Super Meat Boy: A Choice Cut

Super Meat Boy is the kind of game that hides nothing up its sleeves. Within minutes of pressing start, the game hurls itself at you with its 8-bit tale of a beefy young hero out to save his bandaged princess from the terrible Dr. Fetus. Within a few levels, the game will splatter your raw platforming skills against all manner of whirling blades and pounding mallets, never once relenting, simply demanding you try again and again until you get things right. At this point you know whether or not this is the game for you; whether to dive in for more punishment or pack up for safer passage.

Team Meat has put together a platformer that hearkens back to the days of Nintendo hard, regularly injecting cutscenes with bits of NES nostalgia, while still bringing a good amount of modern conveniences to the table. The first thing to know, is that you will die. Super Meat Boy will throw a kitchen full of sharp objects your way every level and you can expect to fail dozens of times before reaching the end of any particular challenge. Luckily, the game doesn't give you time to dwell upon your defeat, respawning your little ground giblet back at the start for you to instantly give it another go. If you're the kind of gamer who demands retribution when struck down, Super Meat Boy is all too eager to throw you back into the grinder.

Unfortunately, while the controls are pixel perfect, there are still moments where the mooshy D-pad of the 360 get in the way. I'm a huge fan of Microsoft's successor to the coconut cracker, but 2D gaming requires a level of precision it just can't provide. Fortunately, the game has plenty of methods to kill you on its own, so the ratio of controller related deaths doesn't weigh too heavily over the game's own love of player punishment. If I have any complaints over the game itself, its that many of its more advanced features like the Dark World are all thrown at the player in the first few levels while the player is still trying to get a feel for the game. The feeling that you must play through these alternate challenges to advance can really drag the initial pacing down, where had they been saved for after the credits, they would have provided more incentive to hunt down every last secret.

Overall, Super Meat Boy is an uncompromising love letter to another era of platformers. It's the kind of game that throws you to the ground over and over, taunting you to face it once more. If you long for the days when a cackling villain would dare you to continue, then Super Meat Boy is probably just the kind of game you're looking for.