Dude check out how sweet this N fanart is. Click for the deviant art.
N and Super Meat Boy are, basically, the same game. They’re both a single concept dragged out as far as it will go and styled with simple graphics and a retro feel that appeals to the inner gamer. They’re easy to learn and impossible to master, eagerly gobbling up hours and hours of your time as you fight desperately to clear one more level, grab another collectible or climb one tantalising step on the online leaderboard.
N and Super Meat Boy are entirely different games. The very basics are undeniably different and effect them in significant ways. N’s grounding in flash technology, allowing it to be played on anything from a web browser to a Nintendo DS, prevents any more complicated visuals or levels than single screen gray-scales with flashes of colour for significant elements. Super Meat Boy, meanwhile, relies on it’s visual style to deliver it’s experience – there’s much less variance in SMB’s early levels, but their size and beauty make up for it. Where N has pure game, Super Meat Boy adds (dare I say it) art.
However, they’re /essentially/ the same. They both hate you and want you to suffer. They both laugh mercilessly as you bang your head against the brick wall of their difficulty curves and respond to every triumph with some new endlessly repeated horror. They’re adversaries few men can claim victory over and even once they’re conquered spit out further challenges – time trials and community content flowing out into infinity. They’ll fill a void whether it’s visual accompaniment to your latest audiobook or the latest fix for your inner completionist.
They aren’t the same.
At all.
In fact, N and Super Meat Boy epitomise the changes in gaming over the last twenty years so perfectly one wouldn’t be blamed for suspecting this microcosm was deliberately constructed by some gaming deity to get the point across. N is the stumbling, unsure child. It represents the lucky accomplishments of the bedroom coder. It lacks flair, passion or style, relying on it’s simplistic charm and jump-in jump-out gameplay to keep the player entertained. It isn’t worried about guiding you by the hand, or tutorial levels, or starting out easy. It’s not worried about review scores or sales or boxart.
Super Meat Boy is more refined. It’s polised. It’s got a plot and an art team. It’s got cinematics and unlockable characters, a hero with a face and a point to all the jumping and collecting. When starting a level of Super Meat Boy, you can imagine it as a real place in the crazy, fucked up universe that’s been created. N is just another room full of robots and mines. Super Meat Boy has modernised the retro-platformer genre.
How crazy does that sound? It’s the same story as has been told across any number of genres since gaming’s origin though. Compare Crysis to Doom or StarCraft II to Dune – in-game storytelling, prettier graphics and more and more extravagant ways to play evolving out of pure gameplay.
This isn’t a preach-post designed to get you to renounce your Call of Duty and Halo ways and join me in the glory of the days of Hard Reset-alikes and twelve-unit selection groups. I really enjoy new games and think, on the whole, video games are better now than they’ve ever been before. However, this was a starker contrast between two sides of gaming (and two sides of a war raging on message boards and in comment threads to this very day) than I have seen elsewhere.
Perhaps the best way to end is to say that I prefer N to play but SMB to experience.
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Except for that fucking “use a controller” bullshit at the beginning, that can fuck off, maybe if your default controls weren’t such a massive pile of ass you wouldn’t think they were bad, hmm? Also, editing an ini file to change my controls, that’s a taste of the retro I didn’t need, thanks.