Team Fortress 2

Another week, another set of attention-grabbing headlines in video games. Join Eurogamer news editor Tom Phillips, Eurogamer reporter Emma Kent and me in the video below as we run through the news that matters. Bong!

We start with the PlayStation 5's first big update, which comes five months after the console came out. This update finally lets you move games to USB storage - a feature the PS5 really should have had at launch. We chat about why this improvement is so important, but also discuss the state of the console itself as it approaches half a year out in the wild. Is the PS5 where it needs to be? Is it already playing catch-up in terms of features with Microsoft's Xbox Series X? And what do we want next from PS5?

Elsewhere, we chat about Nintendo's latest indie showcase (there's a lot of Fez talk, sorry!), before moving on to the ever-eventful world of Cyberpunk 2077. (Emma's report on what could be DLC for that game is well worth a read.) Can CD Projekt turn Cyberpunk around? The company has vowed to stick with it, at least.

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FEZ

To mark the end of the 2010s, we're celebrating 30 games that defined the last 10 years. This is the last entry - you can now find all the articles in the Games of the Decade archive, and read about our thinking about it in an editor's blog. Stay tuned for a couple more special articles tomorrow.

Fez is one of those magic-trick games. You could call it a gimmick without being disrespectful - a good gimmick can enliven any game - but I'd define a gimmick as a novel, repeatable concept that gives you a little jolt of satisfaction when you encounter it. What Fez does is different. Its trick is very simple, but has deep implications. It defines everything about the game. It constantly changes the way you think. Playing the game, you perform this trick all the time, and yet every time you do it you still do a little internal gasp as it reorders your perceptions. It's impossible, but it's real. It's magic.

The trick is this: Fez is a two-dimensional platform game set in a world where three dimensions exist, but only two of them can be perceived at once. This fact is so brain-scrambling that the inhabitants of this world have forgotten it, or repressed it. It is revealed to our hero Gomez when he puts a magical red hat on his head. From then on, he - you - can rotate his world through four viewpoints, snapping it back into a flat plane where everything is reordered and much is revealed. The game world's three-dimensionality, its solidity, is real - it looks like pixel art, but is actually built out of cubes - but it can only be seen fleetingly as you flick from one plane to another, the way an illustration in a pop-up book leaps from the page and then collapses back in again. You have to hold it in your head.

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FEZ

If you're looking for more ways to expand that list of games that you really, really honestly will get round to playing eventually but probably not right now because you've still got a load of other ones to get through, then I'm pleased to inform you that Fez is currently free on the Epic Store. Oh, and that Inside and Celeste will be free next week too.

Fez, for those yet to experience its multi-dimensional charms, is, at first glance, a sort of puzzle-y platformer in the retro, side-scrolling mould. Before too long, however, its 2D protagonist discovers that their world isn't quite as flat as they'd been led to believe, beginning a slightly brain-scrambling adventure that requires players to flip through the world's previously hidden sides. Really, it makes more sense if you see it in action.

Eurogamer, it's fair to say, adored Fez when it released back in 2012. Oli Welsh gave it a Eurogamer Essential badge well before they were a thing, and everybody else refused to shut up about it, even going as far as to crown it Game of the Year.

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Braid

Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid and The Witness, has shown more of his new puzzle game. It's a game inspired by (and even, it seems, codenamed) Sokoban, the old Japanese game about pushing boxes in specific orders to cover all the marks on the floor.

Blow showed footage during his talk at Spanish conference Gamelab, which I popped along to a few weeks ago. It's taken a little while for the videos to appear online.

In the footage, the viewer looks down into a leafy kind of compartmentalised level to see three characters and six doorless rooms. There's one big crystal which needs moving but when you move around, blocks pop up barring the way. What to do? That's the puzzle. Character abilities will help you out - in the video a wizard uses a kind of teleportation spell to move the crystal - and there's an undo mechanic to keep your experimentation swift.

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FEZ

The first games I played were games of memory. My English grandfather was full of them. Parlour games, mainly. There was one in which each chair in his living room became a station and his family became trains. He would stand in the middle of the room and direct the trains between the stations, and you had to remember which train you were and where the station you were headed to could be found. At five or six, I found it overwhelming, but also intoxicating. (At 39, I now look back and suspect my grandfather wished he hadn't spent his life as clerk of the local magistrate's court.) Then there was another game - I've since learned that it's called Kim's Game, but as a kid I assumed my grandfather had invented it - in which he arranged a tray with bits and pieces from around the house, gave us a minute to study them all and then covered the tray with a cloth and quietly removed one item. When he uncovered the tray again we all had to spot what was missing.

God, memory is just fascinating. At times - these times may be called "the speedy approach to being 40" - it feels like memory is the most human of topics. It's where so much of what we are lays tangled together. Tangled and knotted. I think of Kim's Game and I am instantly back in my grandfather's living room. I can remember so many of the items that served time on the Kim's Game trays - a silver toast rack, a plectrum, a music box with a clown printed on it, a bright purple brazil nut chocolate - and then these items bring their own memories along with them too. I remember looking at that plectrum and wondering what it was for. I think of the toast rack and I can almost smell the gas hob and the marmalade that scented the kitchen of that house. I remember that I was allowed to eat that brazil nut chocolate once that particular game was completed.

Games and memory belong together, I think. There is the way they are stored in the mind, for starters. I tend to remember games the way I remember architecture or poetry: fragments set adrift, occasionally bumping into view, distracting and sometimes faintly troubling. Just as I remember a warm tiled corridor with iron banisters rising at the turn, or a gentleman, clean favoured, and imperially slim, I will suddenly from nowhere recall a cathedral that hangs from chains, or a cavern where visitors are intermittently crushed between slabs of disco-pink quartz. I remember pieces, and the pieces are often more interesting than the games they force me to track down. A door that held an entire ocean behind it. A book that sent me back to the start.

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Super Meat Boy


A new version of blood-soaked platformer Super Meat Boy will be released for iOS devices, developer Team Meat has revealed.


Now-renamed Super Meat Boy: The Game, the fresh incarnation will be remade "from the ground up" to rework the Xbox 360 and PC's precision controls for a touch screen interface.


Explaining the need to remake the game, Super Meat Boy designer Edmund McMillen wrote on Team Meat's blog that "there was no way in hell [the original] would work on a touch screen with buttons all over it, Super Meat Boy isn't a game we want to make a sub-par version of just to cash in".


Hence the new version for iOS.


McMillen went on: "what the game isn't: a shitty port of an existing game with non tactile buttons spread all over the screen blocking the players view and making for frustrating controls."


And neither is Super Meat Boy: The Game "the Super Meat Boy you're used to, there are aspects of Super Meat Boy in there, obviously, but this is a brand new game with new art, new sound, everything".


The first image of Super Meat Boy: The Game lies below, showing more rounded, cartoon graphics akin to the original game's cut-scenes. No release date was mentioned.

'Super Meat Boy: The Game announced for iOS' Screenshot 1
Super Meat Boy

UPDATE: Microsoft has confirmed that as of next month, all Xbox Live Arcade titles will have the option to increase from 200 to 400 Gamerscore points, with the addition of up to 30 Achievements.


The new 400 Point ceiling will be mandatory in all new XBLA games releasing from June this year.

ORIGINAL STORY: The Achievement limit for Xbox Live Arcade games is about to be doubled, a new report claims.


A fresh set of rules from Microsoft will double the current 200 Gamerscore base limit for downloadable titles to 400G.


XBLA games will also be able to include a maximum of 30 Achievements, up from the current 20 limit.


The new Achievement policy, unearthed by Xbox360Achievements, will apparently be mandatory for all XBLA releases beginning 1st June, while downloadable games launching from 1st April can opt in to the new system.


Achievement rules for XBLA DLC packs are also changing. The current standard for XBLA games is 50 extra Gamerscore and five more Achievements per quarter, up to a limit of 350 Gamerscore and 35 Achievements total.


This will increase to 100 Gamerscore and 8 Achievements per quarter, up to 800 Gamerscore and 62 Achievements total, meaning XBLA developers can add Achievement-infused DLC for a full year after release.


Eurogamer has contacted Microsoft for comment on the report. We'll update if we hear back.

Super Meat Boy


Team Meat is currently tinkering around with a smartphone version of its hit platformer Super Meat Boy.


Studio co-founder Edmund McMillen told Eurogamer that it has an idea for how to make the precision jumper work on a touchscreen and is prototyping the concept.


"We are currently developing tech for the next game that might be a touch remake of Super Meat Boy for both [iOS and Android] platforms mentioned," he explained.


"If we end up doing it it won't be anything like the version people are familiar with but something new that embodies the SMB spirit.


"Bottom line, SMB on a mobile device is by far the most requested thing we get asked and a few months ago we started playing around with a very odd idea that could make SMB work on a touch devise," he added.


"It seemed fun and inspired so we decided to start prototyping it to see if it was worth making. That's where we still are.


"Who knows if it will happen or not, if it sucks we won't release it, if it's fun we will continue working on it."


Team Meat hasn't exactly been vocal in its enthusiasm for smartphone gaming in the past. Back in March 2010, McMillen's colleague Tommy Refenes publicly stated that he "absolutely f****** hate[s] the iPhone app store", likening the service to the failed '90s Tiger handheld.


However, McMillen explained the pair are now slowly starting to come around.


"As for the 'U-turn', Tommy and I decided to question the platform's strengths and instead of being pessimistic at least make an attempt at making a good game for the platform rather than just say it's all s***. There have been quite a few good games that have come out since Tommy's rant so there is hope.


"FYI, the rant about the iPhone was from about three years ago and about how porting games to iPad was like Tiger handhelds of the early '90s, and also how the store sucks (it still sucks).


"You can't get away from how the mobile market is pretty bad these days, especially with its horribly encouraged copy-cat mentality and everyone out to make a quick buck.


"But there have been good games made for the platform that are unique and well done, we would like to attempt to be one of those instead of simply poo-pooing every aspect of the platforms."


Team Meat's notoriously unforgiving debut launched on Xbox Live Arcade to rave reviews back in 2010. See Tom Bramwell's sweat-flecked 9/10 Super Meat Boy review for details.

Braid


US cable TV network HBO has optioned the rights to make a fictional TV series based on forthcoming documentary Indie Game: The Movie.


According to Deadline, the film's directors Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky signed on the dotted line at the annual Sundance Film Festival in Utah over the weekend, where the film premiered to glowing reviews.


Initial reports that HBO wanted to turn it into a half-hour comedy have proved wide of the mark, with a post on the movie's Facebook page today stating "HBO has optioned IGTM for the basis of a (fictional) series. It is NOT a comedy. It is NOT a sitcom."


Hollywood veteran Scott Rudin - whose credits include 2011 Oscar winner The Social Network, Moneyball, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Queen and Wes Anderson's take on Roald Dahl favourite The Fantastic Mr Fox - will reportedly produce. No word on potential casting choices, but the mind boggles.


It's worth noting that not every property that gets optioned by a network necessarily makes it through to full production.


The film follows a number of recent indie titles through development, including Super Meat Boy, Braid and Fez. Take a look at a trailer for the flick, which is due out later this year, below.

Super Meat Boy


Rock hard downloadable game Super Meat Boy has sold over one million copies, developer Team Meat has revealed.


"Fun Fact: Super Meat Boy past [sic] the million sales mark last month!" the indie developer wrote on Twitter. "PLATINUM BABY."


Super Meat Boy, designed by Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, launched on Xbox Live Arcade in October 2010 as part of Microsoft's GameFeast XBLA promotion. It later launched on PC and Mac.


The two-man studio is now hard at work on its "ambitious", "fun", "more experimental" new project.

...

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