Want to get the first look at some of the best independent games of 2015? Then join us Thursday, February 5th, at 7:00PM at Austin’s North Door as JUEGOS RANCHEROS presents a selection of games recently nominated for top awards at this year’s Independent Games Festival.

[ RSVP FOR THIS EVENT AND INVITE YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK BY CLICKING HERE! ]

With the festival headed to the expo floor of the Game Developers Conference in March, JUEGOS RANCHEROS will be showcasing a number of this year’s finalists — jury selected from a pool of over 1000 entries — from the Main competition as well as the Student Showcase, ahead of the IGF’s official ceremony on Wednesday, March 4th, 2015.

All the games — including some not yet available to the public! — will be playable beginning this Thursday, February 5th, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public, so come join us as we drink, play and meet the people changing the way we think about games!

In some horrible twist of Gregorian fate, the first Thursday of the new year lands directly on the first actual day of the new year, so come nurse your holiday hangover in a dark room this Thursday, January 1st, at 7:00PM at Austin’s North Door, where we’ll be screening two episodes of our local favorite TV show: GameCenter CX.

[ RSVP FOR THIS EVENT AND INVITE YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK BY CLICKING HERE! ]

If you’re unfamiliar with the legacy of GameCenter CX (now in its 18th season in Japan, and sometimes known stateside as Retro Game Master), the premise is simple: comedian Shinya Arino is confined to a room and made to marathon-complete retro games from the NES forward in a single sitting.

This can, on rare occasion, simply take until sundown — more often, the brutal difficulty can push game sessions well past midnight, where Arino’s exhaustion ratchets up the challenge.

While the prospect of watching a middle-aged man play an 8-bit game to completion may not sound like the most thrilling way to ring in the new year, we can promise that skilled editing — and the universal sense of triumph that comes from seeing someone overcome adversity that many of us painfully recall from our own youth — makes this honestly one of the best TV shows about videogames ever created.

We’ll be screening two episodes: the first starting quite promptly after 7pm, followed by a short intermission, and the second up until the venue’s next act. It’s OK if you show up feeling as bad as you look — probably all of us will be.

Come spend the evening with us this Thursday, January 1st, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The screening is free and open to the public. We’ll be back to our usual, brighter-eyed and bushier-tailed programming in February!

Every month, as part of the regular monthly meetings of 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 for your reference.

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In our estimation he’s one of the best and most undersung interactive artists working in videogames today, and this Thursday, December 4th, at 7:00PM at Austin’s North Door, we’ll take a look back at the work of New York based artist Vectorpark, including the debut of his upcoming iOS game, Metamorphabet.

[ RSVP FOR THIS EVENT AND INVITE YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK BY CLICKING HERE! ]

Probably best known for his 2009 adventure game Windosill on iOS and Steam (pictured below), Vectorpark was a pioneer of interactive web art, and is a reigning champion at creating both dreamlike environments and creatures which inhabit them that all feel unbelievably tactile and alive.

We’ll have a number of these early and more recent works on display at the ND, and will also be giving Austin the first chance to play his latest game, Metamorphabet, an “interactive, animated alphabet” which, says Vectorpark, “presents the 26 letters of the alphabet as a series of luminous and unexpected transformations, inviting playful participation from kids and adults alike.”

All the games will be playable beginning this Thursday, December 4th, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public, so come join us as we drink, play and meet the people changing the way we think about games!

Every month, as part of the regular monthly meetings of 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 for your reference.

(more…)

Want to spend your Thursday night wrestling a pitbull to the ground & high-fiving a pizza as you lose yourself in a ‘giddy apocalypse’? Then come join us this Thursday, October 2nd, at 7:00PM at Austin’s North Door as we present the local double-feature premiere of Kevin Cancienne’s local multiplayer dog-em-up Dog Park & Jane Friedhoff’s Slam City Oracles.

[ RSVP FOR THIS EVENT AND INVITE YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK BY CLICKING HERE! ]

Developer Cancienne — also known for his design work on area/code’s early classic iPhone puzzle game Drop7 — has described Dog Park as “a fighting game without the fighting”, a four-‘person’ brawler where players choose their dog & score points for chasing, wrestling, cavorting & gamboling in perfectly-pitched canine fashion.

Various JUEGOS RANCHEROS organizers have also described it as “omg the best game ever”.

In addition to Dog Park, we’ll also be showing Slam City Oracles, a two-player body-slammer by Jane Friedhoff, with art by Jenny Jiao Hsia & music by Prophets & Kings.

Already drawing a number of favorable comparisons to Katamari Damacy from sites like Kotaku for its cheerfully chaotic cartoony slapstick physicality, Oracles is a vertically-oriented game where two girls have four minutes to joyfully & wantonly break the entire world around them.

Both games were commissioned for the NYU Game Center’s No Quarter exhibition — the yearly local-multiplayer focused show which has spawned games like Nidhogg, Bara Bari Ball & Bennett Foddy’s Speed Chess — and were first debuted there September 19th, alongside Naomi Clark‘s consensual card game Consentacle and Corporate Vandals, a physical game from Shawn Allen, creator of Treachery in Beatdown City.

Both games will be making their local debut Thursday, October 2nd, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public, so come join us as we drink, play and meet the people changing the way we think about games!