LogFAQs > #948457599

BetrayedTangy posted...

I was already having a hard time with the first phase and when I was looking for strategies online, I discovered there was a second phase.

I think the way you approached the game is smart. I think I would've enjoyed it more if I had taken it more slowly, I just wanted to beat it right away because I'm already behind pace to finish the project in five years. Yeah, I felt a definite sense of relief when I beat Dr. Fetus only to be mortified when I found out there was an escape sequence afterward. I really would've liked to turn the game off and take a break at that point, but I didn't want to go through the first part again.

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Final Analysis: Super Meat Boy
What I Thought of Super Meat Boy: Good core mechanics, annoying level design
Would I Play Meat Boy Again? Not for a long time.
Did it deserve to lose round 2? I'd say it's debatable.

One of my favorite pieces of level design comes right at the start of Donkey Kong Country's "Vulture Culture," the first level of its third world. There's a barrel that will shoot you into a stationary vulture. It's there to introduce you to the way DK bounces off enemies when fired from a barrel, in an environment where you can't possibly mess it up - and that's the mechanic that the entire level is based around. I remember playing it recently and thinking of how a modern game might have paused for a long tutorial on a mechanic like that. Donkey Kong achieved in seconds what an approach like that might take a few minutes to accomplish.

Super Meat Boy knows the same trick. It's really good about dedicating short levels to quickly and seamlessly introduce its new mechanics, before it ramps them up to terrifying levels of mechanical demand. Immediacy is one of its great overall strengths: restarts are almost instant, for example, and every level is immediately followed by the next without needing to return to the world map. Even though VVVVVV beat it to the punch in some ways, it's one of the pioneering games in this genre of super-hard indie platformers and understands how to make them work. It's not like I Wanna Be the Guy where it throws random untelegraphed instant-kills at you all the time: if you die in Super Meat Boy, it's because you made a mistake.

Platformers are such a well-explored genre by now that it's hard to make one that stands out. VVVVVV's solution to that problem was its gravity-shifting concept, but Meat Boy manages to distinguish itself while remaining much closer to standard platforming. Its primary mechanics are an ultra-horizontal long jump and a sort of slippery wall climbing, which pass the test of being inherently fun to play with and also allow the amount of depth and variation necessary to last a game's worth of time. The presentation is good too - the blood stains Meat Boy leaves in a trail behind him mark where you went on previous attempts (and what killed you,) for instance, which helps create the intended feeling of satisfaction when you finally win. The game's Newground-native aesthetic feels a little immature, but still has its own charm, and the music is good.

But you know what, for all that it does right, I can't honestly say I enjoyed Meat Boy much. Every man has to decide for himself where the line between a well-balanced challenge and a game that's just kind of annoying lies. For me, Meat Boy crosses it. My impression of a lot of the level design was that Edmund Macmillan would make a good, creative level for a high-difficulty platformer - and then add one or two more hazards, tipping the level over to the point of being too much. The perfect example of this, for me, is in the final battle against Dr. Fetus. There are giant walls of saws both behind and in front of you, with no gaps to move through. You have to wait until the wall ahead of you moves forward, but get through before the one behind catches up. The one behind you is fine. It makes sense to put in a sort of time limit for the tense final battle, but I would argue that the level would only be improved if the one in front of you were removed. After failing the level for the twentieth time, it's not much fun to have to sit around and wait for the damn thing to move before you can try the hard parts of the stage again.

Personally, I don't like having to make near pixel-perfect jumps through the gaps between two closely-placed saws all that much. A lot of the later levels require you to do that like twelve times in a row, and start from the beginning if you mess up so much as once. I start to get tired, and angry, before I've come anywhere near building up the muscle memory required to actually complete the harder levels, and when I finally did, my feeling wasn't triumph or satisfaction so much as relief. I would think "Thank God I don't have to play that stupid level any more." When I finished the game, I thought something similar.


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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 12/129
Currently Playing: Super Meat Boy