I Wanna Be The Guy

(Hey, guys.) Me again. You may have been wondering why I haven't blogged in a while. Well, it's because I've been trying to beat this game. And I did it, you guys. Isn't that great? Heh-heh-heh......Why did I do this? Why did I let this game punish and abuse me like it did? Oh, let's face facts: I deserved it. I deserve everything I get.

But I'm the Guy. I became the Guy after beating this game. Does it mean anything, though? What does a Guy even do? Why would I ever want to be one? I never found those answers, and I doubt I ever will. The game doesn't have a lot of story, but it's still better than anything I could ever hope to fart out. It's all a series of references to better games from the old school, like Mega Man, Rampage, and Super Metroid. At first, they seemed like a small sliver of hope in my suffering, but after a while, they stopped doing anything for me. I felt...nothing. I felt like the hollow shell that I really am. I could blame the game for it (you never hear much of the music, after all), but we all know I'm to blame. For everything. God. And once you take away those references, I had nothing from the game. I mean, it's not like the game offers anything of its own that's any good. T...the...th...uh....DAMN IT! WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU!? JUST WRITE IT DOWN, YOU GODDAMN ASSHO-graphics! The graphics that aren't ripped from other games could be made in Paint (I imagine; I can't even draw so much as a pathetic pixel in Paint), and Dracula sounds like he was recorded through speakers with my shitty microphone.

Speaking of shitty, me. I am shit. Nothing but shit for having so much trouble with this game. Don't tell me that this game is supposed to be difficult; I know that it's all my fault that I died so many times. I should have seen all those traps coming, but I didn't. Even when I saw the traps coming (because of my repeated failure), and knew how to guide the Kid through the loosely designed levels (not too often), my fat fucking fingers tripped over the keyboard and sent that Kid to his death. Wait...Oh god...1368 children I sent to their deaths, and for no reason. I'm a monster; beyond all hope. Granted, they all died each in their own special way, but that's far more than an abomination such as myself ever deserves. I don't even deserve good gameplay from this game, which certainly explains why I didn't get any. Oh, sure, I died as many times as I did, but things became bearable after a while, and the difficulty of playing this game died down (for a while, at least), leaving me with what I truly am: nothing. Absolutely nothing. The platforming was basic enough to appeal to a moronic idiot such as myself; the secret items do nothing to quell the eternal pain; and the bosses are just as vindictive as the rest of the game. All in all, it's a monotonous hell which extinguishes any potential fun I might feel. This game knows exactly how I ought be treated.

Did I mention the glitches? No? I imagine it's because there are no glitches in this game. I'm just so terrible with computers that any time I so much as touch a button on this machine, the program simultaneously freezes and bursts into flames. Nature has conspired against me to thrust me into the most supreme suffering imaginable. But, being the fool that I am, I pressed on, and was rewarded in kind with so many glitches. The platforms, for example, knew better than to hold my weight and let me plummet to my inevitable death, laughing at my naive hubris. The game would then crash, and I would ignore the warning, diving right back into this thing. Every time, I had to reconfigure the controls, because apparently I'm too good for simple arrow keys; Mr. Kingy Goddamn King needs some WASD in his PC games. Although looking back on it (I can't help but relive these terrible events over and over again), it seems that most of the glitches were related to music. Mega Man abandoned me; the dead would steal music from me; the dead would summon silence in death; areas began to overlap; I could go on and on about this, but....y....just....I....

Review Synopsis

• ........
• .......I.....
• ........

Maybe this video will cheer me up. I doubt it, though.

Super Meat Boy

(Holy shit; it did the trick.) Well, now that I'm out of that stupor, how 'bout some Meat Boy? OH DEAR GOD, what an ordeal that was. I don't really know how to describe it, or, to be more accurate, I don't know how to describe it without repeating everything I said in the I Wanna Be the Guy part of this blog. After all, Super Meat Boy's a glitchy mess of a game that specializes in balls-hard platforming and shitloads of old school references. However, there is one key difference betwixt these games: Super Meat Boy is actually pretty good.

Right, then. The premise. What's this game about? Well, you, a meathead, must rescue your beloved from an evil fetus. No, that's not an allegory for a body builder trying to convince his girlfriend to get an abortion; it's literally a ball of meat saving his girlfriend from a robotic abortion. Thinks that sounds dark? Well, get used to it, because the entire game is like something you'd find on Newgrounds. Half the characters look like they were beat over the head with a mace, and half the time, it's because they were. Not that I'm complaining or anything; it lends the game quite a bit of personality along with a twisted sense of humor. After all, if every single character can smile throughout this (and they do), why shouldn't I? Imagine Binding of Isaac, only exactly like that.

Speaking of references to other games, guess what this game does a ton of? Actually, don't, because I revealed it in that very sentence. Anyway, like I Wanna Be The Guy (because I just remembered that I have to tie that in somehow), you're gonna find a lot of references to NES games or whatever, and like I Wanna Be The Guy, they don't do a lot for the game. You'll see them once, think "yea, that's kinda cool", and then forget about them entirely. References to modern games, on the other hand, are all kinds of awesome, partly due to volume. There are more characters from other games in this one than there are original characters. Now at first, that might sound lazy, but it actually works wonders for the overall game. First, you add 900 hours just trying to unlock the bastards (even if 890 of them are spent on The Kid). Second, each one plays pretty much like they did in their original game. Naija dashes all over the place; Viridian reverses gravity a bunch; and The Kid is still horrible. Obviously, these techniques aren't going to work in every level, so there's a bit of strategy to your choices, especially if you want to become a golden god. So hooray for that.

But let's face it: you didn't come to this game for other games. You came to Meat Boy to be punished. And punished you will be, because this game is balls hard. Hell, I personally found it harder than I Wanna Be The Guy (although a lot of that is because of what follows later). OK, so it wasn't hard at first, especially when I managed to take things slowly (odd choice of words, given how quickly I blasted through many of the early levels) and made Meat Boy look like what he looks like above, but over time, things became difficult. By the final level, I was cursing whatever sadistic fuck decided to add an escape sequence...and praising him for awesome level design. What makes these levels so good? First off, very rarely do they look impossible; most of the time, I'd look at a level and think "yea, I can totally do this". It may have taken a billion tries, but I did it, goddamn it. You can't walk away from something like this. It's an addiction that taunts you. You just want to get to the next level to see what new crazy idea the developers will use to destroy you, because trust me, there're a lot of them. You have spikes, spikey circles, your own corpses, more spikes, Ameno-Sagiri, and so much more, you guys. All over the course of the entire game, and all mad challenging. Wow, this game has everything! What could possibly sour this experience?

The cavalcade of glitches. What a deal breaker those are. I should have known how glitchy this game was as soon as I started it up. Normally, when I start up a PC game, my display gets a bit wonky as the game tries to adjust my resolution; Super Meat Boy decided to crash through some weird technical issue. Turns out that it can't run in full screen, like, ever. That's OK, though, because I play my games windowed anyway. Then I played the game, and things didn't get much better. My character would fly through walls and floors, they'd die for literally no reason, the controls would refuse to respond, I got no less than four blue screens (along with countless display drivers careening into the nearest roadside tree), and the frame rate...oh god, the frame rate. Actually, the frame rate is probably the cause of most of the glitches (or at least an omen of them). When everything is smooth and fast, no glitches. But should it drop just one frame, the glitches come out of hiding and make the game impossible to complete. In fact, that's largely why I took so long beating this: a chunky frame rate would tell Dr. Fetus to change up his timing and sit on his lazy ass, making the final level impossible to complete without at least 900 rabbits trying to drag their bloody stumps to the nearest police station.

I can sense some of you are about to yell at me about my PC being the problem, because I have the world's lamest premonitions. To that, I offer you my eventual process for playing Super Meat Boy: first, I knocked the game down to the absolute lowest quality possible. (Remember that I was already running this in a window.) Then, I uninstalled all games on Desura and Steam I hadn't touched. Next, I'd close EVERY NON SUPER MEAT BOY PROGRAM so Dr. Fetus could have all the memory he desired. Then, I'd play the game and still glitch the hell out. Given that other people have had these problems (and that they've persisted), and that the game begins with a middle finger to keyboard users, I seriously think that Team Meat couldn't give two shits about anybody who bought this through Steam. To them, you deserve everything you get. So won't you please not incur the wrath of Team Meat, and instead just buy the XBLA version of this game? Every penny counts...or something to that effect.

Review Synopsis

• I'm pretty sure that by the time I post this blog, Team Meat will have shoved in all the characters from the latest Humble Indie Bundle or something.
• Along with at least twenty more ways to kill you in the afterlife.
• All without fixing any of the glitches that plagued my experiences.