Description
Meat Boy is a small sentient cube of meat. He loves his girlfriend Bandage Girl, a girl made of bandages, and Bandage Girl loves Meat Boy. However, nobody loves Dr. Fetus, a fetus in a jar clad in a tuxedo, so Dr. Fetus hates everybody...especially Meat Boy. Dr. Fetus decides to kidnap Bandage Girl, and so Meat Boy must chase after Dr. Fetus and rescue her! Is he a bad enough dude to rescue his girlfriend?
Super Meat Boy is a fast-paced scrolling platformer based on the earlier online Flash game
Meat Boy. Meat Boy's only abilities are to run, jump, wall jump, and die. As the game's defining feature is its extreme difficulty, he will die a lot. To counteract this, each stage is short -- sometimes only a few seconds, sometimes up to a minute or so -- and upon death the player will immediately be returned to the start for another attempt. If Meat Boy manages to reach Bandage Girl, she is then swept away once more by Dr. Fetus, and the player moves on the next stage. After clearing enough stages in each chapter, the player can then fight the boss of that area, who must be defeated to move on to the next chapter.
The game features over 300 stages across seven chapters, including retro-style bonus stages, boss stages, and even higher-difficulty variants of every normal stage in the game. The Xbox 360 release also includes a special chapter called "Teh Internets", where the developers can release new level packs free of charge on a regular basis.
There are also more than a dozen playable characters making guest appearances from other indie games, including Tim from
Braid, the
Alien Hominid, and
Gish. Characters are unlocked either through retro bonus stages hidden within the normal stages, or by collecting bandages hidden in many of the game's levels. Each version of the game contains a slightly different set of unlockable characters.
The player's best times are recorded for each stage and uploaded to a global leaderboard. Also, after completing a stage, a replay is shown that simultaneously displays every single attempt the player made, which can also be saved.
Part of the Following Group
User Reviews
The Press Says
| GameSpot |
Windows |
Dec 10, 2010 |
9.5 out of 10 |
95 |
| GamingExcellence |
Windows |
Oct 25, 2010 |
9.5 out of 10 |
95 |
| ZTGameDomain |
Xbox 360 |
Oct, 2010 |
9 out of 10 |
90 |
| Eurogamer.net (UK) |
Xbox 360 |
Oct 18, 2010 |
9 out of 10 |
90 |
| Eurogamer.es |
Xbox 360 |
Dec 08, 2010 |
9 out of 10 |
90 |
| Games Radar |
Xbox 360 |
Oct 20, 2010 |
9 out of 10 |
90 |
| Game Critics |
Xbox 360 |
Oct 19, 2010 |
8.5 out of 10 |
85 |
| Cheat Code Central |
Xbox 360 |
Oct, 2010 |
4.2 out of 5 |
84 |
| Game Revolution |
Xbox 360 |
Oct 22, 2010 |
B |
75 |
| Bit-Tech |
Windows |
Dec 04, 2010 |
7 out of 10 |
70 |
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Trivia
Development history
The game's developers envisioned
Super Meat Boy as a "flagship" indie game, which is why there are a large number of guest characters from other indie titles. They originally wanted to also include Quote from
Cave Story and Lemeza Kosugi from
La•Mulana, but the developers of those games declined the request.
Though it was originally announced as a WiiWare exclusive title, the WiiWare release was eventually canceled in December 2010. The developers were unable to get the file within Nintendo's size limit of 40MB without cutting most of the music. They also stated that a disc release was unlikely, as the publishers they contacted said there is no money in third-party retail for the Wii.
Inspiration
Each of the introductions to the different game worlds is based on a famous video game. The scenery is re-envisioned and of course replaced with the characters from
Super Meat Boy:
The
Super Mario games also offered a lot of inspiration for various more general design choices. The replay system was inspired by the
Quantum Mario video.
Iron Man Runs
The PC version has additional achievements called Iron Man Runs. Every chapter has this achievement and it is obtained by completing 20 levels in a chapter in succession, without being killed once. It was left out of the Xbox 360 version because
Microsoft limits the amount of achievements to 12 for XBLA games.
Level editor
An official level editor for the Windows version of the game was released on 5th May 2011. It is added automatically through a Steam update.
Parodies
In December 2010, animal rights organization
PETA released a free flash parody of
Super Meat Boy called
Super Tofu Boy. SMB developers Team Meat took it as a complement, and in turn added Tofu Boy as a hidden playable character to the PC version of
Super Meat Boy the very next day. Tofu Boy boasts incredibly low mobility, and it is impossible to finish most stages using him. They also posted a response to PETA on their Twitter account:
"How many Peta members does it take to change a lightbulb?.... None, Peta can't change anything." In December 2010 Dutch developer
Vlambeer also responded to PETA's parody, with a game:
Super Puppy Boy.
Sales
As of 2012, the game sold over one million copies. About 750.000 of those copies were sold on PC.
Unlockable characters
Many of the playable characters that are unlocked by completing warp zones and collecting bandages come from famous indie games. Each character has a different ability.
