Super Meat Boy

Captain's log, stardate 20110301.

I've been playing Super Meat Boy quite a bit lately, my aim is to get A+ on all of the levels including the dark world, although I doubt I will have the patience to attain this goal. It's a really nice game though, one that grows on you. When I first played the demo I didn't like it that much, I thought it was little more than a slightly easier I Wanna Be The Guy with better graphics. The main reason for this though I think is that the level selection for the demo was not very good. In the real game you get a very smooth introduction to the mechanics, only ever so slightly raising the difficulty level. In the demo some levels were a bit too hard for a new player. This is probably not much of an issue though since the game is relatively very cheap and has a lot of replay value with unlocking characters, achievements etc.

I want to live up to the title of this blog though by going over a few things that bug me with SMB. I think the main one is the "class" of enemies that shoot homing projectiles at you. It is the stages with these guys, either the missile shooting ones or their even more evil counterparts, the black gates to hell that shoot what I can only describe as langoliers, that feels the most unfair. Sure, you can avoid at least the missiles fairly easy, but there is something fundamentally wrong about you not being able to defeat these enemies in one way or another. Even when you finish the level they're still around. Another small thing is that you can't always hold down the run-button, since doing so makes meat boy fly faster through the air. I'm pretty sure SMB is the first platform game that works like this, which is not that weird considering it makes absolutely no logic sense. In Super Mario Bros always holding down B to run is default, there is no downside to doing it, but you often have to let it go in Super Meat Boy which - on the upside - makes for a more complex game experience. It takes a bit getting used to though, or in the game's terms, a few thousand messy deaths.

Gaming wise it's looking a bit dry with new games right now for me, I'm probably not getting the new Pokémon even though I've played all of them for DS up until now. I have a lot of other gaming-related topics to discuss though so I'm pretty sure I won't run out of stuff to write about in the near future.

Peace Out!