I dove back down Hotline Miami‘s blood-slick Slip ‘n’ Slide of utterly blissful brutality this weekend, and now it’s all I can think about. It’s a testament to the sheer refinement of its systems, I think, that it can so thoroughly hook me time and time again. But nothing is perfect – not even when it’s really, really close>. So Cactus and co are charging forward with a full-blown sequel. Will there be more breeds of dog? More types of dudes with cat-like shotgunning-your-face-off reflexes? Cats? Um, well, no one’s really sure yet. Oh, but it will have music! This has been – as we say in nigh-impenetrable videogame parlance – confirmed.

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Hotline Miami now allows players to throttle their flatmates with controller cords. Either that or it’s actually possible to play the game with a controller but that seems unlikely. That’s not the only fix/addition that the update brings and there’s also a native Mac version in the works. Important additions: new environmental graphics, a bonus stage unlocked when the campaign is finished, “more gore with the Jones mask” and “the pot of boiling water has been updated”. We should compile a ‘patch note of the year’ list just so that the pot of boiling water can win some sort of trophy. The update should already be live on Steam.

HOTLINE MIAMI

ADAM SMITH / ALEC MEER / CARA ELLISON / LEWIE PROCTER

GO

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Part of me objects to the very concept of expanding Hotline Miami – “IT IS A PURE AND PERFECT SHINING DIAMOND OF FLOW, CONTROL, MOOD AND BRUTALITY LEAVE IT ALONE” – but most of me just wants to play some more Hotline Miami. Devs Dennaton have quietly revealed that DLC for the game of fluid murder is in the works, as well as ongoing patching for the buggy old dear, proper joypad* support and more “secret” things. (more…)

If you can’t beat ‘em, well… that’s not actually a phrase that exists in the world of Hotline Miami. It’s either beat (with a colorful assortment of bats, drills, pipes, and katanas) or be beaten black and blue and red and neon pink. There is, as Yoda says – presumably as a result of some LSD-induced hallucination – no try. Hotline Miami’s creators, however, are nothing> like that. They, perhaps better than much of the rest of the gaming industry, understand the art of compromise. So when pirates started peddling a slightly glitchy version of Hotline Miami in the Internet’s seediest alleyways, Jonatan Soderstrom – aka, Cactus – decided to offer them a helping hand.

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