The Super Boy of Meat

With the lack of reviews on here I’ve decided to treat/torture you to a double whammy of them. This time looking at the hard as nails platformer Super Meat Boy in which you play as the super boy of meat on his mission to save bandage girl from the evil Dr. Fetus – yep, it’s bonkers.

 Humble beginnings

This is one of the easier ones....

The original Meat Boy was a flash game released on Newgrounds on October 5^th 2008 created by Edward McMillen and programmed by Jonathen McEntee. By April 2009 the game had racked up 840000 views and a map pack was in the works and soon after Super Meat Boy was born after McMillen was asked by Nintendo and Microsoft to develop a game for their online services WiiWare and XBLA respectively.

Not so super meat boy

The developers themselves came out with the statement : "Super Meat Boy is "a big throwback to a lot of super hardcore NES classics like Ghosts'n Goblins,Mega Man, and the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros. 2" so it comes as no surprise that they succeed with this. The game itself tasks the player with making split second jumps through gaps of buzz-saws and landing on about 10 pixel wide platforms before dodging a missile headed your way. It's tough and many angry words may be blurted out, but in spite of all that it overcomes the hurdle many hard games fall at; making the mistakes fair.

Many games like this one will give you a level and make you get so far before hurtling an obstacle at you and killing you. This makes the deaths cheap, you feel like you've died due to the game making you and not through your own errors. Super Meat Boy on the other hand traverses this line brilliantly, though sadly not without fault. For about 95% of the game it feels fair the other 5 I felt cheated and I found some of the level structure 'bull-crap' in the sense that you needed a sort of Sight-before-sight to be able to traverse levels like that.

Ninja's Grace

For that other 95% though the game is all about mastering the fluid, precise jumps through platforming hell. The controls lead themselves perfectly to this. It's a simple system, one button to run one button to jump and off you go. However it's the almost decimal point perfection of the jumping that makes everything feel good. When you spend days on one level which had you shouting nasty words at the screen and finally crack it there's that unbeaten joy of satisfaction - in my case I felt like a Ninja, albeit one who drips blood every step he takes.

An example of something I
find too funny

The game never takes itself to seriously, which aids it immensely in the aspect of cutscences. It has a crude humour to it which actually made me chuckle once or twice, there might have even been a chortle at one point. 

To me it's something which showed the developers cared. They wanted to make their fans laugh and make their game the best it could be. And it worked for almost the entirety of the game but it's the small doses of unpredictable level structure which ruin it plus the difficulty level will throw quite a lot of casual gamers so that the end credits are only seen by the dedicated fans (Like me!!)

A brilliant game with only minor niggles, would definitely
recommend for those looking for a fair challenge 

 Thanks for Reading

                           Ross!!