Good news and less good news from the Humble Bundle camp today. The happier end of the bargain is that purchasers of the current Humble Bundle 4 now get the base contents of Humble Bundle 3 (i.e. VVVVVV, Crayon Physics Deluxe, Cogs, And Yet It Moves, and Hammerfight) added to their pack. That’s if they’ve bought HB4 already. If they haven’t, they’ll have to beat the average price to get the bonus goodies. The average price is currently $5.17 million. (more…)

Details of the next Humble Indie Bundle have once more leaked, because Steam’s Content Description Record Viewer Thingamie is so ludicrously easy for people to spy. And it looks like it’s going to be a bit of a corker, as spotted by DIY Gamer. In the pay-what-you-want collection it seems there will be Super Meat Boy, BIT.TRIP.RUNNER, Jamestown, Nightsky and Shank. That’s the first wave, and then there’s even better to get added in.

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Here’s an indie bundle with a difference – it doesn’t contain any games. Instead, the Indie Music Bundle it’s a collection of soundtracks from some of your favourite (assumption #1) indie games and some you have probably never heard of (assumption #2). As is swiftly becoming obligatory, the ten albums are available at a price of your choosing, although this is for one day only, being a Black Friday sale. The minimum price is $1 and if you pay at least $10 you’ll receive seven bonus items.

Of the ones that I know, the VVVVVV soundtrack is simply wonderful, and both Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac, are quite enjoyable. The latter is in the $10 bonus items. Even if you opt to be stingy, for a dollar you’re sure to find something that you love (assumption #3). Everything is DRM-free and delivered as 320kbps MP3s. Take a look.

The Binding of Isaac is a roguelike-or-is-it/shooter/body-horror/religion-bating curio from Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl. It’s… different. It’s nasty. It’s funny. It’s lightning fast. It’s cruel. It’s a lot of things, in one small and very cheap package. But is it any good? In the name of finding out, Alec and Adam gathered to discuss mutant babies, shooting human waste products, dicing with the devil and laser eyeballs.> (more…)

And we <3 Team Meat right back. Over the weekend, they've been chatting to the cool cats over at IndieGames.com, and Ed dropped this hefty knowledge bomb:

We’re never going to make a game that couldn’t also be on PC. That’s a stupid thing for most indies to do. PC is crucial

No surprises there, considering that the Steam sales of SMB outnumber the Xbox sales by 2:1.

Don’t just take my out-of-context quote for it though, listen to the interview yourself here. There’s talk about how Tommy’s ex really >didn’t like him wearing pyjama pants outside, Ed discusses the development of The Binding of Isaac, and they dish out a bit of advice to indie devs hoping to get a Steam distribution deal.

What will> the next game from Super Meat Boy creators Team Meat be? Well, it probably won’t be a Super Meat Boy sequel, going on their earlier comments. But it does, apparently, have something to do with one, some or all of these things: stabbing, cardboard, cats, trolls, teabagging, ninja sais, Benny Hill.
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Update: Team Meat are now claiming this was only a misinterpreted joke and there’s no truth to the reported number.

Holy…> We’ve been pointed in the direction of DarkZero’s pretty fascinating chat with Super Meat Boy creators Tommy Refenes and Edmund McMillen, and amongst all manner of rumination on stuff like the importance of Steam sales and why they’re not worried about piracy, they let slip a little but apparently made-up number.
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There are now over 500 levels in bastard-hard platform gem Super Meat Boy. Over 500.> This absurd milestone has been reached as a result of a dramatic new update, known in continually Nintendo-prodding fashion as Super Meat World. It’s free, it was added to the game on Saturday, and it consists of a slew of new official levels and even more of a slew of approved third-party levels for the blood-smearing jumpy-runny game.
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What are you doing right now? Working? Smiling? Breathing? Well, stop with that nonsense and go straight over to the Steam page for The Potato Sack, a new bundle of indie games offering £108′s worth of great indie games, including Amnesia, Super Meat Boy, Toki Tori (which you can read Kieron shouting about here), The Ball (which Jim and John talk about here) and Defense Grid: The Awakening, for a paltry £27. I’d eagerly pay £30 for those five games alone, and there are another eight in the pack.

While if you already own two or three of these games you might have a tricky decision ahead of you, if you don’t own a single one of them then this is an absolute no-brainer. Buy! Buy it now! There’s even a Team Fortress 2 hat in it for you. And just in case only one or two of the participating games catch your eye, each of them is currently enjoying a 50% off sale. Amazing.

Last night at GDC, Team Meat took the stage to let out some of the frustrations that accompanied releasing Super Meat Boy. And those frustrations were Microsoft. Seemingly screwed over on a number of occasions, the independent dev team did not receive the promotion they were promised in return for the month-long XBLA exclusivity. Eurogamer have all the details about this screwery here. But there’s another aspect to this story. During the talk they also revealed that the game had the majority of its sales on the PC, despite the 360′s month-long head start.

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