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.

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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!

How do you navigate a videogame world when the game itself keeps re-writing the rules around you? Come find out this Sunday, April 1st, at 4PM at our special tenth edition of JUEGOS RANCHEROS at The Highball, as we give Austin its first chance to play ANTICHAMBER, Demruth’s upcoming mindbending game of psychological exploration, with creator Alexander Bruce in attendance.

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ANTICHAMBER comes to Austin fresh off its win at the 14th annual Independent Game Festival a few short weeks ago, where it took home the prize for Technical Excellence — the latest in a long string of recognition which also includes accolades from IndieCade, Penny Arcade and Japan’s Sense of Wonder Night.

There it also was named one of BitMob’s top three games of GDC 2012, who called it “an enlightened nightmare, a beautiful trap, a revelatory puzzle,” and added:

Alexander Bruce’s deliciously devious rabbit hole doesn’t set out to trick you so much as it wants you to stop tricking yourself. You don’t have to jump over everything…just walk instead. It can get frustrating if you stubbornly hold fast to everything video games ever taught you, but take a breath, step off the path, and do something that doesn’t feel quite right just to see if it works. That’s how you play Antichamber.

Come hear from and meet creator Bruce — visiting Austin from his native Melbourne — and take the opportunity to dive down this rabbit hole yourself!

Everything will be kicking off Sunday, April 1st, 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!

What does an Oxford bioethics teacher and a former member of Cut Copy (?!?) know about videogames? Come find out this Sunday, February 12th, at 4PM, at The Foddy Winter Olympics: our ninth edition of JUEGOS RANCHEROS at The Highball that will show you exactly why Bennett Foddy‘s become one of indie gaming’s most notable (and funniest!) cult-hit creators.

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

A little background: it all started with QWOP, a free web game (later ported to the iPhone) that took the button-mashing simplicity of 8-bit classics like TRACK & FIELD to its totally illogical polar extreme, giving you direct control of each muscle of your athlete’s legs and asking you to learn how to walk all over again. A true viral hit, soon YouTube & Tumblr were full of people attempting to do just that, as well as some inspired cosplay and the best animated Cosby-sweater-photo of all time.

Then came GIRP, which turned rock-climbing into a game of Twister for your keyboard, WINNER VS LOSER, a competitive, slapstick return to TRACK & FIELD for drunks, and, most recently, POLERIDERS, a two-player polo game played out using hyper-realistic vaulting-pole physics.

So, what will our Winter Olympics consist of?

First, the Texas debut of MEGA GIRP, a remix of the rock-climbing hit by Doug Wilson, the creator of JUEGOS-favorite JOHANN SEBASTIAN JOUST. Played out on four dance-mats laid out like a giant full-body keyboard, MEGA GIRP turns those finger-Twister gymnastics into the real-life counterpart. Wear stretchy pants!

We’ll also be debuting: multiplayer QWOP! — a head-to-head version that sizes up just who the real muscle-manipulating champion really is. And we’ll obviously also have lots and lots of pole-riding and winning versus losing: give all of them a try via the links above & get your fingers (and whole body) limbered up to take the championship!

Everything will be kicking off Sunday, February 12th, 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!

It’s the first meetup of the New Year, and we’re celebrating it by bringing back two fan favorites from 2011: this Sunday, January 8th, at 4PM, our eighth edition of JUEGOS RANCHEROS at The Highball will see the return of Die Gute Fabrik’s slow-motion dueling game JOHANN SEBASTIAN JOUST and Messhof’s NIDHOGG (via our prototype indie-game arcade machine, the TEXATRON).

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

First debuted here in Austin all the way back at our second meetup, J.S. JOUST instantly became a local hit, as we saw again last month at its return for the Venus Patrol party. If you’ve still not had the chance to play, you’ll definitely want be there this Sunday to experience how it transforms any group of friends & strangers into a slow-motion dancing, dueling swirl.

We’ll also be bringing back our in-progress version of the indie arcade machine TEXATRON to project on the big screen, which we understand essentially means another few hours devoted to Messhof’s crowd-pleasing low-res masterpiece NIDHOGG.

Both games are still basically unavailable to play elsewhere, so this will be your only chance to see why they’re so well-loved, worldwide!

Everything will be kicking off Sunday, January 8th, 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!

What better way to celebrate the super-successful funding of a Kickstarter campaign than with a party? For a special seventh edition of JUEGOS RANCHEROS at the Highball, this Saturday, December 10th, from 4PM-8PM, join us as we bring together the games, music, art & people behind the upcoming launch of videogame culture site VENUS PATROL, with a live performance from Disasterpeace, the composer behind Polytron’s highly anticipated indie game FEZ.

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

Be sure to arrive before 7PM, when Disasterpeace will kick off his performance, including special arrangements of his songs for FEZ. As you can hear below, his compositions are already promising to be one of the best soundtracks to come from indie games, and, as above, they’re a special treat experienced live.

From 5PM, we’ll also harken back to an earlier edition of JUEGOS RANCHEROS with the re-appearance of the latest version of JOHANN SEBASTIAN JOUST, Die Gute Fabrik’s fascinating & dramatic slow-motion dueling game we debuted in June, now enhanced with a number of new bonus features that we’ll be revealing to the people of Austin for the first time.

Attendees will also be among the first people in the world to play the games being created exclusively for VENUS PATROL’s Kickstarter campaign, including GUN GODZ, a “polytheistic, hiphop action first-person shooter” from Dutch indies Vlambeer (SUPER CRATE BOX, RADICAL FISHING), CAPSULE, a unique deep space adventure from Adam Saltsman (CANABALT, Flixel), and an early look at a new game from SWORD & SWORCERY EP creator Superbrothers.

We’ll also give Highball attendees the first chance to hear the songs from the Moon Grotto 7″ — a collection of original & remixed songs from Superbrothers’ SWORD & SWORCERY EP by composer & remix artist SCNTFC — and will have with us a few handfuls of 1″ buttons, VENUS PATROL T-shirts from designer Mikko Walamies (freshly printed by Austin’s Bearded Lady) and other fun stuff.

Basically, it’ll be four hours of low-key but high-awesome hanging out with drinks, games, music and friends and we super hope to see you there.

Everything will be kicking off Saturday, December 10th, 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!

[*PS: Hey everyone! As usual, bring your 3DS again! We’re doing awesome with these StreetPasses!]

What’s so indie about the highly-anticipated PlayStation 3 shooter STARHAWK? Find out this Sunday, November 6th, at 4PM at our sixth edition of JUEGOS RANCHEROS at the Highball, as the team designing the game at our own Austin-local LightBox Interactive show off their personal side-projects, and explain how working on abstract indie games ends up influencing big-budget AAA designs.

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

In attendance at this month’s JUEGOS RANCHEROS will be STARHAWK lead designer Josh Sutphin with his games FAIL-DEADLY and CORTEX, designer Matthew Gallant with his one-button underwater battler PAX BRITANNICA, and designer Trent Polack with his collection of abstract indie games including IN THE WIND, ASPLODE! and BROKEN.

In addition to simply showing off their work, the team will touch on the development of STARHAWK, specifically how indie development and philosophies themselves can be integrated into a bigger commercial design, and the importance of drawing design influences from a wider variety of media and experiences, followed by public play of all the games brought to the show!

There will also be cake.

Everything will be kicking off Sunday, November 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!

[*PS: Hey everyone! As usual, bring your 3DS again! We’re doing awesome with these StreetPasses!]