Super Meat Boy Forever - A Rotten Sequel

Indie games I think it's safe to say that everyone loves them, regardless of what genre they may be, platformers, RPG, metroidvania, horror, it doesn't really matter, honestly they are a very important part of the gaming industry as a whole and are the projects that many people are passionate about. They put in a huge amount of time and effort, so it goes without saying that they can be hugely successful and carry a generation or fall flat on their faces; in fact, some of my favorite games of all time. Independent games. The Binding of Isaac. Cuphead that I had back in the day, although there is one game that always caught my attention and that game is Super Meat Boy, this one is great with its tight controls, clever level design and a wide range of play styles with different characters and levels unlockable.

Super Meat Boy took over the indie gaming scene in the early 2010s when indie games were just starting to gain traction, it has Steve from Minecraft so that's how you know it's a big deal for indie games , although Minecraft is not an independent game, it does not matter, it is not. No matter, then it would make sense to make a

sequel

to such a beloved game and a big part of the story. First, let's talk about what exactly Super Meat Boy is. Well, Super Meat Boy is a game created by Edmund McMillan and Tommy. rafinas, started as a small prototype flash game created for Newgrounds, newly titled Meat Boy and focused on the exact same premise as Super Meat Boy, hard platform to save your girlfriend, the bandaged girl from the evil Dr.

Fetus, this would generate The basic idea of ​​what Edmund and Tommy would like to do for a next project and for No Surprise was a great success, although how exactly does the Prototype hold up now? Well it certainly remains a prototype that's for sure, it's definitely very wacky compared to what was to come, but it was still useful and did its job in making sure you understand what kind of game they want to make, especially with early flash, yes, after the success of the prototype. Nintendo and Xbox requested a game for their upcoming services. We used an Xbox Live game room which was a big step for them, so the team meeting was born with Edmund as Nella's designer artist and Tommy as the programmer for their next Super Meat Boy project.

Despite living on separate sides of the US, they managed to create the game together and have their families play it. Try it, the game began development in 2009 and was finally released on October 20, 2010 for Xbox Live arcade and then PC, although Nintendo requested the game from Edmund for their weeware software, it never actually came out and this was due to the fact that the Wii couldn't handle this game, the file size was too big, it actually exceeded their expectations with the amount of content they added, it was pretty good, however, despite releasing it on Xbox Live Arcade at first, Xbox I had no hope in this game and in the end Xbox, I mean Microsoft, although despite its low expectations due to lack of advertising, it was a great success selling more than 1 million copies in 2012, a great milestone for a game standalone and it's no surprise that people loved the game's dark and nonsensical art style. combined with smooth and tight controls, it greatly benefits the game by establishing itself as one of the best platform games ever made, at least in my opinion, even though the controls are

super

simple, have a run and jump button and nothing else. , the game does nothing more than its idea.

After hearing ideas with new level mechanics introduced in each world, combined with its difficult difficulty to make YouTubers scream for that sweet, sweet entry. I think if it were released today, you'd hear gaming journalists call it Dark Souls of Platformers. Since gaming journalists only think Dark Souls is difficult, no other game is difficult, it's apparently safe to say that overall Super Meat Boy was a huge success and that would mean people would want to see more of this

meat

y friend. I mean, come on, it's me, boy. Wait, where did he go? Yes, although Meat Boy was indeed successful, the team reunion would remain silent for as long as four years in fact, with Edmund McMillan shifting focus from him to his new projects The Binding of his rebirth and Eugenics a. game you linked to Team Meet at the time, that's actually a fun fact, if you watch the original Mugenics trailer you can see that it censored the Team Meet logo, that's kind of funny.

Both Edmund and Tommy were pretty set on the idea that Meat Boy should stay. a unique title considering the main game is pretty complete in itself and doesn't really need more despite that, although people are practically begging to see something new from their teammate, especially when it comes to a possible

sequel

to Meat Boy and we were left With nothing but silence, just when all hope was starting to lose steam, the team meeting came forward and said that Super Meat Boy 2 is a possibility and that Super Meat Boy

forever

will finally be mentioned as a new adventure with Meat Boy, however, it was

forever

meant to be a game. designed for mobile devices as it is an auto-scroller that uses touch controls and has an online ranking system with Edmund stating that a goal with Super Meat Boy Forever is to design a complete new platformer or touch devices from scratch to avoid To attack bad controls in an existing design we want something that embodies the original Meat Boy but is designed around a simple yet intuitive control scheme that allows for pinpoint precision and surprisingly deep controls without the use of multiple buttons or analog sticks.

I think it's safe to say that we know how well this old um they also gave us a screen that the game would look on and it would appear to have Edmond's kind of thick line style, however it seems to retain the background style of the Meat Boy original, okay, it's a bit of a strange style, but I get it, it's clearly just the Prototype and also it's a mobile game, not necessarily a sequel, it's definitely a spin-off. I'm sure they're cooking up something for a true Meat Boy sequel while they're working on a fun little spin-off that's cool and well, it was. scheduled to release in 2015, that's too soon, so where is the game?

It's two years after Super Meat Boy's initial target release forever and we haven't heard anything about it, only getting versions of the first game for the newer consoles. Inside an interesting choice o For some reason they changed all the music from the original in 2015 with new tracks and oh my god they sound 10 times worse. I mean, just listen to the huge degradation here on some of these issues. Thank you, foreignly, this was due to Denny Baranowski. The legendary composer who did the music for the original Meat Boy did not want to pay for the game's music license with each port, so the music was made ridiculing the composers of the music for The Binding of Isaac Rebirth, we will contact them anyway.

In these ports we didn't get anything regarding the sequel that was until August 30, 2017 when we would finally get our announcement trailer for Super Meat Boy forever, finally the spin-off we were waiting for, we finally get to see what it is, but wait for this. It's advertised as a sequel, wait, yeah, so it turns out the game changed from a fun little mobile spin-off experimenting with one-button touch controls to the Super Meat Boy sequel we've all been waiting for and it seems out from the common. The game clearly had a different style and none of that old Edmund charm that the first game had, both with the designs and the animation, which surprises everyone in the same year that Edmund McMillan revealed that he had left the meeting of the team to change their focus on The.

Tying in Isaac's rebirth and future DLC for the game left Tommy alone as a teammate to focus on Meat Boy content. This wasn't exactly promising since Tommy was just the coder, not exactly the level designer, which was Edmund's job, but the game seems to be coming. It came out a year after the trailer was released in 2018, so we'd have to wait until 2018 rolls around and the game is delayed again. A trailer came out that year, albeit to mixed reception in the comments, but also a release date of April 2019. Well, all right, great, just one more year should be enough.

Hopefully they keep going and we can see what this game is finally like. The game was delayed again to 2020 this time, so what was going on why the game was delayed so much? It turns out that Edmonds, playing from Teammeet, had a huge impact on the development of the game. Everything was removed from that point and built from scratch, as well as having many animated cutscenes for 2019. Everything seemed complete, however, Tommy felt the game needed a dark world. Well that's great news, the game is being delayed for more content and for 2020 we finally got a release date of December 23, 2020 as an exclusive for epic games on Nintendo Switch.

It was really a shame to hear that the game would be released on those two platforms. only on initial release, especially on Epic Games, however after all this agonizing time we finally get to see how much this game has improved since its Rocky trailer, oh no, Superman boy forever is really, really, really bad, so much so that I would go as far as calling it one of my least favorite games of all time, there are so many things wrong with this game, man it's weird, it feels like it wants to be like the original and at the same time fall on its face while moving forward like a dragon in the mud that the game was about. five hours long but those five hours were agonizing you could say I'm exaggerating yeah sure I could be for the views but I swear this game is that bad so what exactly is it wrong with the game?

Well, let's go over some of the main elements God help us, the whole story is as simple as possible with the Meat Boy game until it's not like the first one. Meat Boy and Bandage Girl are minding their own business with their new childish nugget when all of a sudden, the evil Dr. Fetus has returned to kidnap Nugget as part of his revenge plan. Dr. Fetus, you are a cruel and cruel man, you can't kidnap a baby, so it's up to Meat Boy and Bandage Girl to save her, oh yeah, and the game does. The side story as the game progresses is about this squirrel who hates Dr.

Fetus for destroying the forest. Remember that one-off squirrel joke that's told about all of his dead friends in the original. You already know the end of chapter one. Imagine that, but. it just spread throughout the entire story of the game, yes it's an insignificant addition to the story and it would still be the same without it, what confuses me the most is that the game randomly turns into time travel or something near the end with Meat Boy and Benadryl turning old and Dr. B turning into a cosmic being, okay, they try to play it off as this really cool sequence and, like, oh my God, this is a huge galactic monster, but it's nothing, not to mention that the fight for him is absolutely terrible, but we will do it.

Coming to it, the original kept it simple, it was simply about how no one loved Dr. Fetus, hence the reason he stole the Vantage girl, to begin with, he was jealous of Meat Boy and hated him for that, it's literally set in the intro that doesn't even need to explain the final boss, it's just Dr. Fetus, he's just shooting rockets at Meat Boy realizing he won't die and continues trying to kill him, but the narrator at the end needs a reason quirky and cool to say it's Awesome, it's so stupid, don't get me wrong, I'd be fine with this if the plans were elaborate, but the whole game isn't explained, it just happens after the squirrel falls on a button, it's so stupid and also a lot. of the story the scenes contain quirky baby humor look at this baby being silly, isn't that cool? she's so dumb oh my god she's just a little baby she has no idea what's going on look at her being so dumb and nice she's so cute I have to buy products from her now so yeah the story is nothing , it's not even worth delving into, so now let's talk about music for this part, but I have to say that the sound effects for when you hit an enemy are very disappointing, just thought I'd point that out considering it's the damn trick Anyway, the music is very bland and repetitive and not memorable at all.

The original Meat Boy avoided this by having tracks of decent length and its entire score is unique enough that you can enjoy it and not get tired of it, but with this soundtrack you feel like you're on a merry-go-round that doesn't stop and play the same thing. soundtrack looping over and over again, for example the final world song has this part of the song playing about five times in the span of a minute. I was really tempted to just mute the game, but then I'd miss the other clues that seem curious, so I ended up not doing that and suffered throughout the entire game.game the tease isn't bad at composing by any means, they actually made some amazing tracks for The Binding of Isaac's Repentance, but man what the hell happened here?

They just don't live up to the original soundtrack, although I'd be lying if I said this is the worst aspect of the game, so let's move on to the first time I saw the initial trailer for the game. I honestly didn't care for the art style at all, it seemed like it wanted to replicate Edmund's style even with the weird inconsistent line work. on many different enemies and obstacles, but they clearly had a vision for this style, so how does it hold up? It's very soft and inconsistent. Do not misunderstand. I'm not talking about the animations in the cutscenes because they are very well animated. since they were made by all these people definitely talented artists, hey they even got Paul Tervort and Tammy Chang, both very prominent animators and artists, but the style doesn't really fit Meat Boy, especially compared to the first one, the best way how I can describe art. the style is a more sanitized and corporate version, like looking at all the backgrounds, as pretty as they are, they just don't fit in the same game, they should have just had one style and stuck with it, well that's all the secondary stuff out of the way .

So now we can finally get into the dreaded topic of so imagine you start your first copy of Super Meat Boy very excited to see what you've been missing by wanting to play a really fun and challenging platformer and at the same time being fair, you start the first level and it's me. column fight from the hell chapter, you check it with difficulty, but you managed to do it only to find out that the entire game is the fight against the Meat Golem, which is the gameplay of Super Meat Boy forever. This is probably the most embarrassing gameplay for a platform game sequel I've ever had the displeasure of playing and I'm not even kidding.

I absolutely hate this game. It's so precise and unsatisfying with its mobility options that it left me frustrated for all the wrong reasons, so let me go over the game and then dive into the different ones. aspects of the content that the game has to offer, as you already know, Super Meat Boy forever is an autorunner mixed with the elements of the first Meat Boy game. The use guy still has the ability to wall jump, but instead of the ability to move you have two different attack options while running to increase your movement, the punch and the kick, the punch is used to hit enemies or break obstacles and propels you slightly into the air which leaves more potential for level design, the kick is basically the same except when you're in the air and use it you go down

super

fast.

I admit it's an interesting idea to give more moves at the

meat

guy's disposal, it makes him feel more like he's in control of what he's doing, except for the fact that he can't stop running, yeah. A big flaw that plays into this is the autorunner aspect. I know I keep comparing this game to the first, but how can I not when it's labeled as a sequel to the original? The freedom of movement gave you time to process the level. Design and react things in a more free way, however in this game you are constantly moving so there is no chance to breathe, it is all a matter of memorizing what punch or kick you are going to do and it is much more boring compared to the reality.

When learning level design, on top of that, you could spend tons of time on a section just because it takes a long time to understand what the level design is for a certain section of a level. If this sounds strange, there is a reason for it. So basically, in the entire game there are six worlds: Chipper Grove, the Tetanusville Clinic, the Other Side Laboratory, and Ox Dead Beef, and instead of having 20 levels like the first game, this game has six levels per world, one pretty big degradation, well apparently there is a big reason. For this, this game has procedurally generated levels.

Yes, each level is much longer due to the fact that they are segmented into different parts. This is best explained in the meat questions section on the Super Meat Boy website, which by the way has some of the worst answers I've ever seen that are super challenging but fair. I worked out some of these basic level designs by just guessing, anyway one of them says that each level consists of 100 carefully designed fragments that are placed together to create a level. The fragments are like small. Meepoy levels that are designed, decorated and given a difficulty rating each time you beat a level, a difficulty increasing criterion is used to generate the most difficult version of that level.

Additionally, the levels should have a certain cadence so they don't feel random. Things that we throw at you, we have worked on a system that allows us to give a criterion of difficulty and pacing that makes the levels random but still within the limits of what we want the levels to be presented, so, long story short, it they made. more complicated than necessary to have a higher number because each level is designed around this complicated ad system, the game places checkpoints on each fragment you die in, this is a big problem in my opinion and it really takes away from you What made the first game so great: the original game had short and sweet levels, it was really challenging but also fair.

However, when you die in a level here, you respawn at the fragment checkpoint you loaded, but why would they change that level? simple formula well there is an easy answer for this, the game had a tendency to boast about the fact that it has thousands of levels meaning there was clearly more concern for quantity than quality, not even mentioning that some of the Levels suck to begin with. way more time than I needed on certain parts to make me get stuck and it's not like I could look up a walkthrough because everyone's game is completely different when I figured out what to do, I didn't even feel like I did the bit correctly.

I actually had the idea that I solved it by accident. It's not a good thing. It just feels like with these procedurally generated levels the charm of the original isn't there because they're just striving for the sheer number that the game offers. You have a seed before starting the game to indicate that yes, everything is random, but I really hate how that works in games designed to be random. Meat Boy, the original was not a random game. I also want to point out that they have a speedrunner. timer in settings on a procedurally generated Auto Runner, just pathetic, what else is there to look at?

Well there are also the warp zones, just like in the first game, the warp zones are portals that take you to a secret level where you only have a limited amount of lives to do a special challenge to unlock Honestly, never I discovered. I found two or three of the warp zones in the game and I can tell you now that they are nothing like the first ones and are not as good as these warp zones. the zones focus on referencing the first game and also other games mixing them up instead of being fun. Challenging levels.

Some of them may be fun, but that's only because they're all copying other games like Punch Out, which I really enjoy. I did not do it. I even unlocked anything by doing this and spent a bit of time trying to get the perfect run on your meat challenge test. The first one had three different war zones, usually two normal ones and one where you could get a special character from another game. was great and offered new ways to approach the game with each character offering a new style of play. I'm a big fan of how the game celebrated the Indies at the time, although after searching for it online you get skins that you unlock. doing very specific tasks that mostly revolve around collecting pacifiers, by the way, pacifiers are the replacement for bandages and I ended up ignoring them throughout the game because my attention is focused on the fact that I'm constantly running and I can't stop to think. about how to get them, so I ended up with zero, yeah, it really sucked, because with the warp zones in the original, you did three levels of challenging platforming to be rewarded with bandages or a new character, it was a great incentive to do them. however, locking skins behind a specific number of dummies and combined warp zones just ruins the point of their existence, plus going from single playstyles to mainly skins due to limiting gameplay is a huge disappointment.

Two great game editions done perfectly well. in the first left I feel empty in the sequel, surely they couldn't ruin the bosses, although oh my god they ruined the bosses. The bosses are by far my least favorite part of the entire game. It was so terrible to play the first one. The boss is a little Slugger clone, except you're constantly jumping over the wall and hitting weak spots. How exciting, nothing difficult. The second boss is this strange brain creature who is less memorable than Chad, just another boring boss fight that gets really repetitive after a few minutes. then there's a security wall boss fight which is absolutely terrible, the fight is locked in this tight space and you're just jumping left to right, right to left while hitting the slugs in a weak spot so you can hit him in the head.

It took me a long time and the lasers in the fight reset the rotation when you hit his weak points. Sometimes it's completely random and sometimes the Slugs just don't even hit the weak spots. It was horrible and tedious, but believe me, fights get worse. The next fight is a fight with Doctor Fetus, who is just a barrage of clones and yeah, not interesting. I had no idea what to do for the first 10 minutes and just couldn't figure it out. I had to use a guide a lot in this game. by the way, even though the levels didn't have a walkthrough because everything is random, it was very tea, yes you have to keep hitting and jumping the waves of fetuses that feed the eyes while grabbing the jump power to hit the real Fetus Doctor . eventually it's very boring and lastly there's the final boss, he's a gigantic galactic dr fetus and the whole fight is just a super linear and precise auto run level.

It's the worst boss fight in the game and it took me like an hour to do it especially. when the mechanics it uses are really wacky, it doesn't use game mechanics, it relies on only two mechanics that appear in the final world, it doesn't even feel like a final boss and which is super frustrating for all the wrong reasons. These are all terrible boss fights and do the game a disservice, especially when the majority of your time in this game is the last three bosses. The first meat boy had you use what you knew about the world in his boss fights.

While it also introduced fun mechanics and challenged your platforming skills, except for the Meat Golem, they are not perfect boss fights, but they do the job in testing your skills, especially the final boss, the best way I can sum up the gameplay of Super Meat Boy forever. is a sequel trying to be something that simply can't be the auto-running genre, it just doesn't fit in the slightest with Super Meat Boy, a game that relies on precise movement and level design that has a format that already worked in his favor in the past tries to have the same feel and precision but fails to incorporate the auto-running element it just doesn't mix well.

I hope they've managed to revert to the original format if they ever end up making their third game, but based on their super idiotic responses to the two buttons' critiques in the same meat question segment, it seems highly unlikely. I think it's fair to say, based on everything I've said about this game, which is so horribly bad in my eyes, this is far from what I hope the Meat Boy game is, in fact, a soulless shell wearing a Meat Boy skin to target a new audience and forget about everything that made the original so special, although I think I should specify if you enjoy this game, then fine.

For your sake, I'm glad you can enjoy something I simply can't. It's a shame to see this game go through hell and back only to get out, starting as a mobile game for fun and becoming a sequel. It was pretty much doomed from the start, it sucks, it looks like we'll never see a true Meat Boy sequel again I guess, although that may not be true in 2017. Evan McMillan and Tyler Glale teamed up to make a game called The End of the Night . a difficult platformer with almost the exact same control as a Super Meat Boy, so with different movement options to make it feel fresh, it does a much better job of capturing the first spirit of Meat Boy and Edmund has said that it is what Meat Boy would have liked.

The sequel to Boy is like, I recommend you go see it if you're craving more meat, boy, it's avery fun game and even harder, do yourself a favor and skip Super Meat Boy forever unless you like Auto Runners. I guess that's it, I'm a meatball and you just see me get angry over a cube of meat. Let's hope this never happens again. Playing this game was truly agonizing.