Mew-Genics Sounds Horrifying and Amazing

The Wooster

King Snap
Jul 15, 2008
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Mew-Genics Sounds Horrifying and Amazing


Surprise! It turns out Team Meat's Mew-Genics isn't quite as wholesome as it first appears.

"Mew-Genics revolves around Cats, obviously," reads Edmund McMillen's description of his upcoming "cat lady' sim.

"The current number of cats in Mew-Genics is.... 25418658283290000000000000 (and growing)," he adds a little later.

Sounds adorable, right? Well, it is and it isn't.

McMillen reckons Mew-Genics isn't really like anything gamers have seen before, but adds that most would describe it as a cross between The Sims and Pokemon, with a dash of Animal Crossing and Tamagotchi thrown in for good measure. From the gameplay description, there seems to be a touch of Black and White in there as well.

In Mew-Genics, you care for an ever-increasing number of cats. Much like actual cats, the game's virtual felines have a prospensitvy for breeding, and end up passing both negative and positive traits to their offspring. The game also seems to track their psychological ticks, as events can cause the cats to associate certain stimuli with certain events. It's a fascinating idea, as a description of one of McMillen's gameplay sessions proves:

"Last week I was playing a game with Puddle, a fat female cat I had been working on earlier that day, I thawed her out of her Cryo-cube and placed her in my current single story house along with her newly generated companion Champ. I had been focusing my time on Puddle due to the fact that she seemed to have a very unique tail that I believe had helped her place 2nd in a cat pageant in a previous and I needed to breed her so I could continue her bloodline before she got too old. Sadly Champ wasn't up to snuff and Puddle made this obvious by repeatedly kicking him in the face, I separated them quickly by putting champ in the attic but when I tried to feed him.. something odd happened. See, Champ was a dullard and when Puddle kicked him he just happened to also be eating and now associated the trauma with food instead of Puddle herself, he was scared of all food.. and sadly died in the attic shortly after."
The story continues towards a grim conclusion. McMillen adopts a stray narcoleptic cat called Goon, who passes on his disorder to the kittens he produces with Puddle. Not only that, but Goon gave Puddle feline AIDS, forcing McMillen to put her back into cryostasis until a cure could be found. The story ends on a rather bleak note, with Goon attacking one of his own kittens and eventually running away while McMillen ends up being arrested by local animal control before he can find a cure for Puddle.

I'll be honest, the feline AIDS bit made me a touch uncomfortable (it's a very real disease, as anyone who's done any time in an animal shelter will tell you), but I'm glad to see Team Meat is still pushing its peculiar brand of dark humor. Mew-Genics is slated for release on Steam, iOS and Android, but there's no news of a release date just yet.

Source: Team Meat [http://supermeatboy.com/141/Mew_Genics_/#b]





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Eomega123

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Jan 4, 2011
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Anyone who says the video game market is dying just needs to take a look at the indie game crowd to realize that interesting games will continue to be made as long as we have people who are just the right kind of crazy. I look forward to further updates, and predict I will be buying the hell out of this game.
 

VanQ

Casual Plebeian
Oct 23, 2009
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As someone who absolutely loves cats, I'm not sure I want anything to do with this. I don't think my heart could take it.
 

Malconvoker

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Nov 1, 2011
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I need this game so much. There is always a weird spot in my heart for pet sims and this just makes it better with its weird dark humor. I foresee this being mine in the future.
 

NightHawk21

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Dec 8, 2010
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Ahh this sounds neat but I was hoping to be able to create weird genetic mutant cats like in the thumbnail picture in the news feed :(
 

Pink Gregory

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Jul 30, 2008
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I saw the thumbnail and I thought, "This looks like an Edmund McMillen game".

Lo and behold, it is.

Certainly sounds innaresting, much as I love cats.
 

Jamous

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Apr 14, 2009
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I suppose we should have expected this. It is Team Meat after all. That said; it sounds no less excellent. ;D
 

Shinsei-J

Prunus Girl is best girl!
Apr 28, 2011
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This sounds terrible, and I'll love every minute of it.
I can't wait to make abominations under god through selected inbreeding.
 

CrystalShadow

don't upset the insane catgirl
Apr 11, 2009
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It.. Isn't quite like anything that's ever existed?

Because, honestly, that description reminds me a lot of the kinds of things that happened to 'Norns' from the creatures series of games.

Not quite as gruesome, perhaps, but keep in mind that 'Creatures' let you create several different species, some of which attacked others.

Also, the whole focus of that series is on genetics and AI.

I certainly had Norns do and learn some really bizarre things... (then proceed to teach those things to others).

It got really messy if you used the editing programs to alter their genetics directly. By default Norns have mutation and duplication disabled for several critical things (such as the neural net that forms their rather simple brain).

If you were to enable random changes to this you could in theory get some very strange things. Digital evolution in action.

Still...

Perhaps the similarity I'm seeing is superficial. But if not, it kind of surprises me that the whole 'creatures' series seems to have vanished from collective memory, considering what it did. (I mean, I know the company behind that series collapsed, but still...)
 

octafish

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Apr 23, 2010
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Soooo...crazy cat lady simulator? Or just another breed em up? I guess we will see.
 

Monsterfurby

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Mar 7, 2008
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CrystalShadow said:
Creatures etc.
Agreed. I actually liked those games - not so much because they were fun or made me feel way too evil, but because I really liked the entire cause-and-effect spectrum they included. Looking forward to Mew-Genics.
 

Rainforce

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Apr 20, 2009
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Pink Gregory said:
I saw the thumbnail and I thought, "This looks like an Edmund McMillen game".

Lo and behold, it is.

Certainly sounds innaresting, much as I love cats.
had the same first thought as well.
Also, despite having an actual cat, I don't love them as much as a certain member of the escapist staff.
anyways, I will surely enjoy this game for it's crazy premise and randomly generated nature.
 

Nalgas D. Lemur

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Nov 20, 2009
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Desert Punk said:
And so far, the songs that they have released for the soundtrack sound amazing as well
The list of people involved with the music is as awesome and ridiculous as what they've released about the game itself. They've been involved in a bunch of fun/weird stuff, so I was pretty excited to hear when they started letting out some info about that side of things.