In a world of overachievers, I advocate for a more modest means of personal satisfaction.

A “good enough” mentality will help set you up for life in the realm of stress free self-empowerment

I’m aware there is a lot of tonal whiplash in my style from day to day here on Active Time Event; one minute, I am waxing poetically with complicated measure, the next I’m cursing like a fucking sailor. All depends on the mood and energy levels, I suppose. I think one thing that has greatly benefited me in getting articles posted everyday (when I’ve successfully quelled the demon that is depression) is that I avoid perfectionism at all costs. The number of times I’ve talked to other creators that admit they could never keep the same pace because of endlessly scrutinizing their own work…such sad, savage self-sabotage by my reckoning. If the difference between someone making something and simply not doing so is to just have a “good enough” mentality, I’d say aim for that over idealism every time. If I only showed up to work on days I thought were going to be absolutely care free, I’d be unemployed for the rest of time.

Perspective matters in these types of affairs

While I’m guessing I’m not done :“talking” about Mixtape, as I think it will be an experience that will remain in the memory banks of the gaming zeitgeist for awhile yet. However, the experience is a rather short romp, and having finished it yesterday, I leave y’all with the few articles I wrote on the matter to mull over, in all of their grey area complexities. I always hate when a game comes out that divides players in such a way, if nothing else due to the sad dictation of how binary so many conversations end up being. This is due to the abject laziness of the heart and mind, with people so often lazily defaulting to a black and white mentality; most considerations in the everyday boiled down to a love or hate type response, with absolutely no room for a more nuanced approach. People are going to people at the end of the day, so I can’t say I’m terribly surprised at the whole matter.

Kind of rambling here, but more so than just the perfectionist streak that keeps people from posting, based on how exhausting the everyday has become due to, you know….reality, I don’t blame people for not being more creative, more so for a lack of energy than not feeling as if their work isn’t immaculate in structure. I’ve been bonked our exhausted the past couple days, and sleeping my free time away between work shifts would be infinitely preferred to keeping myself on a hectic creative schedule, yet here we are. What a world.

I don’t feel as if this write up is doing justice to the next game I’m about to mention, as it’s one I’ve been looking forward to for sometime, even delaying starting it in the name of seeing what Mixtape was all about. With all of that said, I started Super Meat Boy 3D today, the third title in the Meat Boy series, and a follow up to a game that is near and dear to my heart. Though I did skip Super Meat Boy Forever, which was not necessarily intentional; I literally didn’t know it existed for awhile, and then kept putting off downloading it for any number of randomly distracting reasons, the original Meat Boy launched way back in 2010, and for a lot of people, who quite likely in a similar fashion, haven’t messed with the series since the first game, 16 years is a mighty long time to be away.

In my own world, I’ve revisited the game several times since my first 100%ing of the game, and it never gets old for me, based on just how meticulously polished the level design and controls are, playing off each other in a ridiculous harmony, that creates the ideal balance of challenge and engagement that keeps one pinned to a chair for just “one more run” a thousand times over.

Though Team Meat has changed over the years, and focused on other titles with far more gusto, like the ridiculously replayable Binding of Issac, and the recently released cat focused strategy game Mewgenics, Super Meat Boy still stands as a modern day classic, and one that helped to define a certain era for indie gaming, in conjunction with both a featured spot in a film about indie games around the time of its launch, and a huge push by Microsoft to help define the 360 as the place to be for indie goodness around the 2010s, along side the likes of Braid, Spelunky, and Fez, which helped to cultivate a fairly legendary era of small creators making a big difference in the landscape of gaming.

Very interesting time in gaming, and most certainly a fascinating time to think about for those who grew up in those moments in their more formative years. I had already moved out of the house I grew up in by the time Meat Boy came out, and had been renting my own place for a couple years at that point, so I definitely was no wee pup by the time it came out, but it certainly feels like a more “nostalgic” moment, as it were, though I’m not sure one usually associates the idea of nostalgia with adulthood in such a fashion, which ends up being an interesting insight, or at least a revealing enough one that gives me a moment of pause to do a double take.

Just shooting from the hip here on reflecting on Super Meat Boy, which was not even the goal of this article, but here we are (again), I recall the moments when I reviewed the title, back when I was playing the part of a more straight edged, traditional gaming journalist, hustling for whatever bucks my freelancing ass could muster by doling out review scores, and I remember giving Super Meat Boy a 9/10, which is bizarre I rated it in such a fashion, as I love the game, so you think I’d have given it a ten, but my rationale for not doing so was accessibility issues related to difficulty, as many wouldn’t have the patience to enjoy the challenging standard the game offers. An interesting moment involving some protest to my own review score, which irks me on a personal level, but not a professional one, within the framing of the context cited, making sense all the same with said rationality in mind.

Which is another interesting point that I think is worth mentioning, when considering my recent musings with Mixtape, in that I cite the game as non-traditional, within the realistic acknowledgement it wouldn’t be for everyone, which ends up being the inverse issue of Meat Boy’s appeal and tragic flaw in a similar but different way, which by my reckoning, is that the game is so super traditional, some people would be turned off by its pretense, the experience in that example, not being for everyone as a result.

I think there’s a lot more to that thought, but I’m out of time. Lots to think about, though.

-Pashford