Have you ever wanted to kick a hole in your CRT? Have you ever nearly snapped a controller in half with your bare sweaty hands covered with the remnants of an army of Cheetos that valiantly fought in your mouth and lost? My dear reader, have you ever questioned your entire life because you couldn’t master a simple jump from one platform to another after nearly 300 attempts? If so, then you have experienced maybe one fifth of what it’s like to play Super Meat Boy, one of the most grueling video game ever made.
Super Meat Boy is an independent platformer developed by Team Meat, two video game nerds who are total geniuses and masters of their trade. It was released on the Xbox Live Arcade in the Autumn of 2010 and became an overnight sensation selling millions upon millions of copies, making it one of the best selling independent video games ever made.
In the game, you control Meat Boy, a small dude made out of meat, who must rescue his girlfriend, Bandage Girl, from the evil Dr. Fetus. That’s it. That’s the whole story and it’s brilliant.
It’s a game where you get lost in the motions. The mashing of buttons as you time the perfect jump. Every neuron in your brain standing on edge to give you just a better chance of finally making it, hoping you can finally move on to the next portion. Your back shoots forward as your retinas become attuned to the green, red and blue.
It’s a religious experience as the outside world fades away into a darkened shell and for a moment you can feel the twangs of the universe purring like a wild cat who has momentarily given you its audience. Each level you crush beneath your foot is another temple or prayer shot off into space.
I could simply say that Super Meat Boy taught me patience. How I learned to wait for the things that I want or to work for them, but that cliche bullshit won’t fly here. I didn’t learn patience like a school boy with a dry erase marker and snot stains on my jumper. Patience was water-boarded into my brain by every painful mistake and death that violently jerked me out of time as I was within grasp of getting it right. The true torture is not the failure you initially experience when you die, but the expectation that comes afterward. You see, every time you die in Super Meat Boy, there is no game over screen or demand for more quarters. That would be too easy. Instead, the game simply picks up right at the beginning of the level, as if to dare you to try it again and see what happens and you want to finish. How you need to get Bandage Girl. It becomes an obsession as you bounce and sprint from wall to wall, obstacle over obstacle. Every death is a momentary backwards step as you literally fling yourself into the meat grinder hoping one small morsel will fly to the other side. So, you continue through over and over again, life after life, attempt after attempt. Sometimes, it takes hours to beat a level. Sometimes a few momentary flickers of light, not even seconds or recordable time but tiny fractions of information that click in the processor.
However, the true horror of the game is not its difficult or expectations in terms of mastery of key skills, but the sheer amount of content. Not only does the game have its regular levels, but alternate versions of every level on top of collectables and different random zones beyond the standard game. So, even if you beat the whole game, it is quick to remind you that only 20-30 percent has been completed. Did I also mention this side content is even harder?
So, yeah, you could say I think it’s a good game.
