LittleBigPlanet and the upcoming Tearaway are among the most creative & beautiful games to land on the PlayStation platform, and their creators, Media Molecule, will be right here in Austin Thursday, March 7th, at 7:00PM at the North Door.

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

Flying in all the way from Guildford, UK, the Media Molecule team will be presenting — for the first time ever — the results of its own first-ever internal game jam, with, says the company, “photos and videos of things we made — games yes, but a whole load of weirdness, too.”

The team will talk through the process of running a game jam and the weird stuff they did alongside it, and then “a bit about how we applied it to our real dev process.”

Before that, the night will open with the first look at the upcoming SoundSelf, a game that “combines your own voice with evolving fractal graphics and mind-altering auditory feedback” being created by local sound designer Robin Arnott, with live musical accompaniment by Austin electronic guitarist Michael Garfield.

Following the presentations, the night will conclude with more music by JUEGOS RANCHEROS’ own resident Cosmic DJ, and more! Everything will be kicking off Thursday, March 7th, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public — come drink, dance, and meet the people changing the way you think about videogames!

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 — now regularly cross-posted to the newly launched Venus Patrol!

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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! ]

In addition to the recently released and soul-achingly gorgeous Kentucky Route Zero, from Cardboard Computer, and Droqen’s beautifully abstract Starseed Pilgrim (previewed at bottom), JUEGOS RANCHEROS will also be presenting three more still-unreleased games heading to the Independent Games Festival ceremony in March.

This will include Teknopants’ brilliant & brutal bushido deathmatch game Samurai Gunn, which already made a strong, surprise debut at this year’s Fantastic Arcade…

…Asteroid Base’s neon-lit co-op space shooter Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime…

… and Super Space _______, the co-op arcade shooter about “competition, cooperation, communication and the democracy of physics” from David Scamehorn and Alexander Baard.

Everything will be kicking off Thursday, February 7th, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public — come drink, dance, and meet the people changing the way you think about videogames!

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 — now regularly cross-posted to the newly launched Venus Patrol!

(more…)

Want to meet the creators of 2012’s breakaway hit Dishonored, learn more about Sony’s first-person paint-em-up The Unfinished Swan and take the role of a Cosmic DJ in a late-night dance party? Then join us Thursday, January 3rd, at 7:00PM as JUEGOS RANCHEROS returns at its new night and ND Austin venue, where we’ll be featuring an unbelievably awesome triple-header bill.

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

We’ll kick off the night with directors’ commentary from Raphael Colantonio and Harvey Smith, co-creators of Arkane’s Dishonored, more or less unanimously praised as the 2012 Game of the Year. They’ll be in conversation with Tiger Style’s Randy Smith, and will be on hand to answer all of your questions about the mechanics, the conception and the lore behind the wildly imaginative & viscerally thrilling adventure through Dunwall.

Following that, we’ll be joined by special guest star Ben Esposito, lead level designer on Giant Sparrow’s PlayStation 3 exclusive The Unfinished Swan, who will guide us through its fantastically charming storybook world, as well as give us a taste of the other independent game creations coming from this rising indie star developer.

As if that weren’t enough, we’ll then kick off the night in full dance-party style with a live performance of Cosmic DJ, the upcoming iPad game from Austin’s own GL33K, self-described as “a drum machine that loves you”, which will allow you, the player, to help create the music in real-time, as you can see near the end of GL33K’s preview video above.

And finally, as part of the city’s “Free Week” series of free, live music performances, we’ll also be joined by Austin’s own Total Unicorn, who’ll finish out the night in their own inimitable electro-psychedelic style demonstrated above.

Everything will be kicking off Thursday, January 3rd, at 7:00PM at ND Austin, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public — come drink, dance, and meet the people changing the way you think about videogames!

Hello everyone! With the closing of the Highball until sometime in 2013, we’ll have some big changes coming over the next couple months, so here’s the full run down of what’ll be happening through December and into the new year!

First & foremost, as you might have seen at our last meetup, even though the Highball will temporarily be gone, that doesn’t mean our meetings will end! Instead, we’ll be moving to a new day, and a new venue: specifically, starting on January 3rd, we’ll be relocating to the amazing ND Austin, located at E 5th & Brushy, for regular meetups on the first Thursday of every month.

This means that no longer will you have to drag your tired bones out of bed on the middle of a Sunday afternoon: these will be night-time meetups starting around 7:30PM and running for as long as you’re happy to stay there! If you haven’t already visited ND for a Nerd Nite / Dorkbot meetup or a show, you’re in for a treat: the space not only has a stage, but a massive two-story screen that will be fantastic for projecting games. They also have good drinks, and (speaking from experience!) great tamales and queso at their bar around back. We’re super grateful for the ND for taking us in!

What this also means is that our originally scheduled December 5th meetup will be delayed to January 3rd, BUT! We’ll still be getting together this month as a part of Make Watch Love Austin, an all-night expo and preview of the new space that’s being opened by our friends at the Austin Film Society. The event will be taking place Saturday, December 8th, from 5-9PM, and, as JUEGOS, we’ll be bringing back local-favorite JOHANN SEBASTIAN JOUST to spread the love to Austin’s wider creative community.

Tickets and more information are available from the Austin Film Society event page!

Finally, if you’d like a more direct way to stay on top of what’s happening with JUEGOS than our Twitter / Facebook page / this here site, we’re setting up a new email distribution list with Google Groups. For now, it’ll be ‘announcement-only’ so we can directly contact you about upcoming events, but we’re looking into eventually expanding the list to help solidify and grow Austin’s community of videogame creators and lovers.

If you’d like to join the group, just visit this Google Groups page and click the ‘Join group’ button!

We’ll have even more exciting JUEGOS announcements as we roll into the new year, so stay tuned for those, and looking forward to seeing you all at one of our events soon!