Super Meat Boy is far from the best platformer I've ever played, but it certainly is a very fun one. In a way much less overt than, say, Bit.Trip Runner, Super Meat Boy is all about forgetting yourself and caving in to your gut level reactions and gaming skills. This makes it really only appropriate for people who have played the shit out of Mario, of course, but also people who have made their way through the likes of N+ or I Wanna Be the Guy and still crave more.
If those references don't mean anything to you, or even if they do, then you probably know what Super Meat Boy's distinguishing characteristic is: ungodly difficulty.
There's a pretty great quote from Shigeru Miyamoto in a recent New Yorker piece about him on the question of difficulty (and I'm sorry that I bring up Shigeru Miyamoto so often on this website, but considering that Super Meat Boy is so indebted to the Mario franchise, I think it's apropo here).
Miyamoto recognizes that there is pleasure in difficulty but also in ease, in mastery, in performing a familiar act with aplomb, whether that be catching a baseball, dancing a tango, doing Sudoku, or steering Mario through the Mushroom Kingdom, jumping on Goombas and Koopa Troopas. His games strike this magical balance between the excitement that comes from facing new problems and the swagger from facing down old ones. The consequent sensation of confidence is useful, in dealing with a game’s more challenging stages, but also a worthy aim in itself. “A lot of the so-called ‘action games’ are not made that way,” Miyamoto told me. “All the time, players are forced to do their utmost. If they are challenged to the limit, is it really fun for them?” In his own games, Miyamoto said, “You are constantly providing the players with a new challenge, but at the same time providing them with some stages or some occasions where they can simply, repeatedly, do something again and again. And that itself can be a joy.”
This, quite frankly, is something that Super Meat Boy doesn't really follow. That's not to say that any game that tries to be like Mario has to be exactly like Mario, and Super Meat Boy certainly carves out its own little niche, but this sort of "classical" design style is tossed out the window in the first five minutes, when your little avatar gets sliced in half by a bandsaw.
Actually, what Super Meat Boy's design feels like is the "challenge for challenge's sake" kind of games that seem to permeate the depths of Flash game development on the internet – and for good reason, as Super Meat Boy started out simply as Meat Boy on Newgrounds, offering up a challenging, yet fun little timewaster (the finished product of Super Meat Boy is quite different from Meat Boy, honestly, though I can't see why Super Meat Boy couldn't be done on Flash anyways). Elements of this sort of design return for its souped up "special edition" on XBox Live and PSN: each level takes about 15 seconds to do; you're given unlimited lives to achieve your goal on any given level; and, as is often the case in these types of games on Flash, the goal isn't progression, but rather, to complete a challenge, move on to a slightly more difficult challenge, and on and on.
It's actually a pretty quality design for something that's designed to kill time, and it's certainly a ridiculously addictive formula. Team Meat seems to acutely understand how to make a difficult game fun, and the secret is this: between the time you die and the time you start over, there can only be a fraction of a second separating the two. Those extra seconds in between dying and starting over are all the difference between "just one more try" and "fuck this shit."
And Super Meat Boy is a game unafraid to use death as a teaching tool. I've always found it a little strange in games such as these that, essentially, you get killed over and over again trying to make it to the end, but you're only required to be successful once. It doesn't really teach you anything, except I suppose giving you the skills to potentially make it through the next level (anyways, that's not really an issue with Super Meat Boy, per se, just an observation). As Meat Boy is indeed a sentient, raw piece of meat, when he dies, he dies in a bloody fashion (although it's all very cute, oddly enough). Essentially, your failure begins to stain the very landscape of the game, and by the time you've saved Bandage Girl at the end of a level, probably every piece of the level will be covered in your, ahem, "accomplishments." (There's also a fun little feature at the end of each level where you can see each of the Meat Boys you used in a particular level all at once in a replay; just like in The Highlander, there can only be one.)
So yes, Super Meat Boy is outrageously fun for the platforming expert – I doubt that many people who are just picking up the genre would find much to like about the game, but that's not really who the game is meant for. My problems with the game stem from a few issues that probably also stem back to the Flash game aspect of Super Meat Boy. Indeed, in its native Flash form, Meat Boy is a lot of fun, compelling in that "I should be working" kind of way; but as a $10 release, the presentation veers between "pretty bad" and "pretty juvenile" a lot of the time. The story – Meat Boy saving Bandage Girl from Dr. Fetus – is way too "Newgrounds-y" for its own good, being stupid and weird for stupid and weird's sake. It feels like the nerdy version of baditude, which is unfortunate. And as for the level design, it's certainly challenging, but it's not especially aesthetically pleasing. It has a nice, clean look to it that stays out of the way for the most part, but outside of the adorable design of Meat Boy himself, there's not a lot going on there.
Perhaps most unfortunately, this applies to the music as well, which is occasionally very good and chiptune-y, but is occasionally way too annoying and Dragon Force-y. Probably a more consistently retro soundtrack would have sufficed here.
And finally, one has to hope for a WiiWare release for this game – not just because I'm a bit of a Wii apologist, but because the XBox controller is pretty godawful for games like this (I didn't get a chance to play it with the Playstation controller, though I'd imagine it'd be better, if only because it's a much more "classic" design). Neither the analog stick, which is a bit too "floaty," nor the d-pad, which is too loose and doesn't provide the pixel-exact movement you expect or need for a game like this, work as well as you want them to. Add to this the sometimes-dodgy button press recognition (I would often die at the beginning of a level because the game was failing to recognize that I was pressing the jump button or whatever), and if this game had a conventional "life" system, you'd be liable to throw your controller across the room. Now, the game is difficult enough to make you want to do that anyways, but it should be the level design, and not controls, which make that happen. To be fair, my problems with the controller only really cropped up every once in a while, but even the shape of the controller, with its hefty middle section and the way it forces your hand to its shape, don't quite feel right for this game, proving (for me, anyways) that the NES controller really is the very best controller for platformers ever created, boxy shape and all.
Overall, Super Meat Boy shouldn't be taken as one of the greatest platformers of all time – its presentation is just too uneven for that. Rather, seen as an addictive timewaster, it's one of the best. Whether you need to download it at all, though, is another matter entirely – it's not much more than a spruced up Flash game with extra levels, and it definitely works better in its original context.