TGO Daily | January 4, 2020 | Super Meat Boy Forever Releases
The Gaming Observer is back in business!
I hope you had a tremendous holiday break, and are looking forward to an awesome 2021 :) 2020 was a wild year, but it was also a great one for video games. Hopefully that momentum can continue, and I look forward to see what devs have in store for us.
Today, it’s a recap of some of the biggest stories of the last few weeks. As the news cycles ramp back up again, we may have some slower paced days of news coming up — hopefully it won’t take too long to get back to normal.
Adrian
In The news
Super Meat Boy Forever Launches
The original Super Meat Boy is an incredibly important title in gaming history as one of the landmark games in a massive surge of indies being released. Ten years later, its sequel Super Meat Boy Forever has come out…and nobody is talking about it.
Part of the reason could be because it came out 2 days before Christmas. It also doesn’t have the name Edmund McMillen attached to it anymore, who brings a lot of brand value these days.
The reviews for it have also been disappointing, likely because of how dramatically the sequel changes the game’s core mechanics. The main source of contention is the game now being an auto-runner, like you would see on a mobile game. All you can control is jumping, ducking, and punching while Meat Boy automatically moves forward. Apparently that isn’t as bad as it may seem, but it’s also hampered by the game now having procedurally generated levels, which are longer and divided by checkpoints.
Kotaku made a great point that Meat Boy joins two other follow-ups in 2020 of indie classics Spelunky and Hades:
This year, all three have seen direct sequels or spiritual successors, with Hades building on and yet far surpassing the foundation laid in Bastion. In this context, Super Meat Boy Forever feels especially disappointing, offering not even just more of the same from a treasured classic, but instead a weirdly compromised spin-off whose auto-runner conceit feels stifling without bringing anything exceptionally new or worthwhile to the table. It’s hardly a terrible game, and it’s still rife with cutscenes that tell a breezy new chapter in the Meat Boy-verse. But it’s still a bummer.
It’s a shame that it won’t make the same splash that the original title did, but hopefully the people who bought it aren’t too disappointed. If you’re interested in trying it out, it’s available right now on the Epic Games Store and the Nintendo Switch.
Binding of Isaac: Repentance
Speaking of Edmund McMillen, we finally have a release date for the final DLC of The Binding Of Isaac: Rebirth! It’s called Repentance, is the biggest expansion the game has ever had, and releases on March 31st.
The backstory here is that around the time the last DLC released, Afterbirth+, a very popular mod for the game also released called Antibirth. Well many of the hardcore players of the game preferred this mod over the official expansion (which was not received very well), so Edmund just hired the mod creators to make another official expansion, which is now Repentance.
I’m super excited for this one, and am looking forward to diving back into that game with new content.
AGDQ 2021 Kicks Off
Since I’m not seeing much coverage of it, I’ll cover it myself!
Awesome Games Done Quick, the speedrunning charity fundraising event, is now live and accepting donations for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. If you’ve never had the chance to check out one of these shows, I highly encourage you to do so — you don’t need to do know anything about speedrunning, because they explain it all while they play. Its super fun to see some of your favourite games being torn apart for the sake of speed, and a fantastic community has been built around it for a good cause.
Check out the schedule here, and watch it live on Twitch here, where they’ll be going 24 hours a day until Sunday
Koei Tecmo Gets Hacked
It appears as though a major hack has occurred at Koei Tecmo on Christmas Day, with over 60,000 accounts having personal information released. While Koei maintains that while no financial information is out, email addresses, passwords, mailing addresses, and birthdays are all possibly leaked.
If you have an account with the company, you are encouraged to change your information on it, as well as change any passwords you might reuse on other websites.
Say Hello!
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