The truth hurts.


There’s no punchline follow up to that cold open. That’s it.

In an unpredictable bout of what I feel is justifiable ire, I’ve more or less been “on one” the past few posts, thrashing about in anguish at the thought of some of the more lamentable aspects of the gaming industry, with traditional game reviews taking the brunt of most of my savageries. As is the case with most of my critiques, after the piece is finalized and finally goes up, much later on in my day, I always have that moment of self-reflection and think to myself “was I too harsh?”, only to be reassured after a second glance that, no….it is not that I was too harsh, I was just too real; not holding back in the name of decorum, and the unfortunate reality that the truth hurts, though that pain is always worth the truth, I feel, for the sense of contentment and peace of mind that follows soon after, in knowing I lived my truth, and that I did so with fervent gusto, when all was said and done.

What more can we ask of anyone, truly?

There does remain an intense irony, of course, that in those many articles of truth allaying and soothsaying, one of the large oversights ended up being the collateral of referencing the notion of my current playthrough of Super Meat Boy 3D, without actually talking much about my playthrough of Super Meat Boy 3D (SM3D). At least, not any more thoughts running along side my critique of the industry, outside of my initial opening gambit involving Pound of Flesh. This isn’t the first time such a thing has happened, wouldn’t you know, and while it is never an intentional trolling of sorts, I’ve always seemed to have the habit of enjoying discussing everything surrounding the game, except for the game itself, in some kind of weird self-condemning challenge of creative fervor. I noticed this as far back as my article entitled: The Belmont’s Day Off: A Thousand Words, a write up involving a playthrough of Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, so this is a known known of sorts. Of course, the bill comes due, it always does, and at the moment, I feel as if it’s time to pay my dues to that tenacious little cube of meat, and discuss some more of the trials and tribulations involving his latest adventure.

Having finished the light world yesterday, and having played through at least half of the Dark World, I know there is still quite a chunk of content left to see, but I will be surprised if any of it moves the needle much for me, in terms of how I feel about the game. On the one hand, the difficulty present, the precision platforming as it stand, and the flying by the seat of your pants gameplay scratch an itch for the old school masochist within me. On the other hand, there are just stark truths that I have been pondering about involving Meat Boy as a whole, and a big one with intense relevancy on the present situation. This curious notion that I’m about to put forth has a bit of a bite to it, but so be it: Did Meat Boy really need to be a franchise?

I ask, only because the first game, especially now with two more games following the initial *retail release of Super Meat Boy, was so obviously such a lightning in a bottle moment, that both follow ups are definitely farcries of distance away from touching the same level of quality. When your first title is such a cultural touchstone within the stratosphere, the follow ups of course are probably going to pale in comparison, but I feel as if this is a particularly egregious example that such a moment of success was never going to be repeatable.

I think one of the bigger elephants in the room is the long standing feud with Team Meat and the original composer for Super Meat Boy (SMB), Danny Baranowsky, who did such a magnificent job on the soundtrack of the original, his music single-handedly helped to inject a ridiculous amount of life into the title, that after their falling out, every subsequent release of SMB had different stand in music tracks, and the game never felt the same again after that. In fact, even when I did download SMB on other platforms with the updated OST that had to replace the old music for legal reasons, I would still play the old audio through third party means while playing the game on the new platform…the quality of difference is that profound.

I’ve said for awhile now that one of the big fundamental differences between a B tier game and an A tier game is good sound design, a point that came into focus when I was playing through My Friendly Neighborhood, and a truth that rears its ugly head here once again. The music in SMB3D just lacks that Baranowsky touch, and shows how much he elevated the quality of the original game….much like Marty was to Halo, or even John Williams was to Star Wars, Baranowsky earns similar praise in accordance with his work on Super Meat Boy, and why his absence here is felt so severely in SMB3D as well.

If we are talking about pure gameplay metrics, the other painful reality is that going from 2D to 3D, you’re going to lose some of the zest of the original movement, which will only truly be felt as a lost in translation moment when one begins to sink their teeth into the nitty gritty, and really focus on Planck time affairs. Obviously. Since Planck time is so infinitesimally small, a human can’t legitimately measure it without instruments, hence why I am being an absurdist exaggerator at the moment, but my comparative point stands, in having to really measure such minutia to feel the alterity present, and how the pain of distinction can be felt in those tiny unseen, inbetween moments that make the world of difference. To that point, SMB3D does lose some of the cadence of the original SMB when you get down to brass tacks; everything is just a tad slower due to the mechanical realities of 2D v 3D, and there is just no getting around that unfortunate truth. From jump movement, to speedy momentum, to just a small loss of grace in the realm of precision platforming, when you have a game that is so polished it blinds you with a mirror like sheen, much in the same way SMB does, anything else just doesn’t feel as shiny.

I have more thoughts, but I’m going to end it there for now. Till next time.

-Pashford