Thursday 14 August 2014

Super Meat Boy

[Post #15 of the Blaugust Challenge!]

I know this has been out for awhile but I only recently got my hands on it thanks to one of my guildies gifting it to me. Simply put it is a challenging platformer and muscle memory game in which the player controls a square who is trying to save another square from an evil square. Yes, the graphics are quite on the simplistic side but the animation and humor makes up for it rather nicely. You've probably never seen squares this cute, or monsters so happy (most have a smiley face).

This poor cube dies a lot. :P

Difficulty wise it is more forgiving than I Wanna Be The Guy, at the start anyway, and slowly ramps up as you play through each stage and then through each dark world zone which contains similar maps just harder with more traps and/or in reverse. To unlock dark world zones you have to beat a set time limit on each Light world zone. These range from 3 to 60+ seconds depending on the map. Personally, while I have cleared all the Light world stuff some of the Dark World remains unplayed for me (15% to go according to the stats) and I've not yet completed all the extra warp zones nor collected all the other collectibles in game. The Kid from IWTBTG is actually a playable character too, so you can guess the difficulty level once you reach him.

There are also leader boards which add some reason for re-playability if you like having small numbers next to your name. My best rank was 12,325. What is most impressive for me, after some of the deviously designed stages, is the soundtrack. Each zone has a theme done three ways. Light, Dark, and 8-bit for the warp zones. This is on top of boss fights and cut scenes, and given there is no voice or speech the music carries a fair bit of weight. 

Lastly I should mention that the loading screen always highly suggests a controller to play too, though I'm doing just fine on a standard PC keyboard (which is my personal preference anyway). Maybe it's easier with a controller but given the nature of the game... why the hell would you use a controller anyway? All up I give this frustrating yet addictive game four whirling saws of death out of five. Just be sure you have a patient temperament to dying well over 9000 times before getting it.

Blaugust Bonus: One of my favourite foods is spaghetti and I love almost all types of it as long as they avoid seafood. Anytime I go into a new restaurant it's one of the first things I look for to order then judge the entire establishment based on that. I think it's one of the easiest things to cook, so if they can't get that right then there's no point in coming back to order anything else. It's just one of those things I can eat all the time. I'd just get fat(ter). :P

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