Miaow miaow miaow Team Meat miaow Super Meat Boy miaow The Binding of Isaac? Miaow miaow miaow Mew-Genics, miaow miaw miaow. Miaow miaow don’t know miaow, miaow miaow miaow miaow 12,207,031,250,000,000,000,000 cats miaow miaow. Miaow! (more…)

Tripwire are having a busy weekend, with the announcement of Killing Floor’s now-traditional Christmas spectacular, and a free weekend on Steam for Red Orchestra 2. This Christmas’ Killing Floor event is IN SPAAAACE, which puts robots and Evil Santa on the moon (a free map with Christmas-themed baddies). Could anything be more festive? Watch the trailer below, and decide for yourself.

R’ochestra meanwhile is free from now until Monday. It’s a fantastic, rumpled bastard of a game. Worth a few squeezes of the mouse button. (more…)

The entire gaming world and its robo-dog is currently going from door-to-door and begging for cash, so a shaft of philanthrophic light amidst the Kickstarted darkness is a welcome one. We posted about Mario/McMillen & Refenes mash-up Super Meat Boy Galaxy last week, but it was unclear whether Aubrey Hesselgren would ever share more of his half-gag, half-tribute project with the world. Turns out, he will. BUT ON ONE CONDITION. That condition is cash. Of course it’s cash! This cash will not, however, go to the developer – it will go to The Samaritans. If SMBG is successfully ‘ransomed’ for £10,000, its prototype will be freed and released to the public.

Blood money, I call it! Blood money! And also a very smart idea. (more…)

Over-talented game dev Aubrey Hesselgren crafted an unofficial 3D mashup of Super Meat Boy and Super Mario Galaxy, apparently “for Tommy Refenes’ 30th Birthday”. You can see a video of it in action below. Hesselgren says on a Reddit thread devoted to the idea: “It’s just an experiment in adaptation. I kept hearing people write off 3D games with all the arguments about spatial perception, limited information etc, and wanted to try to tackle a few of their points, just for my own edification. I didn’t want to dismiss what they were saying, but I felt like I had to see for myself. I learnt a lot!” (more…)

Four words all but guaranteed to win my attention: “a game about cats.” When said four words are twinned with the knowledge that the game in question comes from the creators of Super Meat Boy and one half of The Binding Of Isaac team, my attention becomes unwavering.

We know precious little about Team Meat’s Mew-Genics other than that it’ll be “randomly generated, strange and involve cats” so even a tiny, kitten-size scrap of detail is enough to cause a flurry of fluffy speculation. Today, that’s two new shots showing in-game characters. (more…)

Killing Floor knows all about mods, having been one itself. They never tidy their rooms, leaving files scattered all over internets and hard drives alike, and trying to organise them is like trying to herd cats. The multiplayer horrorshow is gathering all its mods in one place, the increasingly active Steam Workshop, which should make keeping track of maps and modes much easier. Tripwire will also be adding Steam Workshop support to Red Orchestra 2, which is receiving a paid for expandomod by the name of Rising Storm. I’ve got a load of notes about that which I shall compile later this week. There are booby traps, flamethrowers and kamikaze bayonet stabbings, all of which I approve of in games though I frown at them in life.

It’s easy to forget Amnesia. And I don’t mean that in the sense that it’s a forgettable experience (it’s most certainly not>) or that amnesia, the unfortunate mental condition, might lead to forgetfulness (duh). Rather, Dark Descent’s been out for two years, and it’s become pretty far removed from the public eye. Sure, it’ll occasionally pop up on the cover of some trashy tabloid rag (Did you know that it’s become both fat and> Bigfoot?), but thechineseroom-developed A Machine For Pigs is now the series’ main attention hog. Over on Frictional’s blog, though, there’s an “Amnesia – Two Years Later” post that provides some super interesting info about the oppressively scary hit’s present and a brief taste of what Frictional’s up to now.

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After a brief foray into the world of music, the Humble folks are back with their third Android bundle. Which is also a PC, Linux and Mac bundle too. Buy them, and you’ll get versions for each. In there this time are BIT.TRIP.BEAT, Fieldrunners, SpaceChem, Uplink and for those who pay above the average, début release Spirits. So that’s quite an… wait, what, Uplink’s out on Android!

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Killing Floor is an acquired taste, or at least it was for me, like chugging down a bucket full of rust and blood, with accents so dodgy they’d taken on form and floated atop the grungy broth like cockney croutons. Where Left 4 Dead directs the players’ progress, toying with them, Killing Floor has the player run around in circles, waggling their most succulent parts at the mutants and freaks, encouraging pursuit. Crowd control, herding, elimination; it’s a butchery simulation with cattle that bite back. This summer’s special event, the Summer Slideshow 2012, adds new levels, enemies and guns. The trailer would have given me nightmares when I was a boy.

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Last week, I ran the first half of my recent chat with Steve Gaynor, formerly of Irrational and 2K Marin, and now of indie studio The Fullbright Company – who are working on mysterious, ambitious, suburban-set non-combat first-person game Gone Home. Being as I am an investigative journalist par excellence>, I decided that it would be appropriate to spend the second half of the interview forgoing questioning entirely in favour of simply shouting the names of other games at him. Games like Myst, Amnesia, Jurassic Park: Trespasser, Journey and Dear Esther. Rather than hanging up in disgust, he offered fascinating, thoughtful replies on the limits of interactivity in games and the sort of scale Gone Home is intended to operate on. (more…)