Overdue Review: Super Meat Boy (PC, MAC, Xbox Live Arcade)

Butler hopes to make an example of Team Meat’s Super Meat Boy in hopes that other indie developers will learn from this cautionary tale of an OK game gone horribly awry. See how after the jump!

This article turned in to a hulking beast as I was writing it, so very quickly, here are the things I liked about this little indie platformer: the premise (you as a sentient blob of meat trying to rescue your girlfriend from an evil fetus in a jar) is pretty delightfully absurd, the animations are cute yet tongue-in-cheek, and the soundtrack is great.  You will note that I did not mention anything relating to the gameplay.  So, Super Meat Boy, can you come up to the front of the class so the other developers can learn a lesson or two?  First on the docket:

If you are making a game for PC, make sure it controls well on a PC

I’ll start out small here.  Super Meat Boy begins with a little jibe about how using a controller is infinitely superior to using a keyboard and advises you to do so.  Play this game for about 30 seconds (5 levels or so – more on that below) on a keyboard, and you will find that yes, this game blows when you play it that way.  Gamepads are not cheap, however, and a big draw in PC gaming is that you pretty much never need peripherals beyond a mouse and a keyboard.  So when the first thing I see upon starting your game on my computer is “hey, this game sucks on a computer”, it is not going to be starting with a good taste in my mouth, especially when my $3.50 acquisition has suddenly become a $43.50 acquisition now that I need to buy some additional hardware just to play the fucking thing.

Every time you buy a Microsoft controller, Bill Gates gets an erection,

coupled with a starry-eyed and distant gaze.

10 second levels have no place beyond browser flash games

Every level in Super Meat Boy lasts an average of 10 to 15 seconds.  This is fine at the outset when nothing in the game is particularly difficult and it gives you a great feeling of accomplishment as you learn the game’s basic mechanics.  If you are anything like me, however, your momentum will be brought to a screaming halt with a sledge hammer to the kneecap around the first boss level.  You see, in theory, this level should last you approximately 20 seconds.  I, on the other hand, spent about 20 minutes dying over and over and over and over and over and over again due to cheap blind pitfall/spike trap deaths and grappling with the finicky controls, restarting the level every 10 seconds or so.  Can you even comprehend how many times you watch yourself die while this is happening?  Well, I guess if you want to use your fancy math, that number is about 120 times, which is absurd.  I spend more time dying in this game than literally anything else, which reeks of length padding.  It’s almost like the level designers couldn’t be bothered to make levels that coherently fit together, so instead made levels that are so pant-shittingly difficult that you spend many times the completion time trying to figure out how to get past that one buzz saw, or winding up going way too fast for a jump and careening over the platform that is half your size.  Dying a handful of times due to sadistic level design and awful controls is frustrating, let alone dying dozens of times on the exact same 10 second stretch.  Nobody should have to put up with this kind of maddening frustration for money.

Oh, and did I mention that upon completing each level, the game

replays every attempt you made at once?  This means your reward

for winning is a reminder of how much you suck when you see

every death you had happen almost simultaneously.

And speaking of maddening frustration, this lets me lead nicely to my most important and final point:

Infuriating difficulty is not a substitute for good game design

Anger is a strange motivator in videogames.  Anyone that has had the joyful and wondrous privilege of living with me at any point in my 2 decades of gaming has borne witness to fits of rage that can at best be described as juvenile, and at worst have resulted in broken gaming equipment.  I’d apologize, but I know that if you’re reading this, you have done it too and know exactly where I’m coming from.  See, when a game is frustrating, it is made all the more so by the fact that your rage becomes a compounding loop, continually vented at something that doesn’t even care that you’re angry due to the fact that it is just a bunch of lines of code.  The fact that your rage goes unrequited means that this smug fucking game is mocking you, calling out the miniscule size of your gamer genitalia for all to see, so goddammit, you will not be beaten.

This kind of rage is the only reason people ever continued to 

play against the Street Fighter cpu after the third tier.

So you play and die over and over again figuring that if you can just get past this level, all will be well, forgetting that games never employ a downward difficulty curve.  And lo and behold, you reach that next level only to find that goddammit this is even harder.  But you will not let this game beat you.  Oh no, so you get back in the ring while your blood pressure rises to unforetold levels, all the while deluding yourself into thinking you’re having fun.  The thing is, the charade eventually disintegrates and you realize that you could be playing any number of things that actually engross and excite you, and ever dwindling hard drive space makes that “uninstall” button look mighty tempting.

As gamers we are always looking to “beat” whatever it is we’re working on, and indie game developers seem to love exploiting this, appealing to our obsessive drive to complete things without actually making the completion of these tasks rewarding.  Beating an infuriatingly difficult level only to be rewarded with an even more infuriating experience is not fun, and it doesn’t take long to realize that as you hurl racial epithets at the screen (am I the only one who becomes strangely racist when yelling at my computer?) through teeth you are clenching to dust.  So yes, I did obsessively play Super Meat Boy for about an hour because I was not going to let this game get the better of me, only to realize that it had already gotten the better of me long ago, by forcing me to waste time playing it while I could not have been said to be having even an iota of fun.

The thing is, this game is lauded for its difficulty, making the point that it makes the levels that much more rewarding.  Bullshit.  Levels that last 15 seconds but take 10 minutes to complete are infuriatingly repetitive and were a construction of days long since past when designers had to figure out some way to get you to pay $50 for a game that has about a half hour of actual content.  In today’s day and age, releasing a game made difficult because of an endless series of cheap shots is not a sign of competence, it is a sign of a lack of substance, demonstrating the inability of the designers to come up with a fun premise or enjoyable mechanics in favor of making 90% of your play time reloading from your last save.  Which as I pointed out above, was 10 goddamn seconds ago.

Words do not even begin to do my hatred of these people justice.