Super Meat Boy (

2010

)

A long time ago (in internet years anyway), there was a website called Newgrounds, where amateur cartoonists and game developers could post their work for the whole world to see. It was a lawless place, where the edgy humor of the early 2000s combined with the creativity of countless bored teenage boys to produce some incredibly sick shit. You could toss Bin Laden into a blender, or play a short cartoony game about a school shooting (inspired by the Columbine massacre!). You could watch humorous cartoons starring your favorite Nintendo characters, filled with the kind of gore and profanity that would never earn the Nintendo Seal of Approval. Pornographic ads ran at the bottom of every page, and plenty of impressionable young men got their first introduction to hentai while browsing through some of the site's more depraved corners. The humor was low-brow, filled with cheap violence and sick jokes about piss and shit. There were crappy cartoons that barely qualified as animation and plenty of games that just crashed inexplicably on launch. It was a shady, crappy website full of degenerates and losers. It was the best damn site on the internet circa 2001 and don't you try to tell me otherwise. Of course, all good things must end, and while Newgrounds is still around, it's a shadow of its former self having lost much of its audience and creators to competing platforms like YouTube. You can't go back to the old Newgrounds, but if you want to see a glimpse into that world you just have to play Super Meat Boy; hell the game's precursor, Meat Boy, was originally posted on Newgrounds by its lead developer Edmund McMillen.

The core concept of Super Meat Boy is nothing groundbreaking, a little guy made out of meat has his girlfriend kidnapped by a mad scientist and must go through an increasingly absurd gauntlet of platforming challenges to get her back. It's the same damn plot as Super Mario Brothers [1985], or Adventures of Lolo [1989], or River City Ransom [1989] or a hundred other 8-bit Nintendo games. Two things set Super Meat Boy apart from the herd, the first of which is its grotesque and irreverent late 1990s early 2000s attitude. Those of us who grew up on Newgrounds can delight in the nostalgia of it, and those who didn't can watch through the cracks in their fingers and wonder why anyone over the age of 12 would find this at all amusing. Super Meat Boy indulges in cartoonish violence in every level, with your character exploding into chunks of gore and blood whenever he runs into a buzz-saw or fails to dodge a missile. When you clear the level you see an instant replay where all your unsuccessful attempts run through the obstacle course simultaneously, getting taken out by the dozen until your one successful run reaches the finish line. Death itself is reduced to just another immature gag. Then there's the poop jokes, the irreverent humor (the main villain is a fetus suspended in a tank), and the pointless cruelty thrown in around the sides. Whenever I go back to play Super Meat Boy, I'm suddenly 14 again, laughing at something that I probably shouldn't even be watching.

Yet, attitude alone cannot make a game great, and it's here that the true genius of Super Meat Boy shines through. The gameplay is simple but so polished that if it's not perfect it's about as close as a game is ever likely to get. The early Nintendo games that McMillen imitates were riddled with design flaws and oversights. Lengthy death animation, limited lives, and thumb-blisteringly difficulty were all but certain to reduce most players to fits of rage. McMillen keeps the difficulty of the old school games but does away with the flaws. There are no lives, you just keep trying the level until you can clear it. Nor are there any long death animations, instead you are plopped back at the start instantly ready for another go. The controls are as fluid and perfect as any game I've ever played. Even though Meat Boy himself, is slippery, he controls like a dream and always responds exactly as you expect him to. You will be killed countless times by the environmental hazards, tricky jumps, and timed-challenges, but never by an unexpected movement.

In terms of bang for your buck, Super Meat Boy is frankly absurd. The game can be grabbed for dirt cheap (I've seen it on sale for $1) and for that you get a game with 100 levels (plus boss stages), each offering a unique set of platforming challenges. Clear the levels fast enough and you'll unlock a “Dark World” variation (for an additional challenge). Beat the whole game and you'll open up an additional world: Cotton Alley, where you play as Meat Boy's girlfriend Bandage Girl (all the stages here have their own dark world challenges as well). Then there are the optional collectibles that will unlock additional characters if you collect enough of them. Finally, there are the warp zones which pay homage to classic video games from various eras and systems, and other special warp zones that will allow you to play as certain other characters (The Kid from I Wanna Be the Guy: The Movie: The Game [2007] is one of these, but his stages are so difficult that I've never even come close to unlocking him for the rest of the game). If you want to just play through the main game, Meat Boy is certainly long and challenging enough to be worth your investment, but if you want to unlock everything and beat every challenge then get ready to set aside a couple of months of spare time. I've played the game on and off for years, and there's still plenty of stuff left for me to unlock and plenty of challenges left to complete. I seriously doubt I will ever finish Super Meat Boy 100%.

If you can't stand the rapid movements and slippery controls of Meat Boy, there's no need to fret, as almost all the game's content can be played as any one of several unlockable characters. Which will be available to you are somewhat dependent on the platform your playing the game on, the Head-Crab for instance is only available on Steam. Most of these characters are lifted lovingly from old indie platformers that the original Meat Boy could count as peers and which in our brave new world of politically-correct, artsy-fartsy, corporate-backed, “indie-in-name-only” games is beginning to look like almost as much a lost golden age as the Newgrounds of my youth. There's Tim from Braid [2008], Commander video from Bit.Trip Runner [2010], Jill from Mighty Jill Off [2008], Ogmo from Jumper [2004] (who helped me clear a few of Meat Boy's trickier levels), and Gish from McMillen's own early game Gish [2004]. The mere fact that this game features The Kid from I Wanna Be the Guy: The Movie: The Game [2007] as an optional character, tells you exactly the sort of environment it is simultaneously a part of, and paying homage to. This was a world of amateur game designers making stupidly difficult games for the connoisseurs and obsessive fanatics. It was the refuge for hard-core gamers, sick of hand-holding bullshit that dominated the mainstream big releases. It's a time I look back on and wonder if we'll ever see anything like it again in my lifetime.

Maybe I'm just getting old, and pining for a lost “good-old-days” that never really existed. Life was, in many ways worse in the past than it is now, and as much as I dislike certain movements and artistic trends I understand that these are only temporary setbacks, and that generally speaking the future is continuing to look up. Yet, I think that Super Meat Boy lends itself to this sort of nostalgic day-dreaming. It is, after all, an indie platformer from the golden age of indie platformers paying homage simultaneous to its peers, the gross world of Newgrounds flash animations circa 2000, and the blisteringly hard games of the late 1980s and early 1990s. It's a product that aligns three lost golden ages and crafts them into this wonderful world. That it does so with such confidence and mechanical perfection only makes me love it more. You don't have to be an ex-Newgrounds Edge-Lord, or a connoisseur of indie platformers, or even a fan of old Nintendo-era games to be charmed by this fusion. Just watch the Fine Brother's video where a bunch of elementary school kids play through the first few levels of Super Meat Boy. Most get frustrated and give up, but there's one little girl who clears every stage and asks for more, utterly captivated by the challenge and emotional high of overcoming it. Super Meat Boy wears its influences of its sleeve, but it is at once uniquely its own thing.

It's a masterpiece.