Want to play the next hit game by the designers that brought you super stylish successes CANABALT and SOLIPSKIER before anyone else? Then join us this Sunday, November 4th, at 4PM for our sixteenth edition of JUEGOS RANCHEROS at The Highball, where we’ll be presenting the Texas premiere of HUNDREDS, the upcoming iPhone and iPad game from designers Greg Wohlwend (SOLIPSKIER, GASKETBALL), Austin’s own Semi Secret (WURDLE, CANABALT, GRAVITY HOOK) and ambient electronic musician Scott Morgan, aka Loscil.

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

Semi Secret describe the game as “an abstract, minimalist, arcade-puzzle game designed specifically for touch screens featuring 100 carefully crafted levels” which “teaches a variety of increasing complex gameplay ideas without tutorials, tells a strange story in an unconventional way, and allows players to play at their own pace, cooperatively or solitaire.”

I describe it as one of the best iPad games I’ve played in ages, which instantly ensnares you into its gorgeously & clinically austere universe — every single person I’ve seen that’s laid just a tentative finger on it has immediately fallen down its rabbit hole and not emerged for hours. Now it’s your chance to find out why!

Everything will be kicking off Sunday, November 4th, promptly at 4PM at The Highball, 1142 S Lamar Blvd, Austin, TX 78704! Come early to get a head-start on unravelling the mystery of HUNDREDS, enjoy the Highball’s Happy Hour drink specials, and say hello to the people changing the way you think about games!

Want to get a taste of the amazing lineup coming to Fantastic Arcade 2012 well ahead of the crowd? Join us this Sunday, September 2nd, at 4PM for our fifteenth edition of JUEGOS RANCHEROS at The Highball, where we’ll be presenting three of Fantastic Arcade’s finest: SUPER TIME FORCE, SUPER HEXAGON & MCPIXEL.

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

Headlining the event will be SUPER TIME FORCE, the ultra-amazing time-bending future-shooter from #SWORCERY & CRITTER CRUNCH creators Capy, which I’ll let them explain here:

THE YEAR: 198X

LOCATION: OUTER-SPACE / 4TH DIMENSION AKA TIME

THE PROBLEM: EVERYTHING’S GONE TO SHIT!

THE MISSION: FIX IT!

Super TIME Force is a rip-roarin’, run ‘n gun action game with a time-traveling twist that creates opportunities for both strategy and mayhem, or, “strayhem”. With an ingenious “time-rewinding” mechanic, STF takes the action to intense new peaks by allowing players to team up with their own past replays of a level in an utterly unique single-player co-op experience that sees all of your past-lives fighting together at once. It’s fun to play with yourself! You command the elite, time-travelling soldiers of the STF in their mission to make the world a more awesome place by jumping through time and messing with the history books. At every event the STF endeavours to undo, the evil Blounbots appear and attack, seemingly trying to undo their undoing. Still with us? Good! Who commands these filthy space robots? What is their agenda? And why do they hate freedom so much? Tune in, er… Play the game to find out!

We’ll also be running the latest version of SUPER HEXAGON, the game we’ve previously described as a “27th century space-disco teen-laser-punk arcade hit”, created by Terry Cavanagh, best known for games like VVVVVV. This game’s been stealing our time like no other over the past couple months, in a neverending string of 15-20 seconds at a time.

And finally, we’ll be showing off MCPIXEL by Sos, one of the best slapstick-comedy games we’ve ever played, where you’re given 20 seconds to save the day in hundreds of precarious and stupid situations, and kicking the nearest person in the junk is always a legitimate & sometimes actually lucrative option.

Everything will be kicking off Sunday, September 2nd, promptly at 4PM at The Highball, 1142 S Lamar Blvd, Austin, TX 78704! Come early to get a head-start on your Fantastic Arcade 2012 experience, enjoy the Highball’s Happy Hour drink specials, and say hello to the people changing the way you think about games!

Want to know why we think SPELUNKY is very easily one of the greatest videogames ever made? Been playing for weeks and want to vent to creator Derek Yu about “the tunnel man”? You’ll be able to do both, this Sunday, August 5th, at 4PM, as we devote the entirety of our fourteenth edition of JUEGOS RANCHEROS at The Highball to Mossmouth‘s procedurally-generated platform adventure.

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

You may have already seen us gush about SPELUNKY in the last FISTFUL OF INDIES roundup, or played the freeware original (still available for PC & Mac), but the Xbox Live Arcade version of SPELUNKY released in early July was a true landmark achievement: an accessible but still immensely challenging platformer that re-arranges itself every time you play, fantastically full of layer upon layer of secrets.

Not only will we be bringing the single & multiplayer version of the new game, and also be setting up the 2008 original — to give a sense of how far it’s come — but creator Derek Yu will be joining us remotely from his SF studio for a live chat about the game, and taking your questions/complaints/curses for that time that fire frog landed in the shop and set everyone in the black market out for your blood.

Everything will be kicking off Sunday, August 5th, promptly at 4PM at The Highball, 1142 S Lamar Blvd, Austin, TX 78704! Come early to get a head-start on multiplayer domination, enjoy the Highball’s Happy Hour drink specials, and say hello to the people changing the way you think about games!

Where has the love for pulp paperback fantasy gone? It’s gone directly into GOD OF BLADES, as you will soon see this Sunday, July 1st, at 4PM, as we present the swordfighting epic debut from local indie upstart White Whale Games at our thirteenth edition of JUEGOS RANCHEROS at The Highball.

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

White Whale ultra-succinctly describe the game as “a love-song to pulp fantasy tales of yore, 70s synth-prog-landscape oddities, and forgotten places”, and we’ll add more pointedly that it’s one of the most satisfying real-physics swordfighters you’ve played in ages — a 2D sidescroller that truly understands weight and rhythm.

White Whale will be on hand at the Highball to explain in greater detail how to make a game which distills swordplay and action to its core also touch more deeply on aspects of “memory, culture, and loss in terms of stories, books, and the communities that love them.”

They’ll also be premiering a new co-op survival mode of the game with a chance for you to win prizes like T-shirts and limited prints of the amazing custom pulp book covers they’ve created for the game, as above (see more of those in their gallery here!).

Everything will be kicking off Sunday, July 1st, promptly at 4PM at The Highball, 1142 S Lamar Blvd, Austin, TX 78704! Come early to get a head-start on learning the game’s rhythms, enjoy the Highball’s Happy Hour drink specials, and say hello to the people changing the way you think about games!

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!

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!