‘Meat’s meat, and a man’s gotta eat’
[Art by Pacalin]
While the original launch build of Super Meat Boy for WiiWare was killed before it was born, the titular character still managed to make a few appearances on Nintendo consoles in the years that followed.
He appears in a cut scene in Bit.Trip Runner, as a power up in Bit.Trip Fate, and as a playable character in Retro City Rampage. His arch nemesis Dr. Fetus even popped up in some DLC for Bit.Trip Presents Runner 2. Though these cameos may have helped Nintendo fans to learn about Meat Boy, many who don’t spend much time with non-Nintendo platforms might not know first hand what makes him special. They’ll have their chance to find out on May 12, when Super Meat Boy launches on the Wii U for a special two-week sale price of $14.
I’ve been playing the game for a future Nintendo Force review, and though I loved it the first time, I’m still shocked by how much I still love it. When our own Mike Cosimano announced that he thought we gave the game too much credit the first time around, it occurred to me that maybe I was wrong for seeing it as a work of genius back in 2010.
Thankfully, that hasn’t turned out to be the case. If anything, I think I love Super Meat Boy even more now than I did then. While I wish Team Meat was able to add some of the Nintendo-specific content it had originally planned, and I miss DannyB‘s original score (particularly this track), the new music works well in its own right, utilizing live instruments to evoke a more organic feel than Danny’s largely synth soundtrack.
I also don’t think I fully appreciated how tightly fine-tuned Super Meat Boy‘s difficulty scaling is until now. Depending on how you decide to approach the game, you could either have an exciting but relatively breezy time, a white-knuckle, molar-cracking, buckaroo daredevil ride of your life, or anything in between. I also love having the option to play on the Wii U GamePad. Being able to hold the screen right up to my face in order to inspect every pixel before trying to make a perfect jump is a real treat for a platformer over-thinker such as myself.
According to a press release from Team Meat and port-smiths at Blitworks, the Wii U may not be the only Nintendo platform to play host to this fleshy little fella’s adventures. Now that the game is on PC, Mac, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo platforms, they’ve teased that “…only the 3DS will be missing, but maybe not for too long. Gotta catch them all!”
