Oct 21, 2010 Super Meat Boy Review. Super Meat Boy is often regarded as one of the best Indie games, and much fuss was made about the hardcore difficulty. Jan 22, 2018 That said, having a portable version of Super Meat Boy is fantastic, especially now that I’ve played its spiritual successor, The End is Nigh.Switch functionality brings a couple new features to.
Super Meat Boy (Switch eShop) Review Mini
by Zachary Miller - January 22, 2018, 10:35 pm PST
Total comments: 2
The game is still great; the music, not so much.
Because the game is more than seven years old now, I’m going to assume the majority of you are at least passively familiar with Super Meat Boy. If you’re not, maybe check out Daan Koopman’s review of the Wii U version. Pretty much everything Daan says there also applies here, and I’m going to talk about the things I particularly like/dislike about this version of Super Meat Boy. As a baseline, I love this game to death—I bought a used Xbox 360 specifically to play it all those many years ago.
Super Meat Boy on Switch is exactly as advertised: Super Meat Boy—but on Switch, making it portable. Yes, the game appeared on Vita several years back, but I cannot imagine playing it on that small screen, as everything is already very small. In fact, there are times where playing it in off the TV where some things (like keys) are a little too hard to make out unless your nose is up against the glass.
That said, having a portable version of Super Meat Boy is fantastic, especially now that I’ve played its spiritual successor, The End is Nigh. Switch functionality brings a couple new features to the table, such as leaderboards for every stage that rank folks based on completion time. I suspect this may elicit the kind of friendly rivalries among NWR staffers last seen in Runner 2, though I don’t see an option to only display friends’ times. Brand-new to this version of Super Meat Boy is a split-screen two-player mode in which each player takes a Joy-Con (or controller) to see who can beat an entire level first. I can’t quite recommend this for tabletop mode, because chopping the Switch’s screen in half makes very small things downright microscopic. However, it’s a great time on your TV. I will warn you that this is not a game to play with people who don’t play a lot of 2D platformers. They will quickly become frustrated.
But we have to talk about the elephant in the room: the soundtrack. As you may or may not be aware, the original Xbox 360 version of Super Meat Boy came with an exceptional hard-rockin’ soundtrack by Danny Baranowsky. You can listen to it here thanks to the power of the Internet. When the game was ported to Sony systems, Baranowsky chose not to license the music and so a new soundtrack was hastily throw together by various artists and implemented in the Sony, and all subsequent ports, of Super Meat Boy. Taken by itself, there is nothing inherently wrong with this new soundtrack…but it just can’t compete with Baranowsky’s iconic original. My solution has been to mute the TV and listen to Baranowsky’s soundtrack on my phone. Your mileage with that technique may vary. I want to stress that the soundtrack issue in no way compromises how good Super Meat Boy is from a gameplay perspective, but it doesn’t sound the same anymore and that makes me sad.
One thing I do appreciate about Super Meat Boy is that you can sort of tailor the difficulty to your personal preference. Just critical-path'ing the game isn’t that bad, but then you might try to get all the bandages and warp zones, which adds a layer of difficulty. After that, you might try to get A+ grades on every normal stage in order to unlock the dark version of that stage, which is another feat. And then, if you really want to torture yourself, you might go after all the bandages and warp zones in the dark stages, which is straight-up masochism.
It feels great to be playing Super Meat Boy again, despite the soundtrack problem. I can’t say enough good things about it, but you should know that the difficulty ramps up pretty steadily and somewhere during the third world, the gloves really come off. Enjoy the Warp Zone of World 5-7, kids! If you can find a similarly-experienced buddy, the two-player race is really quite fun.
Summary
Pros
- Easy to learn, difficult to master
- Seemingly endless varieties of challenge
- This is just an amazing game
Cons
- Shame about that soundtrack
- Some stages are just hopelessly, agonizingly difficult, especially if you're going for 100%
- The game's few boss battles aren't especially good
Super Meat Boy Online
Talkback
So if I never played the original I wouldn't have any issue with the music, right?
Probably not, no. And don't click that link to the original soundtrack either, lest your eyes be opened.
Game Profile
Worldwide Releases
| Super Meat Boy | |
| Release | Jan 11, 2018 |
| Publisher | Team Meat |
| Rating | Teen |
| Super Meat Boy | |
| Release | Jan 11, 2018 |
| Publisher | Team Meat |
| Rating | 12+ |
Related Content
Super Meat Boy is something of an indie Cinderella story. A game designed and produced almost entirely by Edmund McMillen alone, its release on Xbox LIVE Arcade heralded the return of the hyper-difficult old-school platformer, a genre that hadn’t had anything like mainstream success since the days of Ninja Gaiden and Mega Man 2 on the NES.
Read on to find out if the PC release of this indie darling is deserving of your time, money, and endless frustration.
Super Meat Boy is an old-school throwback through and through. The story, presented in 1920’s style film reel, is very simple: our protagonist, Meat Boy, is attempting to rescue is girlfriend, Bandage Girl, from the grips of his nemesis, the evil Dr. Fetus. In each level, Meat Boy must reach Bandage Girl, at which point she will be kicked around a bit by Dr. Fetus and subsequently poof’d off to the next level. It’s about as simple as videogame narratives ever get, which just reinforces the concept that this game is about gameplay and little else.
Super Meat Boy Game
The first thing you should know about the gameplay is that Edmund McMillen is an incredibly intelligent game designer. He understands how to do difficulty the right way, and how to gradually ramp up difficulty in a way that does not become overwhelming to the player. Super Meat Boy is a game that teaches you how to be great at it, while simultaneously making you its bitch. It’s all based on the concept of high-risk, high-difficulty levels coupled with a very, very low penalty for failure. The game is really very simple; all Meat Boy can actually do is run and jump, and it’s never unclear what’s going to kill you when you run into it. Your goal is always obvious, the only challenge is navigating though the deathtraps to get to the end.
A lot of people claim that their game is “easy to pick up, tough to master”, but SMB really means it. You’re going to die in SMB, and you’re going to do it a lot. In any other game, game over after game over would eventually force you to throw your monitor off your roof in frustration, but McMillen has decided that the concept of the game over is outdated and largely unnecessary. Under normal game circumstances, you never have a limited number of lives, and death is really only a minor inconvenience. You might die 30 times in one level, but when a the level only takes 14 seconds to complete when you survive, a single death feels like hardly a slap on the wrist. If the short level time is a source of concern for you, don’t worry: each individual level may be short, but there are a friggin’ ton of them. Each world consists of twenty levels as well as a boss battle, and upon completing a level with an A+ grade, you’ll unlock the “dark world” version of that stage, a modified version of that level with the difficulty cranked to eleven.
As if that wasn’t enough, the game also includes bonus stages, known as “warp zones”. There are usually three warp zones in each of the game’s six worlds, and they offer a slight change of pace from the way the rest of the game plays. These stages, hidden as black vortexes within the game’s normal stages, throw back to older game consoles, emulating the look and sound of platforms like the old school GameBoy or Super Nintendo. They typically last three levels, on which you’re only allowed to die three times each before being forced to restart the zone.
These zones are also one of the means of unlocking brand new characters in Super Meat Boy. Occasionally, the warp zone will be prefaced by a short cut scene introducing a brand new character, and after completing it, you’ll be able to play as that character any time you please. The other method you have of unlocking characters is through the collecting of bandages. In some stages, you’ll see a small pink bandage floating somewhere around the level. Collecting them will incrementally unlock even more, sometimes platform-exclusive, characters.
The bonus characters are definitely a major selling point for this game. They all come from other indie darling games, and they all play differently and have different special abilities. The Kid ( I Wanna Be The Guy) can double jump, Commander Video (Bit.Trip series) can glide horizontally through the air for a short time, and Steve (Minecraft) who’s spefical ability is to completely break the game. There’s a ton of them, and they’re a blast to use. Oh, and who can forget the latecomer Tofu Boy, a character patched into the PC version of the game after a brief but hilarious scuffle between Team Meat and animal rights jihadists PETA, unlocked by typing the word “petaphile” into the game’s start screen.
SMB‘s sound and art design are both great. It sports a cartoony look reminiscent of its flash game roots, which is silky smooth and easy on the eyes. It changes up the visuals frequently: each world has a very unique look, and some stages are presented in silhouette style that looks very cool. The music, composed by the very talented Danny Baranowsky, fits the flavor of the game perfectly, and in fact can be purchased from his bandcamp page.
Super Meat Boy is incredibly good at what it does, but the fact is, what it does will not appeal to every gamer. It comes down to a “try over and over until you get it right” kind of mindset, and whether or not you enjoy it will depend largely on how satisfying it is for you to finally complete that stage that killed you 75 in under two minutes. The satisfaction is amplified by the replay you get to see of the level, showing each of your attempts played simultaneously. It usually ends up being a veritable river of meat that pops apart, one by one, until a single Meat Boy finally pushes through to the end. For some gamers, that sense of accomplishment is crack, and they’ll play this game hour after hour, until their thumbs are bloody, immobile nubs. Personally, though, I find it more exhausting than exhilarating. After only a few levels, I can literally feel my heart racing, and I find that my leg is bouncing involuntarily. It’s uncomfortable.
I do have to complain a bit about some of the bugs in the PC version. They’re not game-breaking by any means, the game has a tendency to forget some of your settings, and you usually have to run the game in windowed mode in order to prevent it from running at perma-warp-speed, though that’s a common bug among games ported from XBLA. It also has oddly high requirements for a game that started life as a flash game on Newgrounds; I’ve heard reports that gamers with relatively low-power laptops have some trouble running the game smoothly. Combine that stuff with the fact that the precision demanded by the later levels of this game basically requires you to use a gamepad rather than a keyboard, and you end up with a PC version that’s tough to recommend over its XBLA counterpart. However, if you have a decent PC and access to a gamepad, the PC will be adding in a level editor in sometime in the near-ish future.
Super Meat Boy Free Download
Super Meat Boy is easily the best platformer you’ll play this year. If you love the feeling of clawing your way to triumph over a hyper-difficult stage after being beaten back by it again and again, this is, without a doubt, your game. If you’re like me, you may find that your mileage with this game is relatively low. Either way, you can’t deny the fantastic gameplay and art design present here, so I’m going to give Super Meat Boy…
Super Meat Boy Newgrounds
- Game:Super Meat Boy
- Platform Reviewed: PC
- Developer: Team Meat
- Distributed By: Steam, Direct2Drive
- Release Date: 11/30/2010
- MSRP: $14.99
- Review copy info: A copy of this title was provided to DualShockers, Inc. by the publisher for the purpose of this review.