Monday, November 12, 2012

Super Fucking Meat Boy

I know this blog is about WoW, but I am unable to not rave about this game. Having finished the "main" game a year or two ago but losing my progress to a PC upgrade, I turned it on last night last night on a whim and ended up playing all the way through The Hospital's Dark World [with A+ time on all but that god damn vertical fan level] and once again found myself having the most fun playing a video game ever.

Every gamer should play this game. Don't be frightened by people telling you how stupidly hard it is. Don't think it's like Dark Souls-- a game which uses the argument of "it's supposed to be hard" basically to excuse the developer not bothering to fix any blatantly unfair design issues. Yeah-- I get that Dark Souls is "genuinely" retro in that way, but let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater in terms of modern game design.

Super Meat Boy is not a retro game, it's a game that builds on a quarter-century of refinement of the platform genre.

Super Meat Boy is not designed to be "finished" by more than some ridiculous top percentile of gamers, but the game does have a smooth difficulty curve to gradually push you into trickier and trickier challenges. It's about seeing how far you can get-- exploring and expanding the outer limits of your skill as a gamer. And although you will inevitably end up dying over and over, the constant refinement of your play skill [the purest form of video game fun] will compel you to keep going, attempt after attempt, until you finally nail it.

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