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:
