Video games
fromEngadget
18 hours agoSuper Meat Boy 3D, coin-pushing chaos and other new indie games worth checking out
Indie game showcases are thriving, with new games and updates announced regularly.
Whenever you're working with an existing IP, there's always the question of how you're going to translate and adapt, right? Because it's not a one-to-one sort of interpretation.
Upload any picture or video, and Musubi uses artificial intelligence to extract the most important part and hover it in space as a 3D image within the frame. That could be a video of a child's first steps or a snapshot of a birthday party. The image will be displayed in 3D form, viewable in all its holographic glory across nearly 170 degrees.
The lyrics have a rather annoying quality to them, similar to the way that other songs like "Call Me Maybe" by Carly Rae Jepsen, "Fireflies" by Owl City or even "Friday" by Rebecca Black did in their time - songs that gained rapid popularity and, just as quickly, sparked rapid backlash from many due to overexposure to them.
Mattel operates dozens of brands under its corporate umbrella, each with their own visual identity and brand voice. But, until now, Mattel has never had its own proprietary typeface for its overarching brand, instead opting to license multiple existing fonts on a global scale—an endeavor that was not only expensive, but also came at the cost of visual consistency across Mattel's many product lines.
It's now an online sci-fi extraction shooter in which players beam down to the planet Tau Ceti IV to scavenge for loot, carry out missions and potentially blast each other in the process. Its closest rival is Arc Raiders, which makes a similar use of stylised retro-futurism.
Each layered element is independent, all housed within one object on your timeline. Multiple elements can be combined into a Flipbook by using the multi-select function. This allows for users to shift, organise, and retime frames.
One thing I spent a lot of effort on is getting edges looking sharp. Take a look at this rotating cube example: Try opening the "split" view. Notice how well the characters follow the contour of the square. This renderer works well for animated scenes, like the ones above, but we can also use it to render static images: The image of Saturn was generated with ChatGPT.
I've recently refreshed the animated graphics on my website with a new theme and a group of pioneering characters, putting into practice plenty of the techniques I shared in this series. A few of my animations change appearance when someone interacts with them or at different times of day. The colours in the graphic atop my blog pages change from morning until night every day.
Memes have become the clearest and most direct language of digital culture: condensed fragments of reality that synthesize the complexity of the present and circulate at the same speed as a society surrendered to hyperstimulation. From the Dancing Baby of the 1990s to the endless templates of X, Instagram, or TikTok, memes have evolved from simple ephemeral jokes to veritable systems for decoding the world, semiotic capsules that allow us to process the political, the social, and the intimate.
There were lots of good stuff in this week's Convergence Showcase too, including another peek at Mouse: P.I. for Hire as we get to see one of the game's bosses for the first time. This first-person shooter with rubber-hose animation is set to arrive on March 19. There were other welcome announcements for me in this showcase. First, there was a release date for the Zelda-inspired adventure Gecko Gods.
A new controller from 8BitDo has been announced for smartphones, and this add-on will make your phone resemble a next-gen Game Boy. At CES 2026, 8BitDo showed off the FlipPad, a gamepad that connects to a smartphone via its USB-C port. Details on the FlipPad are scarce for now, but 8BitDo says it will support both iOS and Android devices.
Returning to old games isn't always easy. Depending on how old the game is, you might run into various problems, including unusual controls or compatibility issues. Another common point of friction you might encounter is an older game running poorly. This can make it a slog to replay some of the modern classics, even if they're just a decade or so old. So I'm happy to see Ubisoft going back and updating performance in games like Far Cry Primal and Assassin's Creed Unity.
Following the initial reveal last September, Nintendo has released a new trailer detailing which Virtual Boy games will be available to Switch Online subscribers starting on February 17th alongside revamped headsets, and which titles will launch later this year. The company also revealed some new features for the games, including the option to change the color of Virtual Boy titles which were notoriously limited to only bright red on the original hardware.