As excited as we are for this weekend’s meeting of the JUEGOS RANCHEROS featuring all of the games of NYU Game Center’s NO QUARTER exhibition? Help us spread the word!

Our dedicated flyer-maker extraordinaire Dale Austin has prepared two PDFs of the poster above and its alternate (seen on the last post) for you to distribute however you’d like: print, hand out, email, or hang around Austin at all the places where the cool kids hang out so they know about the show! Download a ZIP of both PDFs by clicking this link here!

Also: since our time will be necessarily sort of limited on Sunday, we’ve got two more PDFs that will let you get an early look at the rules behind Zach Gage’s post-apocalyptic eating-contest card-game, GUTS OF GLORY (download PDF here), and Margaret Robertson’s labyrinth creator DRUNK DUNGEON (download pdf here).

Feel free to show up to the Highball a bit before 4PM on Sunday, if you’d like to get a head-start: we’ll all be there helping to get new players acclimated! See you then!

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]

Attention indies both local and global: submissions have been opened for the 2012 Fantastic Arcade — taking place here in Austin, TX from September 20th-27th — with an May 31st deadline already rapidly approaching.

This’ll be the third Fantastic Arcade, which has drawn indies from all across the globe to Austin — names like Vlambeer, Polytron, Derek Yu, Cactus, Messhof, Jon Blow, Molleindustria and Superbrothers — for a week of talks, demonstrations and debuts of new and otherwise unseen games and prototypes, and general carousing.

Here’s how the festival — operated by our friends, partners and generally favorite theater organization ever, Alamo Drafthouse — describes itself:

Fantastic Arcade fuses the world of independent film and independent gaming. We bring together artists and professionals who are telling stories and creating experiences in film, games and online entertainment simultaneously. At Fantastic Arcade, we showcase a curated selection of brand new independent games as well as a larger sampling of important groundbreaking independent games from the last couple of years.

Attendees are invited to play the games as well as interact with the game developers via panels and nightly parties and happy hours. We also feature both panels with independent filmmakers side by side with game developers and intimate demo sessions by independent game developers. Lastly, we feel that video games rightfully belong side by side with shorts and feature films at Fantastic Fest. The artistic merit of these games will be honored with both audience awards and a juried competition.

Selected games will proceed to the second round of submissions and will be asked to provide a playable version of the game for Fantastic Arcade festival programmers. Official selections for the Arcade will be made based on each game’s art, story, characters, gameplay and, most importantly, connection with the character of Fantastic Fest.

Submit your game to be a part of this year’s festivities by clicking here!

[photo by Indie Game: The Movie creators Blinkworks!]