Super Meat Boy

The Good
Meat Boy is quite charming, I must admit that. How can anybody not like a protagonist that is made out of several dollars worth of meatballs, I might have a lot of mean things to say about this game (apparently having a negative opinion about certain games is considered mean), but the character is certainly not one of them. He deserves a real game, maybe even a job at Nintendo or Microsoft, the xbox 360 really needs a platforming franchise.

I really like the replay at the end of each level, they don't just show how you made it through the course, but they also show every single attempt you did in one video (you see hundreds of Meat Boys exploding until only one makes it to the end). It was very cool to watch and I also like it how you can save these clips. I haven't tried it, but I hope it saves them in a .avi file or something, so you can upload it to Youtube or watch it without starting the game up,

The Bad
My biggest complaint is the difficulty, a lot of people praise this, but I think it's false advertising. When I saw this game for the first time, I figured it was a nice game for my little sister, it's not really violent and Meat Boy looked like the game would contain a lot of good humor. I have been playing this game for two week now and I can just barely play it myself, my sister can't even get past the beginning stages. I am currently at the second boss, but no, I am done with this game, I have seen everything it has to offer and I don't want to play it anymore. I like challenge, what I don't like is levels that look like they were designed for a Super Mario World rom hack.

The graphics are a huge disappointment and I once again feel betrayed, the only screenshot I ever saw was from the world select and I didn't know that, so I thought it was some kind of 3D platforming game similar to Super Mario Galaxy, but what I got is a freaking Flash game. These guys have to be kidding, you play these kind of games on Newgrounds.com, you don't pay seven euros for them on Steam, how greedy can a person possibly get? This is also one of the laziest flash games ever, the characters look like they are fresh from Atari 2600.

There is a severe lack of humor except for a few cut-scenes that happen before and after boss-fights. I don't know if this is something that will show up later in the game, but if there is something I learned from my work as a writer it's that you should always do everything you can to suck people in, that means showing what they can expect later in the game, so they don't just put it down after three stages because it's boring.

I really hate it that there is no sound when you start up the game, then you get a music that is a bit loud on the screen that says "press start AND THEN you get incredibly loud music on the menu-screen. Was this game designed by people or freaking monkeys, this isn't fun, it's incredibly annoying. The music during the stages is incredibly bland and soft, I didn't even notice it, so it goes from nothing to loud and then back to nothing, great, just great.

The goal is to save Meat Boy's girlfriend - Bandage Girl - from an evil scientist, okay, I like it that the game doesn't try to tell a complex story in a game that people clearly aren't playing for the story, but there is still a big problem: The goal of each individual stage is to get to Bandage Girl, who serves as the finish line. Every single stage you save her and every single time she is taken away again, that's like if every single temple in the Zelda games had Ganondorf as the final boss, what would make his death at the end of the game more permanent than the rest?

The Bottom Line
Aside from a character that is quite interesting, there is just nothing good about this game. It's too hard, the graphics would shame the original Super Mario Bros. and the story is messed up. This game really deserved a better developer, one that knew how a difficulty curve works and how to keep people interested for long enough, it would also be nice if they didn't hire seven year old kids to design their characters.

Die-hard fans of platforming games will probably like this game and think I just hate it because I suck at it, you could say, I don't like this game because the difficulty curve is insane, but I dislike it for several other reasons which all form a beautiful pile called "Super Meat Boy". There are some coins somewhere in that pile, but do you really want to dig through that stuff?