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!

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.

Read the full feature here, and see also author James Renovitch’s supplementary guide to creating your own original 8-bit NES works, and his link-heavy guide to all things Hexcellent.

See you all on Sunday!

[photo by John Henderson for the Chronicle]

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.

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

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!