New Super Meat Boy Level Editor Lets You Construct Your Own Sadistic Challenges

A quick confession before getting onto this news: I never quite finished Super Meat Boy. As completely awesome as it is--one of my top ten from last year, in fact!--at a point, the game just became too hard for my namby-pamby sensibilities. The pure, unadulterated anger this game inspired in me too often made my eyes go green with pre- Hulk rage, to the point where at least one controller of mine is guaranteed to never work quite right again. Eventually, I just had to stop for the sake of everyone and everything around me. I never wanted to hurt anyone, I swear.

Maybe I can find some catharsis for my still bubbling bitterness by inflicting pain on others via the newly released level editor on Steam for PC players. It's been long-talked about, and now Super Meat Boy players can design and construct their very own bite-sized chunks of hellish platforming acrimony by accessing it via the "Tools" option in your Steam library.

The editor is replete with all sorts of nifty features. You can use any element you've seen in-game in one of your created levels (short of bosses and warp zones--those are off-limits), and you can use all 20 characters to play through them, regardless as to whether you've unlocked them in the main game or not. You can even create your own chapter selections (five levels minimum) with your own par times, titles, and music.

Finished levels are uploaded to the Super Meat World community zone, which players can access via an in-game pad once they have collected 20 bandages. Community members can vote on their favorite  levels, and the best stuff will be highlighted by Team Meat as "recommended levels." And by the best, we're sure they mean the most hateful, skin-peelingly torturous levels, of course. == TEASER ==

The best part of all of this is that it's free. As the Team Meat blog entry regarding the editor so succinctly puts it:

"It was a labor of Love/Hate but something we did because we knew the fans wanted it and were already creating so many awesome levels using our devmode. So think of this as a thank you to all the awesome fans who sent us cool shit, nice emails and created amazing levels with devmode, if you bitched us out because the free level editor was delayed, you should probably not update your game and burn in hell."

Nicely put. Again, this is currently only available via the PC version of the game. The Mac version of the editor is apparently forthcoming, but regrettably, Xbox Live Arcade players won't ever have their own editor. Apparently there's just no good way to do an unregulated level editor via Xbox Live, but Team Meat assured players that they hope to keep releasing new chapters for that version of the game.

As a final sign-off, the game-developing Cenobites at Team Meat made it abundantly clear that they are not planning on a Super Meat Boy sequel. It's a bittersweet notion, one that seems likely to inspire equal amounts of sadness and solace among players. We'll just have to wait and see what dastardly horrors the Team Meat crew are plotting next. I'm already cowering in fear just thinking about the possibilities...