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This thread has been linked to the game 'Super Meat Boy'.
Think of a word beginning with F. Now take out all of the vowels. Next, place a couple of Ns, Rs, and Gs in there. Or maybe some Ls and Bs. It's your word, you choose. Finally, extend the fricative by prolonged exhalation, maybe even to the point that it takes over the entire word.
Got all that? Don't worry about it if you didn't follow, or didn't bother. You'll be doing it soon enough. For the mouth you normally speak so beautifully from is about to bear a succession of strange and bizarre words. New incantations, as if you are speaking in tongues will sprout from your lips in a way that would make anybody in earshot think that this is what you are a natural and fluent speaker of. Some unusual sounds, indeed, the vast majority of which will begin with F:
"FFRRRGGNNGGNGNG!"
"FLLBBL!"
"FFFFFFFFFFFF....."
To say the least, Super Meat Boy is a tough game. Underneath its cartoony exterior beats the heart of a lion and the lion is far too scared to try and get it back! Things sure do start off easily enough, but they quickly amplify through "Tricky", then "Tough", into "Difficult" and "Harsh", with a brief stopover in "Heinous" before settling down in "So difficult you haven't even named it yet, I know use one of those F-words you made earlier."
This is the latest independent superstar, the latest simple little game that is going to take hold of you whilst winning critical acclaim from all directions. It is the story of Meat Boy, who is literally as his name suggests a boy made of meat. The opening sequence will have you laughing out loud as it imparts the most basic of plots. Dr. Fetus has kidnapped your girlfriend, Bandage Girl, because he hates you. To get her back, you need to chase him across 300+ levels of increasing intensity through several themed worlds. Run, jump, and wall-jump are your friends here, with a boss fight thrown in every 20 levels. Nothing here breaks any moulds, and is all packaged in delightful retro charm. The opening screen is a recreation of the one from Street Fighter II, and this is done as a wink to let you know what to expect.
Being an independent game, naturally it has to be a 2D platformer. The same rules apply here as apply to all such platformers of the last few years, most of which are given affectionate homage. Some of them even manage to loan their lead characters replete with their own gimmicks. Tim from Braid can rewind time, Gish can stick to walls, and fellow Newgrounds stalemates The Behemoth provide not only a Castle Crasher but also the Alien Hominid. No simple reskins these; they often change the game completely. Some are required to complete certain challenges, whereas some just make things easier for a while. All are genuine rewards for genuine challenges.
It is this level of challenge that is the single best feature of the game. It would have been easy for Team Meat to design a title that simply piles on the difficulty by throwing increasingly unfair obstacles at the player. The developers have avoided this temptation, and instead take us on a tour-de-force of level design. Problems that look insurmountable at first soon start to look like child's play, because you have been slowly educated in how to play during every single screen up until the one that faces you. Gaps that should be impossible to reliably squeeze through, dissolving platforms precariously placed over pits of instant death, and sections requiring absolute precision timing to the nearest microsecond; all are placed in your way, and all are dealt with thanks to some of the tightest control of all time. Meat Boy simply does what you tell him to, and any deaths that stem from this are your own fault.
Your own fault. Truly, it always is. This is a title that asks you to do the nearly impossible, and leaves you to do it. It is completely fair. Anything that looks like it will kill you will kill you. Falling off the screen is always fatal, in whichever direction. Barring one or two screens that throw you in at the deep end, every level shows you everything it has right away. Every so often you get a new mechanic to consider, but these are all staples of the genre. Keys, timed switches, death rays, evil clones, auto-scrolls, and other such standards will haunt your vision for a good few minutes at a time.
The challenge is, then, the good kind of challenge. The kind that makes you throw your controller away in disgust, but disgust at yourself before going and picking it back up. A red trail of everywhere you have been litters every level and it just gets more red as you die more. This allows you to see exactly where you made your mistake, and teaches you what not to do next time! "One more go" becomes a mantra that you curse yourself for repeating at 3am. The game is designed to keep you playing, by letting you instantly try again upon death. Death becomes so frequent that it loses all meaning, and the focus becomes just getting yourself to Bandage Girl so that you can punch the air, shout out "YEAH!", and get told off by your Mrs. for making that kind of noise at this time...
The tornado force of the swears piling up in your head in that most delicious of agonies, the self-loathing induced by countless ALMOST successes, and the final exhilarating release that accompanies the fulfilment of the goal; this is the combination that videogames give us that keeps us coming back for more. Super Meat Boy offers plenty of this, and does so by tantalising us. Many of the collectables are placed in the most frustratingly visible locations. Some levels have Warp Zones that activate NES or Gameboy style levels, and reaching these zones is usually just on the other side of your current comfort level. Every level also has a par time, and each has its own leaderboard with which to compete against friends/the rest of the world. Finally, completing a level allows you to access the Dark World version of it, which is an even harder re-imaging of the same screen. There is as much game here as you can handle.
What Team Meat have put together here is nothing short of a celebration of platforming. With a flawless learning curve over a mountain of levels, and the option to step up for even greater challenges, this is the kind of game that can drill straight into your pleasure centres if you let it. Failure on any screen is inevitable, but is never a deterrent. Instead, it spurs you on to ever greater successes by simply shrugging off your failure as a natural consequence of the learning process and just not dwelling on it at all. The game wants you to do better, and makes you want to as well. It is fast, funny, furious, fabulous, but most of all "FZZRRGGRRBBZZRRR!"
Got all that? Don't worry about it if you didn't follow, or didn't bother. You'll be doing it soon enough. For the mouth you normally speak so beautifully from is about to bear a succession of strange and bizarre words. New incantations, as if you are speaking in tongues will sprout from your lips in a way that would make anybody in earshot think that this is what you are a natural and fluent speaker of. Some unusual sounds, indeed, the vast majority of which will begin with F:
"FFRRRGGNNGGNGNG!"
"FLLBBL!"
"FFFFFFFFFFFF....."
To say the least, Super Meat Boy is a tough game. Underneath its cartoony exterior beats the heart of a lion and the lion is far too scared to try and get it back! Things sure do start off easily enough, but they quickly amplify through "Tricky", then "Tough", into "Difficult" and "Harsh", with a brief stopover in "Heinous" before settling down in "So difficult you haven't even named it yet, I know use one of those F-words you made earlier."
This is the latest independent superstar, the latest simple little game that is going to take hold of you whilst winning critical acclaim from all directions. It is the story of Meat Boy, who is literally as his name suggests a boy made of meat. The opening sequence will have you laughing out loud as it imparts the most basic of plots. Dr. Fetus has kidnapped your girlfriend, Bandage Girl, because he hates you. To get her back, you need to chase him across 300+ levels of increasing intensity through several themed worlds. Run, jump, and wall-jump are your friends here, with a boss fight thrown in every 20 levels. Nothing here breaks any moulds, and is all packaged in delightful retro charm. The opening screen is a recreation of the one from Street Fighter II, and this is done as a wink to let you know what to expect.
Being an independent game, naturally it has to be a 2D platformer. The same rules apply here as apply to all such platformers of the last few years, most of which are given affectionate homage. Some of them even manage to loan their lead characters replete with their own gimmicks. Tim from Braid can rewind time, Gish can stick to walls, and fellow Newgrounds stalemates The Behemoth provide not only a Castle Crasher but also the Alien Hominid. No simple reskins these; they often change the game completely. Some are required to complete certain challenges, whereas some just make things easier for a while. All are genuine rewards for genuine challenges.
It is this level of challenge that is the single best feature of the game. It would have been easy for Team Meat to design a title that simply piles on the difficulty by throwing increasingly unfair obstacles at the player. The developers have avoided this temptation, and instead take us on a tour-de-force of level design. Problems that look insurmountable at first soon start to look like child's play, because you have been slowly educated in how to play during every single screen up until the one that faces you. Gaps that should be impossible to reliably squeeze through, dissolving platforms precariously placed over pits of instant death, and sections requiring absolute precision timing to the nearest microsecond; all are placed in your way, and all are dealt with thanks to some of the tightest control of all time. Meat Boy simply does what you tell him to, and any deaths that stem from this are your own fault.
Your own fault. Truly, it always is. This is a title that asks you to do the nearly impossible, and leaves you to do it. It is completely fair. Anything that looks like it will kill you will kill you. Falling off the screen is always fatal, in whichever direction. Barring one or two screens that throw you in at the deep end, every level shows you everything it has right away. Every so often you get a new mechanic to consider, but these are all staples of the genre. Keys, timed switches, death rays, evil clones, auto-scrolls, and other such standards will haunt your vision for a good few minutes at a time.
The challenge is, then, the good kind of challenge. The kind that makes you throw your controller away in disgust, but disgust at yourself before going and picking it back up. A red trail of everywhere you have been litters every level and it just gets more red as you die more. This allows you to see exactly where you made your mistake, and teaches you what not to do next time! "One more go" becomes a mantra that you curse yourself for repeating at 3am. The game is designed to keep you playing, by letting you instantly try again upon death. Death becomes so frequent that it loses all meaning, and the focus becomes just getting yourself to Bandage Girl so that you can punch the air, shout out "YEAH!", and get told off by your Mrs. for making that kind of noise at this time...
The tornado force of the swears piling up in your head in that most delicious of agonies, the self-loathing induced by countless ALMOST successes, and the final exhilarating release that accompanies the fulfilment of the goal; this is the combination that videogames give us that keeps us coming back for more. Super Meat Boy offers plenty of this, and does so by tantalising us. Many of the collectables are placed in the most frustratingly visible locations. Some levels have Warp Zones that activate NES or Gameboy style levels, and reaching these zones is usually just on the other side of your current comfort level. Every level also has a par time, and each has its own leaderboard with which to compete against friends/the rest of the world. Finally, completing a level allows you to access the Dark World version of it, which is an even harder re-imaging of the same screen. There is as much game here as you can handle.
What Team Meat have put together here is nothing short of a celebration of platforming. With a flawless learning curve over a mountain of levels, and the option to step up for even greater challenges, this is the kind of game that can drill straight into your pleasure centres if you let it. Failure on any screen is inevitable, but is never a deterrent. Instead, it spurs you on to ever greater successes by simply shrugging off your failure as a natural consequence of the learning process and just not dwelling on it at all. The game wants you to do better, and makes you want to as well. It is fast, funny, furious, fabulous, but most of all "FZZRRGGRRBBZZRRR!"
Great review again Lee.
Everything you say is true, Super Meat Boy is fantastic/infuriating/madness/brilliant and everything in between. I need to play it some more.
Everything you say is true, Super Meat Boy is fantastic/infuriating/madness/brilliant and everything in between. I need to play it some more.
Another excellent review Lee. This is a game I've still not got round to buying yet, must make amends for that soon.
Think of a word beginning with F. Now take out all of the vowels. Next, place a couple of Ns, Rs, and Gs in there. Or maybe some Ls and Bs. It's your word, you choose. Finally, extend the fricative by prolonged exhalation, maybe even to the point that it takes over the entire word.
Got all that? Don't worry about it if you didn't follow, or didn't bother. You'll be doing it soon enough. For the mouth you normally speak so beautifully from is about to bear a succession of strange and bizarre words. New incantations, as if you are speaking in tongues will sprout from your lips in a way that would make anybody in earshot think that this is what you are a natural and fluent speaker of. Some unusual sounds, indeed, the vast majority of which will begin with F:
"FFRRRGGNNGGNGNG!"
"FLLBBL!"
"FFFFFFFFFFFF....."
To say the least, Super Meat Boy is a tough game. Underneath its cartoony exterior beats the heart of a lion and the lion is far too scared to try and get it back! Things sure do start off easily enough, but they quickly amplify through "Tricky", then "Tough", into "Difficult" and "Harsh", with a brief stopover in "Heinous" before settling down in "So difficult you haven't even named it yet, I know use one of those F-words you made earlier."
This is the latest independent superstar, the latest simple little game that is going to take hold of you whilst winning critical acclaim from all directions. It is the story of Meat Boy, who is literally as his name suggests a boy made of meat. The opening sequence will have you laughing out loud as it imparts the most basic of plots. Dr. Fetus has kidnapped your girlfriend, Bandage Girl, because he hates you. To get her back, you need to chase him across 300+ levels of increasing intensity through several themed worlds. Run, jump, and wall-jump are your friends here, with a boss fight thrown in every 20 levels. Nothing here breaks any moulds, and is all packaged in delightful retro charm. The opening screen is a recreation of the one from Street Fighter II, and this is done as a wink to let you know what to expect.
Being an independent game, naturally it has to be a 2D platformer. The same rules apply here as apply to all such platformers of the last few years, most of which are given affectionate homage. Some of them even manage to loan their lead characters replete with their own gimmicks. Tim from Braid can rewind time, Gish can stick to walls, and fellow Newgrounds stalemates The Behemoth provide not only a Castle Crasher but also the Alien Hominid. No simple reskins these; they often change the game completely. Some are required to complete certain challenges, whereas some just make things easier for a while. All are genuine rewards for genuine challenges.
It is this level of challenge that is the single best feature of the game. It would have been easy for Team Meat to design a title that simply piles on the difficulty by throwing increasingly unfair obstacles at the player. The developers have avoided this temptation, and instead take us on a tour-de-force of level design. Problems that look insurmountable at first soon start to look like child's play, because you have been slowly educated in how to play during every single screen up until the one that faces you. Gaps that should be impossible to reliably squeeze through, dissolving platforms precariously placed over pits of instant death, and sections requiring absolute precision timing to the nearest microsecond; all are placed in your way, and all are dealt with thanks to some of the tightest control of all time. Meat Boy simply does what you tell him to, and any deaths that stem from this are your own fault.
Your own fault. Truly, it always is. This is a title that asks you to do the nearly impossible, and leaves you to do it. It is completely fair. Anything that looks like it will kill you will kill you. Falling off the screen is always fatal, in whichever direction. Barring one or two screens that throw you in at the deep end, every level shows you everything it has right away. Every so often you get a new mechanic to consider, but these are all staples of the genre. Keys, timed switches, death rays, evil clones, auto-scrolls, and other such standards will haunt your vision for a good few minutes at a time.
The challenge is, then, the good kind of challenge. The kind that makes you throw your controller away in disgust, but disgust at yourself before going and picking it back up. A red trail of everywhere you have been litters every level and it just gets more red as you die more. This allows you to see exactly where you made your mistake, and teaches you what not to do next time! "One more go" becomes a mantra that you curse yourself for repeating at 3am. The game is designed to keep you playing, by letting you instantly try again upon death. Death becomes so frequent that it loses all meaning, and the focus becomes just getting yourself to Bandage Girl so that you can punch the air, shout out "YEAH!", and get told off by your Mrs. for making that kind of noise at this time...
The tornado force of the swears piling up in your head in that most delicious of agonies, the self-loathing induced by countless ALMOST successes, and the final exhilarating release that accompanies the fulfilment of the goal; this is the combination that videogames give us that keeps us coming back for more. Super Meat Boy offers plenty of this, and does so by tantalising us. Many of the collectables are placed in the most frustratingly visible locations. Some levels have Warp Zones that activate NES or Gameboy style levels, and reaching these zones is usually just on the other side of your current comfort level. Every level also has a par time, and each has its own leaderboard with which to compete against friends/the rest of the world. Finally, completing a level allows you to access the Dark World version of it, which is an even harder re-imaging of the same screen. There is as much game here as you can handle.
What Team Meat have put together here is nothing short of a celebration of platforming. With a flawless learning curve over a mountain of levels, and the option to step up for even greater challenges, this is the kind of game that can drill straight into your pleasure centres if you let it. Failure on any screen is inevitable, but is never a deterrent. Instead, it spurs you on to ever greater successes by simply shrugging off your failure as a natural consequence of the learning process and just not dwelling on it at all. The game wants you to do better, and makes you want to as well. It is fast, funny, furious, fabulous, but most of all "FZZRRGGRRBBZZRRR!"
Got all that? Don't worry about it if you didn't follow, or didn't bother. You'll be doing it soon enough. For the mouth you normally speak so beautifully from is about to bear a succession of strange and bizarre words. New incantations, as if you are speaking in tongues will sprout from your lips in a way that would make anybody in earshot think that this is what you are a natural and fluent speaker of. Some unusual sounds, indeed, the vast majority of which will begin with F:
"FFRRRGGNNGGNGNG!"
"FLLBBL!"
"FFFFFFFFFFFF....."
To say the least, Super Meat Boy is a tough game. Underneath its cartoony exterior beats the heart of a lion and the lion is far too scared to try and get it back! Things sure do start off easily enough, but they quickly amplify through "Tricky", then "Tough", into "Difficult" and "Harsh", with a brief stopover in "Heinous" before settling down in "So difficult you haven't even named it yet, I know use one of those F-words you made earlier."
This is the latest independent superstar, the latest simple little game that is going to take hold of you whilst winning critical acclaim from all directions. It is the story of Meat Boy, who is literally as his name suggests a boy made of meat. The opening sequence will have you laughing out loud as it imparts the most basic of plots. Dr. Fetus has kidnapped your girlfriend, Bandage Girl, because he hates you. To get her back, you need to chase him across 300+ levels of increasing intensity through several themed worlds. Run, jump, and wall-jump are your friends here, with a boss fight thrown in every 20 levels. Nothing here breaks any moulds, and is all packaged in delightful retro charm. The opening screen is a recreation of the one from Street Fighter II, and this is done as a wink to let you know what to expect.
Being an independent game, naturally it has to be a 2D platformer. The same rules apply here as apply to all such platformers of the last few years, most of which are given affectionate homage. Some of them even manage to loan their lead characters replete with their own gimmicks. Tim from Braid can rewind time, Gish can stick to walls, and fellow Newgrounds stalemates The Behemoth provide not only a Castle Crasher but also the Alien Hominid. No simple reskins these; they often change the game completely. Some are required to complete certain challenges, whereas some just make things easier for a while. All are genuine rewards for genuine challenges.
It is this level of challenge that is the single best feature of the game. It would have been easy for Team Meat to design a title that simply piles on the difficulty by throwing increasingly unfair obstacles at the player. The developers have avoided this temptation, and instead take us on a tour-de-force of level design. Problems that look insurmountable at first soon start to look like child's play, because you have been slowly educated in how to play during every single screen up until the one that faces you. Gaps that should be impossible to reliably squeeze through, dissolving platforms precariously placed over pits of instant death, and sections requiring absolute precision timing to the nearest microsecond; all are placed in your way, and all are dealt with thanks to some of the tightest control of all time. Meat Boy simply does what you tell him to, and any deaths that stem from this are your own fault.
Your own fault. Truly, it always is. This is a title that asks you to do the nearly impossible, and leaves you to do it. It is completely fair. Anything that looks like it will kill you will kill you. Falling off the screen is always fatal, in whichever direction. Barring one or two screens that throw you in at the deep end, every level shows you everything it has right away. Every so often you get a new mechanic to consider, but these are all staples of the genre. Keys, timed switches, death rays, evil clones, auto-scrolls, and other such standards will haunt your vision for a good few minutes at a time.
The challenge is, then, the good kind of challenge. The kind that makes you throw your controller away in disgust, but disgust at yourself before going and picking it back up. A red trail of everywhere you have been litters every level and it just gets more red as you die more. This allows you to see exactly where you made your mistake, and teaches you what not to do next time! "One more go" becomes a mantra that you curse yourself for repeating at 3am. The game is designed to keep you playing, by letting you instantly try again upon death. Death becomes so frequent that it loses all meaning, and the focus becomes just getting yourself to Bandage Girl so that you can punch the air, shout out "YEAH!", and get told off by your Mrs. for making that kind of noise at this time...
The tornado force of the swears piling up in your head in that most delicious of agonies, the self-loathing induced by countless ALMOST successes, and the final exhilarating release that accompanies the fulfilment of the goal; this is the combination that videogames give us that keeps us coming back for more. Super Meat Boy offers plenty of this, and does so by tantalising us. Many of the collectables are placed in the most frustratingly visible locations. Some levels have Warp Zones that activate NES or Gameboy style levels, and reaching these zones is usually just on the other side of your current comfort level. Every level also has a par time, and each has its own leaderboard with which to compete against friends/the rest of the world. Finally, completing a level allows you to access the Dark World version of it, which is an even harder re-imaging of the same screen. There is as much game here as you can handle.
What Team Meat have put together here is nothing short of a celebration of platforming. With a flawless learning curve over a mountain of levels, and the option to step up for even greater challenges, this is the kind of game that can drill straight into your pleasure centres if you let it. Failure on any screen is inevitable, but is never a deterrent. Instead, it spurs you on to ever greater successes by simply shrugging off your failure as a natural consequence of the learning process and just not dwelling on it at all. The game wants you to do better, and makes you want to as well. It is fast, funny, furious, fabulous, but most of all "FZZRRGGRRBBZZRRR!"