, as we present the games of NYU’s NO QUARTER.
[ RSVP FOR THIS EVENT AND INVITE YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK BY CLICKING HERE! ]
Now in its third year, NO QUARTER is an annual event sponsored & curated by NYU’s Game Center with a mission to “foster new perspectives and groundbreaking game design”. It’s the organization that has spawned Messhof’s local favorite NIDHOGG, Robin Arnott’s gas-mask audio-game DEEP SEA and Ramiro Corbetta’s digital sports game HOKRA, and this year’s line-up is no less exciting.
We’ll have BARABARIBALL, a new game from New York’s Noah Sasso, which sees 2-4 players mid-air brawling to take control of a ball and dunk it into the opposing team’s water. It’s a fast-paced mix of basketball meets SUPER SMASH BROS, and in all our lead-up tests to date, it’s proven itself super brilliant. Don’t miss Noah’s awesomely animated breakdown of how it’s played here!
We’ll also have TENNNES, a digital re-imagining of the game of tennis by none other than Jan Willem Nijman — half of Dutch indie devs Vlambeer, and the brain behind games like SUPER CRATE BOX, RADICAL FISHING and more. Tweaked and polished to low-fi perfection, this will be your new favorite PONG game since PONG.
On the analog front, we also will have GUTS OF GLORY, a “deck-spewing card-game food-eating-contest set in the post-apocalyptic-future” created by Zach Gage, the creator of newly minted iPhone/iPad hit SPELLTOWER, as well as BIT PILOT, HALCYON and more.
And finally, we’ll be running “the world’s most ornate drinking game” — DRUNK DUNGEON, by Hide & Seek’s Margaret Robertson — in which competing teams of players build dungeons from sets of printed coasters received every time you order a drink. See Margaret’s “hangover report” and “making of” for much more information on that!
NYU Game Center’s own Charles Pratt will be in attendance to give us more background into the organization, the yearly NO QUARTER event itself, and all of the games included in this year’s show. Read his awesome “KEEP GAMES WEIRD” write-up on this year’s event for even more background!
Everything will be kicking off Sunday, June 3rd, promptly at 4PM at The Highball, 1142 S Lamar Blvd, Austin, TX 78704! Come early to get a head-start on learning the card & dungeon rules, 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: 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:
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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.
Tickets have just gone online at the Drafthouse: pick them up now and join us!
As a coincidental side note, Jim Guthrie’s soundtrack has just officially gone on sale, and is now available in digital form, double LP, and a super limited double-LP + T-shirt package, all designed by JUEGOS superpal Cory Schmitz! Preview the music and pick up any of the packages at Bandcamp!
