There’s a real art to remastering, and that’s very evident in Braid’s Anniversary Edition. The 12-year-old painterly platformer is undergoing extensive renovation to its graphics, and adding in what developer Jonathan Blow calls “the craziest, most-in-depth commentary ever put in a video game.”

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At the end of this year, most Flash games will be unplayable in their original form. Adobe are going to stop distributing Flash, and so most browsers plan on dropping Flash support. While this may be an internet security victory – Flash has a history of being vulnerable to certain kinds of malware – it does make it harder to experience the thousands of online Flash games. There are ways to download and run Flash games offline, but many of those games have processes that are meant to lock the game to its original site.

Thankfully there are preservation projects working to keep Flash games playable in their original form. The only question remaining is which you should play. We’ll answer that question, and explain the best ways to play them, below.

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The biggest names in platforming used to live only on console, but it’s on PC now that the genre is thriving. Indies have taken the simple ingredients and spun them off in umpteen directions (but still normally from left to right). Below you’ll find a collection of the very best platform games on PC – including puzzle platformers, physics platformers, platformers with roguelike elements, and platformers about absolutely nothing but pixel-perfect jumping.

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Another month, another big video game publisher puts a great big dollop of video game music online for zero pennies. This time, it’s Bandai Namco, who have just uploaded every single Tekken soundtrack onto Spotify because, well, apparently everyone loves Tekken. I’ve never partaken in a Tekken, but with track names like “Massive Stunner” and “Lonesome City Jazz Party 1st”, I’m already 100% convinced the music must be great.

However, given my rather lacking expertise in all things Tekken-related, I thought that instead of doing a big Tekken musical breakdown like I did for Capcom and all the Final Fantasy games, I’d take this opportunity to celebrate some of the other great gaming soundtracks you can currently listen to for free right now, because boy howdy are there loads of ’em. So bang on those headphones and turn up the volume, folks. It’s head-banging time.

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You could put together a decent indie games showcase for nothing just by loading the Epic Games Store and clicking a button. The current freebie on there is Polytron’s excellent, world bending puzzle-platformer, Fez. It’s definitely worth the zero doubloons they re asking for it. In fact, it s worth at least 100,000,000 times that. Fez is great.

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When Tommy Refenes first sat down to prototype a new, auto-running one-button Super Meat Boy game in his GDC hotel room back in 2011, it was meant to be a tiny spin-off for mobiles that stopped after nine levels. The scope of it was going to be very small, the programmer of Team Meat told me at PAX East 2019 last weekend. The idea was just to be like a palette cleanser in between our bigger projects because we were working on Mew-Genics. It was supposed to be, Let s just do this, put it out and charge like a dollar for it and then move on .

Fast forward to today and Super Meat Boy Forever will shortly be out on every platform with somewhere in the region of 7200 levels (or chunks as Refenes calls them). It s still an auto-runner, but if you re worried about Forever being dumbed down after beginning life on mobile, rest assured that it looks and feels just like the 2010 mega hit right down to the speed of Meat Boy s stubby red legs.

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Splendidly deadly platformer Super Meat Boy is free to keep on the Epic Games Store if you grab it now. This is the second of the freebies luring people onto Epic’s new store since its launch in December 2018, following Subnautica (and if the carrot doesn’t work, there’s always the stick of exclusive games). For now, hey, if you install Epic’s client and register an account, you can get Team Meat’s ace platformer free.

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Super Meat Boy Forever [official site], the auto-running sequel to 2010’s super-rad deadly platformer, has reappeared after several years in that Team Meat ‘missing-presumed-cancelled’ limbo state. Team Meat last night announced it’ll hit in 2018. Forever is an auto-runner, sure, but just as deadly and tricky as ever. This time, Meat Boy and Bandage Girl do have the ability to fight back, biffing enemies as they dash around. Forever also brings the twist of procedurally-generated levels which regenerate into a more difficult variant each time you beat them. Peep the re-announcement trailer: (more…)

Kentucky Route Zero, the game so good we declared it our game of the year back when only two of its episodes were out, is currently half-price. That’s always worth pointing out, that. Sales from this latest sale will go to the American Civil Liberties Union, joining similar fundraisers with other cracking games. Also joining in are the delightful Fez, frightful treasures from Kitty Horrorshow, and the next game from Tetrageddon dev Nathalie Lawhead. … [visit site to read more]

Hey, do you remember Fez [official site]? You know, the clever little platformer where you could rotate your 2D world on a 3D plane to solve puzzles? The PC version may have released all the way back in 2013, but Fez has just this week, quite secretly, gotten its final patch.

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