{"id":1283,"date":"2010-12-25T14:16:26","date_gmt":"2010-12-25T22:16:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/?p=1283"},"modified":"2016-12-06T13:43:28","modified_gmt":"2016-12-06T21:43:28","slug":"super-meat-boy-hell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/1283","title":{"rendered":"Super Meat Boy: Hell"},"content":{"rendered":"

I spent a bit more time on Super Meat Boy<\/em> last night, beating one more boss (or, well, world-end-level; it was more of a race against time, without any real boss monster to beat) and then going to Hell. “Hell” is that game’s name for its traditional lava-and-fireballs world. I suppose there’s an ice level next? A big part of this game’s schtick is riffing on 2D platformer clich\u00e9s. The first world is an idyllic forest, just like the first world in every Sonic the Hedgehog<\/em> game, except there are enormous circular saws mounted all over the place for no apparent practical purpose, and I don’t think Dr. Robotnik ever went as far as to just burn the whole forest down — something played for laughs here. Sonic was marketed as the bad-boy counterpart to Mario, but Meat Boy, with his irrepressable grotesque-cuteness, his glee in the face of repeated gory death, and his utter disregard for censors or parents, has him beat hands-down in the bad-boy department without even making a big deal of it. And Hell is part of this: lots of games have lava worlds, but only a few<\/a> are so forthright about what we’re all thinking. (Fun fact: the Japanese version of Um Jammer Lammy<\/em> has Lammy die, go to Hell, and escape. The North American version timidly replaced this whole scenario with a tropical island, robbing Lammy of her heroic journey’s most directly mythic component.)<\/p>\n

Fittingly, Hell seems to be the place where the difficulty ratchets up to just beyond my abilities. I may well change my mind about this — a good platformer makes things seem like they’re beyond your abilities but then trains you up to the point where they’re not. I remember Crash Bandicoot<\/em> as being particularly good about putting collectibles in seemingly-impossible places that I skipped over on the first pass but came back for later with greater confidence. The “Veni Vidi Vici” sequence in VVVVVV<\/em> looked daunting at first, but yielded to persistent practice. Still, those are both matters of hunting for optional collectibles. Here in SMB<\/em> it’s the main path through the game, and I’m not even on the last world yet. I’m winding up doing the opposite of what I did in Crash<\/em> and VVVVVV<\/em>: going back to find collectibles and bonus areas because it’s the easier alternative.<\/p>\n

Well, I knew what I was getting into when I started playing. This game has a reputation for extreme difficulty. I’ve seen this school of game design described as “masocore”, although there are differing definitions of that — the author of Super Jill Off<\/em> contends that a true masocore game has to subvert genre expectations<\/a>. I suppose SMB does that to some extent, though. Just the sheer abnormal distance that you can leap is something of a subversion, in that it allows the designers to create levels where the best and safest route through a series of obstacles is to just clear them all in one go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I spent a bit more time on Super Meat Boy last night, beating one more boss (or, well, world-end-level; it was more of a race against time, without any real boss monster to beat) and then going to Hell. “Hell” is that game’s name for its traditional lava-and-fireballs world. I suppose there’s an ice level […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[263,331,431,418],"class_list":["post-1283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-platformer","tag-crash-bandicoot","tag-edmund-mcmillen","tag-super-meat-boy","tag-vvvvvv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1283"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4725,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1283\/revisions\/4725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}