Super Meat Boy!
Super Meat Boy is not unlike Super Mario Bros, a game it shares more with than its initials. In this game, you play as “Meat Boy,” a pixilated, dark red, square protagonist, who must rescue a similar pink square, the Princess to Meat Boy’s Mario, from the clutches of evil at the end of every level. In the hundreds of levels, Meat Boy must dodge saw blades, missiles, lava, and a plethora of other classic video-game obstacles only to have his love interest snatched up again by the bad guy. This cycle repeats endlessly as you traverse levels that bring you to forests, hospitals, and even the pits of Hell. Meat Boy’s extreme difficulty, unique levels, precise controls, bonus content, retro-callbacks and replayability makes almost every other game on the market seem like child’s play.
Super Meat Boy’s origin lies on the Internet, as Meat Boy began as a browser-based, flash game on the website Newgrounds.com in 2008. After receiving millions of views and plays, Nintendo contacted the men behind the game and requested that Team Meat make a version for their Wii videogame console. The game never made it to the Wii due to memory restrictions placed on downloadable games by Nintendo, so instead the team turned to Microsoft and had the game published on both the Xbox and on PCs.
The game is a 2-D side-scrolling game, similar to the style of games like Mario and others like Sonic the Hedgehog or Megaman. You traverse through multiple levels as you jump from platform to platform, bounce up walls, and outrun moving spikes or lava. The levels are designed for maximum frustration beyond the first few, and it wouldn’t be uncommon to spend hours trying to get through some of the game’s harder challenges. Meat Boy is extremely fast paced, with some levels starting and ending in less than 20 seconds. Upon falling victim to any of the game’s obstacles, you immediately start at the beginning of the level without any real penalty besides having to get past the saw blade you spent the last 15 minutes trying to figure out how to bypass once more. This die-then-try-again methodology encourages those playing to want “one more try” almost every time they accidently destroy the little square of meat. It’s not uncommon to see anyone that plays Meat Boy cursing at the screen, throwing the controller, or screaming in agony after making a fatal mistake, but they always want another shot at winning. It’s all worth it however, as Meat Boy is a game that rewards you for dedication and persistence, making every small victory important.
Plot wise, there’s not very much to the game. Your girlfriend, Bandage Girl, has been kidnapped and it’s your job to rescue her. But that doesn’t stop you from making you feel general hatred for the game’s antagonist, who send wave after wave of traditional videogame adversaries such as robots and giant worms after you. The plot doesn’t get much deeper then that, but story progression exists as you move across different levels and are occasionally rewarded with short, animated clips that introduce bad guys and often humorously represent Meat Boy’s struggle.
Meat Boy revolves around controls. The controls are about as responsive as they can get, with every tap of the joystick sending Meat Boy running. Meat Boy can’t do much beyond jumping and running, but it takes a long time to master combining different running speeds with different height jumps to bypass obstacles. Perhaps the most fun aspect of jumping is Meat Boy’s ability to bounce off walls in order to get to higher ground, a skill that must be totally learned if you want to get far in the game. Meat Boy’s breakneck speed both allows and requires you to move as fast as you possibly can. The game starts off fairly easy, creating a learning curve that exists so that people can get used to exactly how hard Super Meat Boy is.
Super Meat Boy is easy to learn, but hard to master. If you’re able to get through the countless obstacles it takes to complete the main game, there’s still plenty more to do. If the normal, extremely challenging levels were too easy for some players, a “Dark Version” of each exists, which throws in more bad guys, more saw blades, more crumbling walls, and a heap of additional obstacles that makes second run-throughs of the game very entertaining and extremely tough. Meat Boy also has over ten additional characters that can be unlocked. In every few levels is a hidden band-aid (a reference to Bandage Girl, the love interest) that can be collected. Getting the band-aids is a huge challenge in of itself in that they’re often hidden in hard-to-reach areas, but the feat is worth it to access the skills the new characters possess. The characters are all from indie-games, or games made by small teams or developers.
Perhaps what makes the game so great though is how it references back to the videogames of the past so frequently, such as Mario Bros. This is evidenced through the low-fi graphics of-course, but also through things like the music. The game features music not dissimilar to that of old NES games, except updated to be more modern. Imagine the familiar Mario Bros theme song or the Tetris theme but updated, tunes that sounds like electronic beeps and boops, but with added drums and guitars thrown in to spice things up. The retro call-backs don’t end there. Besides all the previously mentioned secret levels, it’s possible to find even more levels hidden throughout the game. These levels are known as warp zones, and hark back specifically to the first Super Mario game, where warp zones were secret areas that allowed players to skip ahead in the game.
Although Super Meat Boy is a great game in general, the retro-appeal is what makes it so popular among many gamers who miss the aspects of older video games. In the modern videogame market, we have games like Call of Duty shoved down out throats, where everything is complex and more work goes into making sure the sand and water look real than the actual fun of the game. Meat Boy abandons the need to have amazing graphics or a “deep” story in exchange for one of the most fun game experiences in recent memory. Although some players yearn for this new, more realistic style of games, many have grown sick of it. Many of the games on the market today are extremely similar to one another. Tons of them feature soldiers or space-marines that are almost always carrying heavy weaponry, many of which were inspired by the popular game Halo. They imitate real warfare and are hyper-violent in nature. This realism has become too much and the marketplace has been cluttered with games that endlessly copy each other.
Retro-style games have made a huge comeback in recent times: last year, one of the best selling downloadable games was Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, a game based on the movie and graphic novel. The developers decided to make the game a retro-looking, side-scrolling beat-‘em-up. The characters of the movie were totally pixilated forms that look like they come from some alternate universe where games stayed 2-D and the pixel-art of old games was made way more advanced and detailed. These two games are not alone, as many other retro-styled games, such as Bionic Commando Rearmed and Geometry Wars, have made an appearance in recent times.
But why is retro the way of the future? Why do young people go to vintage stores for their latest outfits? Why does music of the past get rediscovered and become more popular then ever? Why is the “Polaroid” style of photography so popular? In today’s world we grow sick and tired of the slick and “highly advanced” lifestyles we’re exposed to on a constant basis. The technology gets either too complex or we get hungry for something else. Nostalgia is appealing to both older and younger people. Those who are older yearn for the things from the past, while the younger folk want to experience these past things for themselves.
Meat Boy combines classic design and gameplay, while keeping up with the A.D.D. Generation. In modern times, many young people feel as though their eyes must always be on a screen and that they always have to entertain themselves in some way or be communicating with others. Because it originated online, Meat Boy had to keep viewers interested and thus was designed to make level completion quick while simultaneously challenging enough to be interesting. Meat Boy keeps players interested through it’s high-speed nature and its bonus content.
Super Meat Boy is unlike anything out on the market right now. For only ten dollars, you’re given access to hundreds of levels, multiple characters, and hours of fun. Meat Boy is a game you’ll want to play all night, just to try and get past some obstacle that’s troubling you. It’s also a game that you’ll want to play with your friends, so you can enjoy the feeling of victory after constant losses together, and so you can watch them freak out over how hard and unforgiving the game is. Meat Boy isn’t for everyone, as the difficulty may be too much for some, but for most videogame players, especially those who yearn for the classic of the past, Meat Boy is a must-buy. Super Meat Boy takes everything that’s great about classic games and improves upon them, thus offering an incredibly unique experience.
