Platform games have come a long way since Super Mario Bros. Not for Super Meat Boy, which is a run of the mill platformer, with some nice originality and humor. Super Meat Boy originally began as Meat Boy, a flash game on Newsgrounds, which saw hundreds of thousands of people playing it, enough for Nintendo to request a port to WiiWare. Now Super Meat Boy has been released on WiiWare, Xbox Live and PC as well.

You play as Super Meat Boy, a slack of meat, who lives life happily when your girlfriend, a patch of gaze, is kidnapped by a fetus called, appropriately, Dr. Fetus — a baby in a jar. And just like in Super Mario Bros, you go on a quest of finding and rescuing your girlfriend. And that’s about all the story we get.

The gameplay of Super Meat Boy is nothing but a fast run and jump styled one, and you’ll be doing that through out the game’s levels (which there are aplenty of). Another thing you’ll be doing throughout the game is die, because Super Meat Boy is challenging to the point of frustrating, and the levels seem awkwardly balanced, where some are as easy as Super Mario, while others will have you die over and over again, prompting a quick “screw this” and starting another game (which happened to us quite a lot). But the nice style and levels drew us back, and we kept playing. Not only that, each level has a “dark world” counterpart, which is even more challenging.

The levels and art design of Super Meat Boy are wonderful, and bring back old memories of NES and Super NES, where platformers reigned supreme. The audio and soundtrack add to its nostalgic feel, but the difficulty level is certainly a notch higher than the old school ones. While the tough difficulty will make you swear after dying over and over again, most of the times when you do complete the level, it’s quite satisfying.

The Good:
Great nostalgia feel
Great value for money
Lots of levels
Challenging

The Bad:
Can be frustrating at times
Not much lasting appeal

Overall score: 8/10