Brothers Fred Wood, left, from San Antonio, and Chad Wood, right, from Austin have serious fun on the arcade game “Push Me Pull You” as part of Fantastic Arcade Thursday afternoon at the Highball. Photo by Ralph Barrera / AMERICAN-STATESMAN
In Tuesday's print edition of the American-Statesman and on MyStatesman, you'll find this week's Digital Savant column on Fantastic Arcade, a four-day games conference that concludes Sunday in Austin.
I was able to attend three of the four days, dipping in and out of a few panels and playing the games on hand, and as in past years, I was mostly struck by the great variety of indie games curated for the festival and by the sheer level of fun that was infused into all of the events and panels.
“Push Me Pull You” is a two- or four-player game shown at Fantastic Arcade that combines sumo wrestling with soccer. It was developed by the Australian game studio House House.
Here’s an excerpt from the column:
There were shooting games ("Starfighter"), fighting games ("Gang Beasts"), adventure games ("Dropsy"), but mostly games that defied genre such as "Banana Chalice," a psychedelic flying game about a cat who shoots bananas, which won a special jury award at the festival. Its gobsmacked developer, Kyle Reimergartin of Seattle, could only exclaim, "Life! Bananas!" and something unintelligible before leaving the stage at a Sunday night award ceremony.
The best thing about the fest, perhaps, is that after five years, it has grown to take on some of the personality of its director, the affable and always-entertaining Wiley Wiggins. Wiggins was a constant presence as funny emcee, tournament play-by-play announcer and champion for indie developers.
Though the fest has a set schedule of programming, it keeps a loose vibe. Sometimes things run late, held up by technical glitches such as a lack of game-controller batteries or a struggle to pack attendees into a single room, as when famed game developer Tim Schafer discussed his 1998 PC cult hit, "Grim Fandango," Friday evening.
But if that looseness bothered attendees, I didn't hear even a whisper of it. Most seemed thrilled to have access to so many games from developers they may not have otherwise ever heard about.
You can read the rest of the column here.
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