In case you missed it: Team's Meat's teased A Voyeur for September turned out to be Super Meat Boy Forever, an auto-scrolling platformer starring everybody's favourite sentient cube of meat. Now, more details have come to light at PAX: details like it's "not an endless runner", and lots of other interesting stuff. Also the sad news that Mew-Genics Team Meat's cat-based cat game about cats is now on hold.

As an FAQ at the above link explains, Super Meat Boy Forever is "not a simple endless runner" and "not a one button game", but rather a meaty platformer featuring six chapters, a dark world, twice the bosses of Super Meat Boy, and "a vast randomly generated level structure" that will change the level layout after each death. There will be an endless mode, and Meat Boy will scamper along levels without you having to hold down an analog stick/d-pad, but the platforming does seem a bit more embellished than that in most endless running type games.

Team Meat's "goal with SMB:F is to design a new full length platformer for touch devices from the ground up to avoid tacking bad controls on an existing design. we want to make something that embodies the original Super Meat Boy but is designed around a simple yet intuitive control scheme allowing for pin point accuracy and surprisingly deep controls without the use of multiple buttons/analog sticks." Don't let that "touch devices" bit worry you: it's also coming to PC.

As for Team Meat's other in-development game, "Mewgenics is not canceled, we just put it on hold to work full time on this one. Once SMB:F is released we will hop back on it".

Super Meat Boy Forever looks like this:

Team Meat, the two-man studio behind the indie hit Super Meat Boy, is apparently working on something entirely new called A Voyeur For September. You can ask me what it is, but I will tell you only this: It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside a trailer.

Do you ever get the feeling that Team Meat has a little trouble staying focused? Back in October 2012, Edmund McMillen announced that the new version of Super Meat Boy the team was working on was being put on hold so it could focus on Mew-Genics, and then last month he revealed that Mew-Genics had also been put on hold so he and Team Meat partner Tommy Refenes can work on something entirely different.

That "something" has now come to light, sort of, as A Voyeur For September. All it is at this point is a snowy, distorted trailer consisting primarily of a creeper's view of somebody's living room, intercut with random, black-and-white clips of stuff. There's a website at avoyeurforseptember.com but it consists of nothing but a title, a copyright message, the Team Meat logo and the trailer in question.

In a post that went up earlier this afternoon, McMillen confirmed that Mew-Genics is "on hold till the next Team Meat game comes out," and said that it will be officially announced and shown later this month at PAX. So with nothing else to do until then, let's take a closer look:

Dandelions on the lawn. Men in ties. An empty room, through a window. Plants, and a man at a desk. More dandelions. A back yard. A punching bag? Upside down, in color then right-side up. A buzzing bee. The picture comes into focus. A goat head on the wall. A woman walks up the stairs. Dandelions. A sharp breeze. Life, to death; and from death, life.

Okay, fine. You explain it to me, then. You've got until August 29 to figure it out; after that, the doors to PAX will be flung open, and all the secrets will be laid bare.

Every week, keen screen-grabber Ben Griffin brings you a sumptuous 4K resolution gallery to celebrate PC gaming's prettiest places.

Like Braid's protagonist himself, webcomic artist David Hellman's soft, painterly style has stood the test of time, and while the visuals here aren't sharp like a Broken Age or indeed Broken Sword given that they were never intended to display at such ludicrous resolutions, this is at the very least a nice experiment.

Until now, to the best of my knowledge, there's never been a single 4K shot of Braid. Now there are 15, all worthy of your desktop wallpaper.



Download the full-sized image here.



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Jonathan Blow, the outspoken developer behind indie hit Braid and upcoming puzzle game The Witness, has posted a pair of pictures hinting that virtual reality support may be coming to the Myst-alike. The images feature the unmistakable double-vision familiar from every Oculus Rift game demo, and as pointed out by an eagle-eyed commenter on Blow s site, the images are titled VR1 and VR2.



For all of the excitement around the Oculus Rift, including John Carmack s recent full-time devotion to the project, programming Rift support into games is still fairly rare. According to Road to VR, barely two dozen games have been developed with in-house Rift support.Luckily for VR enthusiasts, third-party drivers have added support to dozens more including Skyrim, Arma 2 and Mirror s Edge.



Getting to explore the lush island of The Witness with built-in VR support will be a treat, but there is a snag in this fantasy: The Witness will hit the PS4 before it comes to PC, and Sony is rumored to be launching a VR headset for its console. Still, once the work of building to VR headsets has been done, it should translate easily.

If you're a fan of weirdly ethereal electronic bleeps, uplifting synthetic bloops, and occasional ambient strumming, the latest Humble Weekly Sale should be of interest. Rather than focus on a particular game series, or a developer's back catalogue, it features the work of Jim Guthrie: composer of the soundtracks to Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP and Indie Game: The Movie - both of which are also available in their original non-soundtrack forms as 'beat the average' bonuses.



I was a big fan of Sword & Sworcery, and so much of that game's effortlessly off-kilter tone was defined by the way Guthrie's music was integrated into every part of it. At its heart, it was a soundtrack you could walk around in.

It's also a good time for Humble to branch out into approaching a game-related bundle from a new angle. If you just want some cheap games, you're aren't short of options this week. So rather than try to compete with Steam's sale dominance, it's nice to see this emerge as an alternative.



You can find the Weekly Sale page here. The Jim Guthrie and Friends collection will run for just over six days.

Indie Game: The Movie is to get a special edition, bringing over a hundred minutes of new short films, and epilogues for each of the original's main subjects. Is there significantly more to that follow-up story than "everybody got extremely rich"? Will Phil Fish want to stone-cold murder anybody else? Will the movie's creators remember that not all indie games are 2D platformers. A new trailer may reveal the answers to some of these questions.



Damn, they really love that Jonathan Blow passage.

The special edition will also bring new commentaries from Team Meat and the directors of the movie. It will be available as a standalone purchase for digital owners, or as DLC for the Steam version.

In addition, DVD and Blu-Ray box-sets are being released, with over 300 minutes of new material. Details of that package are available at the IGTM website.

Indie Game: The Movie Special Edition will release July 24.

Nothing says “indie” quite like breaking down the walls of copyright and adding a bunch of characters from games you had no hand in making. And wouldn’t you know it, Gaijin Games is doing just that with their cardiovascular improvement simulator, BIT.TRIP Presents: Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien or "Runner 2" for those who need to work on their lung capacity.

Those who drop $3 for the “Good Friends Character Pack” will have access to Psychonauts’ Raz, Cave Story’s Quote, Machinarium’s Josef, Super Meat Boy’s Dr. Fetus, Portal 2’s Atlas (who’s Steam exclusive), Bit.Trip’s invisible Commander Video, and Spelunky's, er, Spelunky Guy.

We’re a little bummed that the DLC doesn’t offer new levels of some kind, but it’s hard to complain about anything when it’s a paltry $3, which, as developer Dant Rambo notes, is less than "a bag of hot dog chips." Still, here’s hoping we get some new levels to break in this new cast somewhere in the near future. In the meantime, why don't you watch these character introductions narrated by none other than Charles Martinet, aka, the voice of Mario. Yes, that Mario.

Just as promised, Steam Trading Cards is now live. The virtual cards can be earned by playing participating games on Steam, trading with other users, or buying on the Steam Marketplace. Complete a set to create a badge, earn rewards and XP, and level up. The user with the highest Steam level at the end of the year gets to high five Gabe Newell while announcing Half-Life 3. In space.

In other true facts, I'm already hearing from users playing the Steam marketplace to profit off the cards' initial popularity. One user I spoke to has been buying low and selling high to pad his Steam wallet, even creating scarcity by buying up low-value cards in quantity. I'll keep an eye on marketplace prices as more users start trading the collectibles.

I was hoping to find a good deal on a 1952 Mickey Mantle card, but unfortunately, baseball isn't a participating game. You can see which of the games you own are participating here.

Team Meat's take on piracy is just as blunt as its bloody platformer Super Meat Boy, with the two-man team stating in 2011 that it "doesn't #%@$ing care" about gamers stealing its game. Now, co-creator Tommy Refenes says in a tumblr post that a more worthwhile alternative to intrusive DRM systems is to forge trust with gamers and deliver a solid, reliable product. I know, that's just crazy talk.

"As a forward-thinking developer who exists in the present, I realize and accept that a pirated copy of a digital game does not equate to money being taken out of my pocket," Refenes begins.

Refenes believes it's impossible for a publisher to absolutely claim that the implementation of DRM made a game more profitable. "There is no way to calculate this because it is not possible to quantify the intentions of a person," he says. "Also, there’s no way of accurately determining which customers would have stolen the game had there not been DRM." He continues: "I do believe people are less likely to pirate your software if the software is easy to buy, easy to run, and does what is advertised. You can’t force a person to buy your software no more than you can prevent a person from stealing it."

Refenes boils the issue down to building trust between a company and its customers—if a developer or publisher shows consistency with its works and treats everyone fairly, he says, people will want to buy and show support with their wallets. "People need to care about your employees and your company's well being," he writes. "There is no better way to achieve that than making sure what you put out there is the best you can do and you treat your customers with respect."

And yes, Refenes does bring up SimCity as an example of What Not To Do in the case of customer relations and product quality, believing the waves of refund requests EA received during the game's messy launch are "much more dangerous" than piracy itself to the company's bottom line.

"When EA/Maxis create their next new game, how many people are going to be excited about it and talking positively about it?" he asks. "I imagine that the poison of their current SimCity launch is going to seep into the thoughts of potential customers and be a point of speculation like, 'Is it going to be another SimCity launch?'"

Read the rest of Refenes' comments on his tumblr page.