Every month, as part of the regular monthly meetings of JUEGOS RANCHEROS, we do a very casual & chatty rundown of the ten or so games from the previous month for the audience, to give people — especially those outside the indie community itself — a look at what they may have missed. The featured games are both local and global, and both indie and, on occasion, a bit-bigger-budget — what binds them together is simply that they’re all amazing.
In keeping with the tongue-in-tobacco-packed-cheek tone, we call these run-downs A Fistful of Indies, which are presented here for your reference.
For the November edition of JUEGOS RANCHEROS, we’re bringing back some of our favorite crowd-pleasing multiplayer games that aren’t widely available elsewhere. Join us this Thursday, November 6th, at 7:00 PM at Austin’s North Door for a special encore showing of Tenya Wanya Teens and Musclecat Showdown.
Tenya Wanya Teens is a cute, crazy, thirty-two button multiplayer party game from Keita Takahashi, perhaps best known for his Namco cult classicKatamari Damacy and the even cultier PS3/iPhone gameNoby Noby Boy.Tenya Wanya Teens, co-produced by Takahashi’s studio Uvula as well as Wild Rumpus and Venus Patrol, returns to Austin after making several other choice appearances, including its most recent showing at XOXO, Portland’s indie art and technology festival.
Musclecat Showdown is a game from Major Bueno & Bee and Puppycat creator Natasha Allegri that we first premiered at Juegos Rancheros in March. It’s received such wide acclaim and wide grins from players alike that we had to bring it back to the North Door for a second showing. The goal of Musclecat Showdown? To settle a schoolyard rivalry by battling your handsome, beefed-up cats in a stylish pose-off, of course!
Both games will be set up and ready to play on Thursday, November 6, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public, so come join us as we drink, play and meet the people changing the way we think about games!
Want to spend your Thursday night wrestling a pitbull to the ground & high-fiving a pizza as you lose yourself in a ‘giddy apocalypse’? Then come join us this Thursday, October 2nd, at 7:00PM at Austin’s North Door as we present the local double-feature premiere of Kevin Cancienne’s local multiplayer dog-em-up Dog Park & Jane Friedhoff’s Slam City Oracles.
Developer Cancienne — also known for his design work on area/code’s early classic iPhone puzzle game Drop7 — has described Dog Park as “a fighting game without the fighting”, a four-‘person’ brawler where players choose their dog & score points for chasing, wrestling, cavorting & gamboling in perfectly-pitched canine fashion.
Various JUEGOS RANCHEROS organizers have also described it as “omg the best game ever”.
Already drawing a number of favorable comparisons to Katamari Damacyfrom sites like Kotaku for its cheerfully chaotic cartoony slapstick physicality, Oracles is a vertically-oriented game where two girls have four minutes to joyfully & wantonly break the entire world around them.
Both games were commissioned for the NYU Game Center’s No Quarter exhibition — the yearly local-multiplayer focused show which has spawned games like Nidhogg, Bara Bari Ball & Bennett Foddy’s Speed Chess — and were first debuted there September 19th, alongside Naomi Clark‘s consensual card game Consentacle and Corporate Vandals, a physical game from Shawn Allen, creator of Treachery in Beatdown City.
Both games will be making their local debut Thursday, October 2nd, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public, so come join us as we drink, play and meet the people changing the way we think about games!
Can’t make it to this year’s Fantastic Arcade or want to get a leg up on the competition? Come join us next Thursday, September 4th, at 7:00PM at Austin’s North Door as we present a special preview of some of this year’s best tournament games, including Gang Beasts, Push Me Pull You and Astro Duel.
Headlining the event will be Boneloaf’s upcoming slapstick party-game Gang Beasts, already a verified indie cult hit, where players “grab, push, pull, punch, and throw their friends from wrestling rings, speeding trucks, and suspended platforms” with “doughy ragdoll physics and horrific environmental hazards.” We’ve previewed this one a bit before, and it became an instant favorite.
We’ll also be running Push Me Pull You, House House’s “2v2 sports game about friendship and wrestling” where connected snake-y worm-y contestants “love each other, work together, communicate and coordinate” as they use their shared body to “wrap, writhe, and wrestle the ball into your half of the court.”
And finally, we’ll be showing Astro Duel, the competitive multiplayer tabletop game from Austin’s own Rusty Moyher, where 2 to 4 players “blast each other using asteroid-style ships”, in fast-paced rounds “inspired by endless nights of Super Bomberman.
All three games will be run in tournament play during this year’s Fantastic Arcade, so come join us as we drink, play and get ready to better face your competition, Thursday, September 4th, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public!
If you thought the Adventure Time Game Jam was going to be hard to top, we might just have done it: organizers of Fantastic Arcade have just announced the Barfcade Game Jam, a two-week jam open to developers world wide to create a ton of two-player head-to-head games based on food, cooking, eating and (obviously) barfing.
Why barf and why now? Fantastic Arcade’s special guest this year will be Thu Tran, frequent Babycastles collaborator and creator of the super amazing cooking/puppet show Food Party (above) and its MTV2 followup Late Night Munchies.
Thu will be providing the special secret ingredient required in all the jam games, which will be announced just before the jam begins on Saturday, August 30th, and will be co-hosting the Barfcade proper, a live game-show event held on September 21st that will be streamed for the rest of the world to see on Venus Patrol’s Twitch channel.
Games for the jam are meant to be fast, competitive, and no longer than 30 seconds each — the best of these will be strung together for the Barfcade event, giving the live competition a sort of head-to-head WarioWare vibe. Canabalt creator Adam Saltsman has created a brand new example game (pictured above), which you can play at the Barfcade website to get a sense of where to head!
The jam will run Saturday, August 30th through Sunday, September 14th — more details are available at the Barfcade site, which will be where you can also find the secret ingredient at launch. Can’t wait to see what you come up with!
Every month, as part of the regular monthly meetings of JUEGOS RANCHEROS, we do a very casual & chatty rundown of the ten or so games from the previous month for the audience, to give people — especially those outside the indie community itself — a look at what they may have missed. The featured games are both local and global, and both indie and, on occasion, a bit-bigger-budget — what binds them together is simply that they’re all amazing.
In keeping with the tongue-in-tobacco-packed-cheek tone, we call these run-downs A Fistful of Indies, which are presented here for your reference.
