mew-genics
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Mew-Genics on hold, will return when it's 'more coherent'
Mew-Genics is officially on hold, Team Meat's Tommy Refenes confirmed to Joystiq at PAX Prime in Seattle. The game was first revealed in October 2012, though the Super Meat Boy developer did not fully explain how the genetically-altered cat lady simulator would operate for another four months. The decision to drag the game's esoteric explanation out is one that Refenes seemed to regret, saying the developer "shouldn't have been talking about it as much in the beginning as we did, because the game expanded beyond what it originally was." As a result, the game grew beyond Team Meat's own original vision: "Even some of the posts that we made in the beginning, that stuff doesn't exist in the game anymore," he added. For example, the developer discussed a "trinkets" system in December 2012, which is now gone from Mew-Genics, as it's "expanded into the stores" in the game.
Mew-Genics side characters make cat calls on specific days
Team Meat's upcoming "cat lady sim," Mew-Genics, has quite the colorful cast of characters - despite being rendered in a 2D style completely devoid of color. According to a recent blog post by developer Edmund McMillen, said cast is also larger than previously thought: side characters can be met with on certain days to influence gameplay. "Each day of the week (real time days) most of these new side characters will appear, and ask something of you," McMillen wrote on the Team Meat blog. "Or maybe offer you something? Or maybe they will just help you break into the cat genetics lab?" McMillen also teased that Mew-Genics had "taken one final sharp turn in development" and that co-developer Tommy Refenes plans to release a video update which will reveal more soon. [Image: Team Meat]
Mew-Genics explains heredity through the miracle of kitten birth
Mew-Genics is an upcoming Team Meat production focused on cats: Cat breeding, cat sex, the horrors of cat genetic manipulation and, as the below .gif demonstrates, the adorably icky parts of cat birth. Though the cloud of afterbirth is a nice touch, the important thing to notice here is the kitten unceremoniously plopped onto the ground. He bears his mother's spots, but since his father is nearly pure white, the lil' fella's spots are less prevalent than they were in the prior generation. As Team Meat explains, this (and every other trait the kitten inherits) may change as the cat ages. Of course, Mew-Genics also allows players to influence the way their cats change over time. With a few subtle environmental tweaks, a kitten destined to grow into the feline equivalent of Mother Teresa might instead pledge allegiance to the thug life. Mew-Genics is currently slated for release at some point during 2014.
Mew-Genics will let you influence, mutate cats using furniture
Lots of people feel that cats have some of the strongest personalities in the animal kingdom; but what if instead of just animal personalities, a cat could be a hipster, a VHS lover or Super Meat Boy fan? What if you could control and selectively breed cat personalities so that you could, as Mew-Genics creator Edmund McMillen puts it in the latest update on the Team Meat blog, "storm the cat fights with your epic army of thugged out pussy?" McMillen explains that in Mew-Genics, cats will have varying personalities when they're born, "from lazy to sexy, from passive to psychotic." Personalities are influenced by items and furniture, which McMillen detailed the function of earlier this month. If a piece of home decor is rare, it's also possible the cat will identify with it so strongly that the cat will mutate and an element or design of the item will become part of the cat. In one screen, a cat that identifies with a Super Meat Boy doll has the same black eye and missing tooth as the hamburger hero. In another, a cat that identifies with gangster rap has a tattoo of a knife on his cheek and a bandana on his head. Again: there is a cat thug with a bandana and knife tattoo on his face. I ... I don't know how to end this post.
Mew-Genics wants you to hoard attribute-boosting furniture
Team Meat recently unveiled another aspect of Mew-Genics' gameplay: furniture collecting. Super Meat Boy creator Edmund McMillen discussed the game's furniture system in a blog post on the game's site, drawing comparisons to Nintendo's Animal Crossing series. In Mew-Genics, players acquire furniture through Baby Jack's store then place it in a room in their house. Each piece of furniture, which belongs to one of five "types," influences a variety of stats in the game, from disease rates to each cat's life span. The five types of furniture are large, medium, small, wall furniture and those belonging to item sets. Team Meat says Mew-Genics will include 750 pieces of furniture in total, not including rare alternates for each one. The cat genetics and breeding game will launch in 2014 for Steam, iOS and Android.
Push two cats together to create a new one in Mew-Genics
Team Meat's Edmund McMillen recently attempted to explain how the Super Meat Boy developer's next game, Mew-Genics, operates. Naturally, McMillen opted to describe the game in webcomic form, noting that it is about "cat genetics and the forced evolution of the most adaptive species on this whole planet." The comic illustrates players' ability in the breeding game to mash two cats together in order to create a new kitten, care for them as well as enter them into battles and pageant-style contests. Team Meat previously referred to Mew-Genics as a "cat lady sim" that blends elements of "The Sims and Pokemon with a sprinkling of Animal Crossing and a dash of Tamagotchi." McMillen likened Mew-Genics to an unreleased Nintendo game called Cabbage that was in development by Earthbound creator Shigesato Itoi and Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto for the canceled Nintendo 64DD system. Cabbage was a multiplayer breeding game that was expected to allow players to take their creature on the go with their Game Boy systems. Mew-Genics is in development for Steam, iOS and Android, and will launch in 2014.
Mew-Genics trailer has folk singing, exploding cats, 2014 release date
The first trailer for Mew-Genics, the upcoming "cat lady sim" from Team Meat (of Super Meat Boy fame) has arrived, and it's... uh... well, there's singing, giant cats exploding, microscopic cats being injected into another cat, a cat pooping out another cat, and we're not 100 percent sure, but some cats might also be up to some NSFW activities at one point in the video. The teaser ends with a cat exploding into a mushroom cloud, which rains down more cats while a "Coming 2014" fades into view. About that 2014 release date: In an email to Joystiq, Edmund McMillen of Team Meat wrote that the game is "definitely one of those 'it's done when it's done' projects," so exactly when in 2014 we'll get our hands on these adorable kittens is up in the air. McMillen described Mew-Genics as a cat breeding sim, cat fighting sim, cat hoarding sim, cat pageant sim, and cat racing sim, all rolled into one. While you wait for your chance to breed, fight, hoard, show off and race your cats, why not sing the Mew-genics theme song to your cat and/or friends? Trust us, they'll thank you.
Mew-Genics, official comic debuting at Pax Prime
Team Meat's new, characteristically adorable/disturbing cat-lady sim Mew-Genics will be on display and playable for all of the hot, teeming masses attending Pax Prime in Seattle this August. This will be the game's first exhibition at any tradeshow or convention, in addition to the debut of its companion comic book. The 28-page black-and-white comic is "packed to the brim with funformation," according to Team Meat's announcement, and it (along with the game itself and "other fun stuff") can all be found at Team Meat's official booth.
Mew-Genics revealed as a 'cat lady sim'
Team Meat has finally unveiled Mew-Genics' true nature, after 17 weeks of teasers and tidbits. Dubbed a "cat lady sim," Mew-Genics will blend elements of "The Sims and Pokemon with a sprinkling of Animal Crossing and a dash of Tamagotchi," as creator Edmund McMillen puts it on Team Meat's official blog.Sounds like just about the most wholesome thing ever, right? Well, not exactly -- McMillen describes a typical Mew-Genics session, during which a cat is unfrozen from a "Cryo-cube" and paired with another cat for breeding. The unfrozen cat attacks the second, and because the attack took place while the second cat was eating, the second cat then associates food with pain from that point on. As a result, the second cat starves to death in the attic.Later, a stray is brought in and successfully mated with the unfrozen cat, which results in a pregnancy. Unfortunately though, the stray suffers from narcolepsy, a trait that is then inherited by the two kittens born from the union. This condition causes one of the kittens to fall asleep during a kitty beauty pageant, losing the competition.After the stray cat runs away, it is discovered that it infected the unfrozen cat with "feline aids." As the treatments are too expensive, the cat is re-frozen into a Cryo-cube and put back into storage. Completing missions for a doctor, however, could help find a cure. The game then ends with the player being arrested by animal control.There's a lot of interesting gameplay elements contained within that tremendously upsetting story, like the fact that cats can inherit traits from their parents and that those traits can lead to failure or (presumably) success during missions. It also made us want to cry. Mew-Genics will launch on Steam, iOS and Android sometime before the end of the year.
Team Meat teases cat fighting, full Mew-Genics announcement next week
This may come as a shock to some of you, but Team Meat's mysterious, feline-focused project Mew-Genics will feature cat-on-cat combat as a heavily integral part of the game's design, Edmund McMillen has revealed. Who ever would have guessed? Team Meat's games are usually so nonviolent.Furthermore, McMillen stated that he has been "using faked graphics for all the cats" in his weekly updates about Mew-Genics, meaning that everything we've seen so far has essentially been concept art. Next week, however, Team Meat will "finally announce what this damn game is," according to its official blog.
Treat your ears to the first full song from the Mew-Genics soundtrack
The Ridiculon duo, composed in half by a former Sleepytime Gorilla Museum member, are working on Team Meat's Mew-Genics soundtrack like a cat works a ball of yarn. "The Ballad of D. Claude" is the first full track from the album, available in full and with lyrics on Bandcamp.
Super Meat Boy development for mobile paused
Developer Team Meat has stopped production of the next Super Meat Boy – the mobile version – to focus all efforts on Mew-Genics."We decided to officially pause work on the next Super Meat Boy and remake Mew-Genics outside of flash, making it our new full time project," the developer noted on its blog. Team Meat co-founder Edmund McMillen elaborated to Joystiq, "It's the new Super Meat Boy made for touch and other platforms. We pitched the idea as a re-envisioning of Super Meat Boy on iOS and people assumed it was just a remake or port, but it's actually a completely new Super Meat Boy game. But yes it's on hold til Mew-Genics is done."Mew-Genics was announced late last year and Team Meat's Edmund McMillen said it was the strangest game he's ever worked on. This is coming from the guy behind The Binding of Isaac. Hold us, we're scared.
Team Meat grants Mew-Genics Steam support, details project history
As one of Team Meat's "Caturday" teasers, the team announced Steam support for Mew-Genics. The game was previously announced for iOS.Team Meat also took a moment to discuss the history of Mew-Genics, noting that the project has been in development for 18 weeks. It started as a Ludum Dare 24 challenge under the "Evolution" theme, though Team Meat went with the "1,000 kittens" joke theme that the community attempted to vote in. After three days of development in Flash, the development duo realized it had a "monster mashup of many different game genres with an underlying theme [it] hadn't seen done in games before" on its hands. Mew-Genics then became the developer's full-time project.The team also recognizes how obscure the "Caturday" teasers have become, saying it "will only do two more Caturday teasers after this then pull back and focus on getting the game done as well as officially announcing what the game actually is and how it plays."
The sounds of Mew-Genics include guitar, drums, glock, cat fights
The music in Mew-Genics is crucial. It's also quirky, fun and from a duo named Ridiculon, one half of which, Matthias Bossi, was a member of experimental rock band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. Bossi and John Evans slapped together a video about recording music for Mew-Genics, sharing a few details about the game in-between banging on hard surfaces and screaming about cat fights.Mew-Genics will feature a lab, a scientist, races in the sewers, kitty pageants and cat rumbles, Bossi and Evans say, and it will launch "super quick." The soundtrack includes 10 instrumentals and 10 full songs with lyrics, including one with the catchy chorus, "Cat fight, cat fight / Cat fight, cat fight / Got cat? Let's fight!" Watch the video above to get that one stuck in your head for the rest of the day.
Mew-Genics reveals the sordid world of sewer cat racing
In the underground world of sewer cats (and we do mean underground), racing is the thing to do. At least in Mew-Genics it is – today's tidbit about the game teases Frank's Cat Races, a sewer-based scheme where players will be able to test how fast their felines are and potentially find their fortunes, Team Meat writes.We met the mastermind behind the cat races, Frank, in November, and if you'll recall, he has "head problems." He also has a tail, though apparently it's not much of a problem.
Mew-Genics lets you freeze cats, is worrisome
While Team Meat has been releasing teasers for Mew-Genics over the past few months, its managed to do so without explicitly discussing how the game operates. The latest teaser image follows suit, as it divulges a "Cryo-Cube 5000" that seems to freeze cats (or food) for future use.Last week's teaser revealed the Boon County Cat Pageant that Mew-Genics players will apparently participate in. Whether frozen cats are eligible to compete is unclear.
Mew-Genics is multi-platform, one of which is iOS
Mew-Genics will be available on iOS devices, but that's not all. Well, actually, that is all for today. The weekly Mew-Genics teaser simply says that the game will launch on multiple platforms, one of which is iOS, as demonstrated by the accompanying iPad mock-up. Considering the mobile angle and Edmund McMillen's recent involvement with Sony, we're personally hoping for a Vita release as well. So far we've learned that Mew-Genics will feature a ton of cats, a rockin' soundtrack and magical trinkets such as petrified poop that lowers damage taken.
Latest Mew-Genics teaser collects trinkets with 'magic properties'
Team Meat recently released some new pieces of information about its current project, Mew-Genics. The game includes a trinket display case for all the "stuff" that players acquire, which sometimes "appear imbued with magic properties that change space and time."Collectable trinkets include food, vomit, kittens, mail and petrified poop. The petrified poop shown in the picture "slightly lowers damage taken," so at least we can assume that this game about cats (many cats) includes some kind of health and damage system. Of course, the petrified poop seen here also lowers the "poop rate" of all cats, so there are apparently some other gameplay elements happening here. There are 105 trinket types in Mew-Genics, each with semi randomly-generated properties.
Mew-Genics teaser brings the beautiful noise
It's Caturday y'all, and that means one more tidbit of information regarding Team Meat's latest project, Mew-Genics. Since all of the game's characters have been revealed, the Team Meat has begun slowly releasing tangential information about the game, with this week's reveal being "Cat Chase," the title theme."We really splurged with the soundtrack for Mew-Genics, the game will feature a full album of over 20 studio recorded songs," Team Meat's Edmund McMillen said in an official update. "We really wanted to make the games music feature extended themes of the game or small stories within each song, kind of how Katamari did it in a way, except all our songs are about cats!"The game's soundtrack/album is being composed by Matthias Bossi and Jon Evans, the former of which provided the narration for The Binding of Isaac. Here's hoping the rest of the score has the same spooky, Neverhood/Skullmonkeys-esque vibe as this track, which can be heard above.
Mew-Genics to hoard over 12 sextillion cats
Team Meat's latest teaser for Mew-Genics is all about the game's "cast of cats," in that it features over 12,207,031,250,000,000,000,000 felines. The developer blog explains that the enormous number "only applies to how the cat looks, if you include its personality variables that number multiplies by A LOT."Team Meat added that "ability variables and personal stats" could practically guarantee that you'll never get the same cat twice in the game. Not that we know what that entails, since all we really know about Mew-Genics is that it's "kind of" about cats. Lots of them.
