Super Meat Boy: is it as delicious as they say?

Three things are required to complete a game like Super Meat Boy successfully: The first is a sturdy keyboard or controller, the second is a level of patience few devout Zen Buddhists can ever hope to attain and the third is more free time than your average Arts or Media Studies student. Whilst I’m rich enough to afford the first and lazy enough to possess the third, I sadly fall short on requirement two, and boy does it show when I play.

Before I delve deeper, a short history lesson for the unfamiliar. _SMB _originated as a Flash game on popular portal Newgrounds.com sometime in 2008 and was such an orgasmic success that it was developed by the aptly named Team Meat into a fully-fledged game, released on Xbox Live Arcade and Windows near the end of 2010; there’s a Mac version coming soon, supposedly. Anyone who follows reviews will know that the game did bloody ruddy well, generating a truckload of hype and literally making reviewers cream their pants (ok not ‘literally’). But why? Well I don’t know. Go research it yourself you lazy bums.

Ok, ok, that’s not very professional of me. Let’s try again... Before I attempt to answer that question for you eager little beavers, let me tell you why this game is amazingly fun whilst simultaneously being amazingly rage-inducing. It’s hard. Let’s not sugar-coat this, it’s balls to the wall hard. Team Meat realised that some gamers want a challenge, and so those bastards gave us one. Saws will rip you apart, lava pits will melt you and you’ll fall to your meaty death more times than you can say buggering cow nipples (or maybe that’s just me). This only heightens the feeling of success when you finally manage to navigate Meat Boy across the beautiful but incredibly deadly 2D environment to reach his love, Bandage Girl. Honestly, it’s rare to find a game that leaves you feeling like such a true platforming pro.

This challenge, along with the nostalgia-inducing 16-bit console feel and suburban musical score puts _SMB _a cut above the rest. The ‘light world’ alone will keep you occupied for ages – don’t even get me started on the ‘dark’, much harder world. The hype _SMB _generated before its release is another question entirely.

The fact that _SMB _stemmed from a Flash game certainly helped, it already had a platform from which to launch its meaty self – to date, the Flash version has recieved over 8 million views, which, I’ll say now, isn’t half bad. Hype was also generated due to the fact that it was supposed to arrive on the PC, Mac, Xbox and the Wii, making it the first indie game to be released on multiple consoles. Unfortunately, the poor ol’ Wii just couldn’t hack it and that incarnation of Super Meat Boy had to be scrapped due to filesize limitations. In all fairness, it was probably for the best; the Wii remote isn’t exactly touted for its accuracy and _SMB _requires accuracy in the same way that I required sanity and counselling after my first hour of play.

Sneak peeks of the game during development touted the game’s retro feel and NES-style graphics, to the delight of many eager players. I was amongst them, although I’ll admit it now I wasn’t quite swept up by the hype this game conjured up. Then again, I try to avoid getting sucked into to any of that stuff, since in many cases the overly-hyped game flops like a moist fish and you’re left feeling rather unsatisfied, like coming home from Imperial and finding some bastard’s drunk the last of the milk.

Super Meat Boy didn’t leave me with that feeling. It’s fresh, fiendishly difficult and quite possibly the most enjoyable way to give yourself hypertension. And let’s be brutally honest here, who hasn’t dreamed of playing a game where you command a lump of sentient meat to rescue a girl made of bandages from a top hat wearing foetus in a robot suit?

• Super Meat Boy official site: http://supermeatboy.com/
• Play the original Flash version here: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/463241