To comment on this article, please visit the forums.
By Michael Lowell
October 5, 2011
Super Meat Boy
Xbox 360, PC (reviewed on PC)
Developer: Team Meat
Distributor: Microsoft (Xbox 360), Steam (PC)
Released: October 20, 2010 (Xbox 360), November 30, 2010 (PC)
Note A: This is a re-review of 2010′s Super Meat Boy. Somebody is going to notice very shortly that I refer to this web site as “gospel” on the front page. That person will call me out when I change my opinion on a video game. Meh. I care. Not really.
Note B: Huge credit to reader and commenter SriK, who dressed down my original review and made it clear that quality control did not do its job.
Update on October 11, 2011: Paragraph edits have been made for readability.
My first review of Super Meat Boy was published to this web site in December of 2010. I may have been the first person on the internet with the balls to call Super Meat Boy an average video game. During the last ten months, I was uh, I’ll say, “educated”. I learned some knowledge. Through overwhelming force of opposing opinion, “Super Meat Boy is an average game” became a completely indefensible opinion. Average game, my ass. “Would be one of the ten best games of 1988″, my ass. I should have never said that. 1988 should have come out of the time warp and sued Super Meat Boy for misrepresentation. The venerable world of side-scrolling platformers should be rather concerned that the platforming genre is under assault by Canabalt, and 1-Bit Ninja, and a host of other shallow platformers that are making a name for themselves on both mobile phones and “indie gaming” web sites. Super Meat Boy has become an indie wunderkind and a figurehead for that movement. It’s my duty to knock this laughable revolution down a notch and I’ll start by shooting one of its leaders in the head.
When I laid down my original opinion, here’s what I failed to understand: Super Meat Boy was sold to the public on a premise that video games now suck. Apparently, video games are “way too easy” these days and they used to be a hell of a lot harder. (This is actually bullshit. The Cult of Nintendo Hard has long failed to understand that the most prized achievements in today’s video games often require the player to outwit and outplay a skilled player in a competitive multiplayer game. But anyway, we have a platformer to discuss.) In Super Meat Boy, you’ll die a lot, and then you’ll die some more. Surprisingly, people were okay with this. People called the game “Tough, but fair.” Right there, anybody with some common sense should have raised an eyebrow. If Super Meat Boy was actually a difficult game, nobody would have played it. So what the hell was going on here? I discovered a disconnect between the perceived difficulty level and the actual difficulty level.
The largest, most expansive levels in the Super Meat Boy universe can be completed in under a minute. Most clock in at fifteen to twenty seconds. Some can be completed in fewer than ten seconds. It’s a bite-sized difficulty level. You only have to play the game flawlessly for half-a-minute at a time. I was one of the fools who thought this constituted a high difficulty curve. Then, somebody hit me over the head with a hammer a couple of times and I finally figured it out. Super Meat Boy is built for the moron who loads up a Super Nintendo emulator, opens Super Mario World, and hits “Save State” every ten seconds. In this twisted version of the Super Nintendo platforming experience, no difficulty level exists because the player is never punished for sucking ass at video games. Instead of beginning at the start of a level or the checkpoint, the player hits a key and picks up right before the chasm that just wiped Mario from existence. Guess what? In Super Meat Boy, the player has unlimited lives. Death is punished with “restart at the beginning of that incredibly short level”. Once you complete a level or a world, you can move ahead. It doesn’t matter if you succeed on the first try or the hundredth try. The game doesn’t discriminate against the skilled player or the bad player. That’s not difficulty. Super Meat Boy advertised and continues to advertise itself as Retro Platformer: Tournament Edition. In reality, Super Meat Boy is Save State Emulator Whore: Tournament Edition. No difficulty level exists in Super Meat Boy because no meaningful punishment for failure exists.
If you grew up on video games in the eighties, think about your experience. When you lost all of your lives or failed the mission or whatever, you were often grateful when a development team gave you continues or a password system. Very often, developers would say “You suck. Until you prove to us that you don’t suck and that you can beat this game, you get to start from the beginning.” If the continue systems in 1986′s Super Mario Bros. 2 (Famicom Disk System), 1988′s Ninja Gaiden, 1991′s Battletoads, and the Mega Man series weren’t exceptions to the rule, then they certainly weren’t the norm. Even with the help of those continue systems, every one of those “retro games” became benchmarks for skill and ability because they required lengthy stretches of flawless play. (And if you were a real freak of nature, you ignored the continue system, anyway. You pulled the equivalent of an arcade “one-credit clear” on your video game console. That’s because you were a badass.) Nobody is going to tell me that any level in Super Meat Boy requires a longer stretch of flawless play than the eighth world in the Japanese edition of Super Mario Bros. 2.
So right there, Super Meat Boy has already committed a sin. The finished product is already in a dire situation. In Super Meat Boy, flawless play must only occur for a long enough period of time where even the least competent gamer can trial-and-error his way through the entire game, where he then rushes to GameFAQs and shares his incredible story with all of his middle school friends. (Meanwhile, nobody dares to connect the dots and realize that Super Meat Boy shares an awful lot in common with 2009′s mobile phone figurehead Angry Birds, another trial-and-error clusterfuck built around miniature levels and unlimited continues.) And even when the Steam and XBox Live achievement systems for Super Meat Boy reward players for sustained levels of play, Team Meat missed the damn point. The game’s vaunted “Impossible Boy” achievement requires the player to complete the final world in its “Dark World” incarnation (best described as “Hard Mode”) on a single life. That actually sounds like a reasonable accomplishment. That is, until the player realizes he can play the twenty levels in any order and get the hardest levels out of the way before focusing on the easier levels. Even when the game demands a no-death run from its most talented players, the player can undertake it at their own convenience.
But let’s make an assumption that we would use an emulator to play through any of the Nintendo games listed above, using save states to compensate for an incredible lack of player skill. These games would still be more entertaining than Super Meat Boy. There’s a reason for that. The setting, narrative, and motif in Super Meat Boy are all built around an eponymous block of meat that is out to save his beloved Bandage Girl from the evil Dr. Fetus. This less-than-subtle parody of Super Mario Brothers is complete with the mandatory “evil twin”, the single-room boss fight where the enemy takes up the entire screen, item-collection mechanics that can also be retrieved and achieved through trial-and-error level completion, and alternate routes through a set of levels that provide no suspense in exploration. From the moment you load a new game world, you know it has twenty levels. You know each of those twenty levels will feature one or two “Warp Zones” that require no exploration or creativity to discover. Super Meat Boy never bothers to provide the awesome feeling that came with finding hidden levels in 1990′s Super Mario World.
The character has no direct method of attack. You’re not supposed to be assaulting levels, you’re supposed to be surviving them. Whether that entails getting from Point A to Point B without a scratch, waiting for a gate to unlock so you can escape from a nasty predicament, or outrunning the falling ceiling of death has all been determined by the level design ambitions of Team Meat. Ambitious these ambitions are not, with the developers readily recycling and reusing these tropes throughout the game’s 250-plus levels.
To achieve positive (i.e. successful) outcomes in Super Meat Boy, the player is limited to a run button, a jump button, and movement buttons. It doesn’t even do these simple controls correctly. A good chunk of my experience with video games has been spent watching players manipulate the dated game mechanics in 1998′s StarCraft and doing it flawlessly. For that reason, I’m cautious to label controls as “inconsistent” or “poor”, especially when you can find video footage scattered across the internet demonstrating that players can beat the toughest levels in Super Meat Boy without a hitch. (Fortunately, I think anybody can agree that these controls are light years ahead of the 2008 flash game predecessor Meat Boy, which may have the worst controls ever programmed into anything claiming to be a video game.) At the same time, I would never go around telling people that the controls in 1993′s Bubsy: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind “are fine, deal with it” because I actually managed to beat that game so many years ago.
The problem in Super Meat Boy seems to be a complete disconnect between run inertia and air inertia. Mid-air control of the character is quite awkward and rather inexcusable in a game where completing a level requires minimal margin for error. All of this is then made worse by the inconsistent mechanics for wall-jumping. If you’re standing directly next to a wall, Super Meat Boy will hug the wall and proceed to slide up the wall, rather than simply jumping straight up. (Every other platformer I have played requires the player to push in the direction of the wall to initiate a wall-sliding mechanic. Super Meat Boy is the exception.) This is critical because these two states of animation (“wall-sliding” and “falling”) maintain different rules for gravity. And since the only way to cancel a wall-slide is to jump, you can expect to die numerous times before figuring out that the game should have never been programmed this way.
Those inconsistent controls seem almost inconsequential when you consider that Team Meat has actually done the impossible: In parodying 1985′s Super Mario Brothers, they have actually created a video game that is less complex than the father of the side-scrolling platformer genre. “Oh, you’re just being crazy here!” Let’s think about it. The title character in Super Meat Boy can’t defend himself, because the entire premise of the game is that you’re nothing more than a stupid block of meat. Clearly, that was a far more interesting concept in parody than application. Super Mario Brothers allows you to attack enemies. It gives you numerous ways to kill enemies. You can jump on them, you can set them on fire, you can destroy them with an invincibility item, you can even kick enemies into each other! You can’t do any of these things in Super Meat Boy. The game has to establish complexity and depth somewhere else. So, you would think that Super Meat Boy could use his speed (and he has a hell of a lot of speed to work with) to turn the tables on everything that tries to kill him. Enemies, projectiles, and monsters can’t be killed ever. (Even the boss fight in the fourth world ends after the boss monster has gone through his pre-programmed animations and inflicted three successful attacks on himself. You do nothing to create that outcome.)
Player movement cannot be used to turn projectiles against their creators or other enemies. Enemies can’t be coaxed into attacking each other. Anti-gravity devices can’t be used against your opponents. Portals can’t be manipulated and can’t be redirected into more favorable outcomes. The only thing you can do is keep running, moving, and wondering why the hell you have absolutely no right to interact with the game world that’s trying to murder your block of blood. That’s not the only place Super Mario Brothers has the advantage. That game even made liberal use of what today’s gamers call “destructible environments”. It used these destructible environments in conjunction with power-ups, hidden items, hidden blocks, and half-a-dozen enemy types that were all used to create diverse, complex, and memorable levels. And that doesn’t even include any discussion of subsequent Mario games. By 1988′s Super Mario Bros. 3, over fifty enemies and over a dozen power-ups were used in the creation of sixty-plus game levels. Compared to what? A dozen enemies, a couple of terrain palette swaps, and level design featuring the bare minimum for meaningful environmental interactions?
This complete lack of complexity rears its head in Super Meat Boy‘s level design. Think about Super Mario Bros. 3 or Super Mario World. Whether you mastered those games or merely played them to completion, I can name a stage number or a stage name and you can immediately build a reasonable recreation of that level in your own head. 5-3. 6-10. Soda Lake. Butter Bridge. Choco Island 2. Nintendo has never been shy about building single levels around a single new concept or gimmick, and these games remain classics for a reason. (2009′s New Super Mario Brothers Wii continued that trend with less successful results, but it was still a damn good game.) Stages and level design in Super Meat Boy don’t become more complex and more interesting as you advance through the game. By the second world, most of the level design concepts have already been introduced and leveraged to their most interesting extents. As you advance through the game, the levels simply get longer.
While the best games in the eight-bit era of video games won fans by taking their diverse roster of moving parts and placing them in locations that became more devilish with each level, Super Meat Boy does not have the legs to sustain memorable and diverse level design past the one-hour mark. Super Meat Boy does not have enough moving parts. The “final level in the game” (Dark World 7-20) is an obvious example. It’s one of the longest levels in the game, clocking in at an incredible forty-five seconds. In this level, the ceiling is falling. To escape from the ceiling, you must navigate a gauntlet of circular saws. Now, you would think that by this point in the game, Team Meat is doing some particularly evil things with these saws. They’re not. You are using the same timed jumps to conquer the same moving saws that you saw in the first and second and third and fourth and fifth and sixth worlds. The final level in the game doesn’t apply any new concepts. The first thirty minutes of the game exploit every mechanic you’ll ever face. I guess somebody thought this was “level design”. So no surprise that in playing hundreds of levels, I can remember perhaps a dozen of them. Very few of the levels are memorable because they’re never complex enough to become memorable.
(“But the personal computer version of Super Meat Boy has a level editor! You can make larger and more complex levels than McMillen and Refenes ever dreamed of!” Big deal. It does nothing to fix the issues. By the fifth year of Doom level design, map creators were doing things that the Doom game engine was never ever designed to do. They were creating three-dimensional levels and putting the best work of John Romero and American McGee to shame. There were options for players to be creative in extending the shelf life of Doom, Quake, Descent, Hexen, and Heretic. What good is a level editor when your most painstaking decisions are cosmetic decisions (what your level looks like) and what good is a level editor when the actual rule set is so small that even its creators couldn’t find ways to continue making diverse, complex levels with it?)
That’s what makes the visuals in this game so bewildering. The entire game is built on the absolute vulnerability of the player-character. So immediately, one would think inspiration could be found in the bloody world of survival-horror video games. (Or, in the case of a game with less-than-realistic graphics, you could pull your inspiration from violent cartoons.) One would think the first consideration in art design would be “How can we design a world that becomes even more disgusting every single time the player dies, ultimately transforming the environment into a monument of blood and guts dedicated to the incompetence of the player?” That should have been the primary focus of the art design. What actually happened was different. Team Meat built an entire game around the premise that our hero is a wretched, weak, worthless piece of meat. However, whenever Super Meat Boy dies, he explodes into a harmless splatter that’s been long outdone by the trails of blood that wash onto everything the player touches.
From there, it’s not difficult to figure out that the visual design of Team Meat is limited by “proficiency”. Their art design is not a stylistic decision. Their art design and their ability to create that art is simply limited. The 2011 release of the bloody Zelda-roguelike-whateveryouwannacallit The Binding of Isaac should affirm that. Much like hundreds of aspiring mobile game developers, Team Meat looked at their limited art capabilities and decided they could market these limited art capabilities if they called them “retro graphics”. So while companies such as VanillaWare and Arc System Works are creating beautiful game worlds with beautiful, hand-drawn art, Team Meat can simply claim they are appealing to the childhood video game memories of those who grew up in the eighties. In doing so, an awful lot of players have given them a free pass.
Well, here’s their fatal flaw in “We’re just being retro, we promise!”: Super Meat Boy‘s “hidden” Warp Zones and Minus Worlds replicate the limited color palettes of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Team Meat even uses these bonus levels to replicate both the color clusterfucks seen in software for the Atari 2600 and the monochrome graphics on the Game Boy. By extension, we can conclude that Team Meat wants their game to be compared favorably with the sixteen-bit video game consoles. And upon an immediate inspection, Super Meat Boy does not even compare well with 1990′s Super Mario World and 1991′s Sonic the Hedgehog , the two platforming experiences most closely associated with video games in the early nineties; two games designed to showcase the potential of the hardware, two games that saw their graphical fidelity outdone by dozens and dozens of other products during the course of the hardware’s shelf life. Super Meat Boy doesn’t even achieve the bare potential of art schemes that were done over twenty years ago by developers that were just starting to stick their feet into the sixteen-bit swimming pool. If you’re really looking for a recent videogame that satisfies your unconditional love for the style of pixel art present on the Super Nintendo, Super Meat Boy is a grand leap behind 2010′s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game, a game that throws a nod to its eight-and-sixteen-bit influences and then firmly carries itself on its own legs.
Super Meat Boy is a rather unremarkable world of washed-out-yet-saturated colors, a game whose only creative leaps in art design come an even more liberal use of saturated colors, where everything in the foreground is painted black and placed upon the background. That color saturation only becomes worse when you’re dumped into one of those retro worlds. And while the music can actually be quite good from time to time (the World 5 music is a particular standout), the chiptune music in the Warp Zones will shoot straight into your ears and steal your soul. Not to even speak of the meager sound effects that lack a required “oomph” to convince the player that every level is a menacing, grinding, terrifying chamber shop of horrors. Quite simply, the sound and visuals are a step back from what we expected in 1991, even when compared to the rather wretched world of “indie game development” that has spawned Super Meat Boy.
So here’s a decision that you have to make: Super Meat Boy has been marketed as an absolute rejection of modern video games. Yet, it doesn’t even aspire to stand against the games that created its damn genre. And even if this game played like a perfect wine, even if the controls were perfect, even if it rejected save state checkpoints in favor of a punishing system for extra lives, I would still be hard-pressed to find much value in Super Meat Boy. I couldn’t claim it has more interesting level design than New Super Mario Brothers, is more complex and challenging than Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure, or that it’s even a better game than fellow indie attention whore Braid.
Contrary to what mainstream video game journalists have declared (journalists that apparently started playing games about four or five years ago), you can’t toss average controls, wonky physics, and sloppy graphics into a pathetically simple game model and call it a 2010 Game of the Year candidate. Not in my America. If you think that I’m being a tad savage in this re-review of the game, I apologize. If anybody thinks I’m being mean to the “indie” developers, then you’re part of the problem. When I think of “independent video games”, I don’t think of Super Meat Boy or Cave Story or Braid. I think of Doom, Quake, Super Mario World, StarCraft, Warcraft III, Psychonauts, Portal, Bayonetta, Vanquish, and I probably missed a couple hundred more. I think of some of the best video games that have ever been created. I’m not going to give a small development team a pass because they have limited resources and limited manpower. Smaller development teams have proven capable of creating some of the best works in the history of this industry, and they did it while being judged against gigantic companies and their gigantic budgets, not just a bunch of amateur projects that pop up on Newgrounds or TIGSource.
When I reviewed this game the first time around, I simply didn’t know better. Apparently, in making their first commercial game, neither did Team Meat.
1 out of 5
(Games rated one-out-of-five have problems. Big problems. Unplayable? Possibly not. But even the target audience won’t find much to like.)