Super Meat Boy - some day we'll meat again

[Xirix]

Oh boy, was waiting for this level to crop up, well done raocow... it took me way more than 2 hours to do it on my first run of the game, though the feeling you get after beating something like that is well worth it.

[TaviTurnip]

Happy raocow :3 <3

[NegativeZeroZ]

Holding or not holding the run button made absolutely no difference.

You need to let go of the run button when you jump off the wall, then start holding it again to magically give yourself forward momentum so that you don't fly into the spikes. If you hold run too soon or too late, you die. The game literally never teaches you how to do this.

Yup.

[Sorel]

I tip my fedora to you, raocow.


Anyway, I kinda somehow did that warpzone in one go. Maybe all that "training" I had thanks to a friend of mine who "forced" me to play I wanna be the Boshy with him made it easier, who knows.

The Kid's warpzone is, to be honest, way easier since you don't need to redo everything. Also, only the first two are really challenging, the last one is pretty easy. (Took me like 3 minutes, but the other two levels took me an hour and a half.)

Good luck, Rapture is going to be a wild ride. And you won't get off.

[raocow]

the only reason it's really 'super hard' is the marathon aspect, honestly. I'm ready for anything!

[DullahanDodgeman]

I applaud your determination. Still haven't completed that warp zone, or at least I don't think I did.
I've never seen Super Meat Boy as a "rage game" as its reputation goes. It's platforming is usually too precise and not jerkish enough to really try to piss you off, with the possible exception of some stupidly precise low jumps in the final levels of the game and occasionally the various launchers the game throws at you. The only time I got mad at the game was during the Kid's warpzone, and that was only because I was sure the physics engine was messing up just for me on that level. It probably wasn't.

[Crow]

So congrats, you did the actual hardest part of the game I don't care what anyone else says 'cause they're wrong I did the entirety of

Dark Cotton Alley

and

Dark Rapture

each faster than this one warp zone.

look I even made an angry rant about it 10 pages ago

really though can i just say
SCREW SKYSCRAPER. If it's not enough that you have to play 3 full-length levels back-to-back with 3 shots at each, you also have to replay the second level to get the bandage. And none of the levels are easy, they'd all make for a decent level in terms of world 5's light world alone. Basically you're playing a difficult level that's four times the length of a normal difficult level. Hell, the skyscraper levels are all somewhere in-between the normal level length and the

World 6 level length

too, so they're not even just full-length levels, but above and beyond that.

And the very end of the third level has such an annoying, awful jump, just because~

glad this one is out of the way though yes

[Sebby19]

SkyScraper sucks

So, now that you have seen raocow do it, and explain what he did with the run button, do you think you can beat it now, legit?

[Unaniem]

My sentiment for Skyscraper is practically the same as everybody has already expressed (and I've already expressed it in the past even).

Congrats, rao. You should, at the very least, be able to beat the rest of the game after having gone through Skyscraper. The chance that there will be portions that are harder in raw difficulty or still take a really long time is edging up on 1 by just a few millimeters, but nothing comes close to Skyscraper in terms of frustration its going to cause.

Although there still are 20/20, Patience and XOXO.
Going to say that ahead of time just in case.

[Crow]

20/20, aka literally just a puzzle level that's easy when you know what to do? Patience, aka "find the safe spot and camp there for 20 seconds", XOXO, aka "just figure out how to do the last sequence of jumps (don't run and it's not too hard).

None of those are that bad :V

[mellonpizza]

I'm ready for anything!

Considering what we're probably going to see tomorrow, thank goodness you have that kind of mindset.

[Unaniem]

None of those are that bad :V

Not in my experience they were ;-;
(although I had some lag issues with XOXO, causing the blocks to appear again much sooner and essentially making the stage impossible.
Took a while before I managed to fix that because I thought the game was working as it was supposed to do.)

[raocow]

I don't know if something in the skyscrapers made something 'click' in my brainsoup but I had super loads of super fun with the *actual progress omitted* of rapture.

[Sorel]

Once you beat something hard you get some kind of euphoria rush apparently.

At least that's what is happening all the time to me.

[Ditocoaf]

Oh man, that was great. Congrats, man!

Very few people beat Skyscraper before beating a single normal Rapture level. Even super die-hard "complete everything in the order it shows up" stalwarts often end up saving that one for later.

[Alice]

I was wondering which level this Skyscraper people had been calling so awful was. I couldn't remember a warp zone that I struggled with too much in Rapture past the obvious one. I found Skyscraper hard and it did take quite a few tries to get through it but I apparently found it a lot easier than many people did. It was one of the hardest levels in this chapter but there's one or two later on I actually struggled with more.

Once you beat something hard you get some kind of euphoria rush apparently.

At least that's what is happening all the time to me.

This isn't true for everyone. For a lot of people it's just a sense of relief that a hellish segment is over which isn't a bad feeling but really isn't a positive one either. There's no sense of actual reward when that happens.

[YelseyKing]

Well... as expected, raocow didn't seem to have any significant problems with that jump. No moreso than any other in those stages, at least. See, my problem is I could never figure out how to make a small jump off a wall. No matter how I handled it, barring a few random instances in which I did it completely by accident, with no knowledge of how I did it, Meat Boy would always take a flying leap at full strength. Again, I don't know if it's my controller, or if there's something I'm missing. But... yeah.

aterraformer on YouTube echoes my overall thoughts on the stage:

As someone not experiencing the euphoria at the end, this string of levels just seemed like a string of poor design decisions. The unnecessary "gotta be retro" low lives system with no way to get more, the redo the entire level for the bandaid for "reasons", and the constant I Wanna Be the Dumb Jumps platformer man.

It all just combined to make that jump unbearable. Had it been at the beginning of the stage, or in a normal stage without lives, I'm certain I could've done it legit eventually, even if it was just pure luck. But that far into a marathon stage trio, and with limited lives? No go. Even if it's possible, I maintain it's highly unreasonable to have something that finicky in such a spot.

Congrats to raocow, though. You've pretty much finished the worst thing in the game, so everything else should be very doable for you.

This isn't true for everyone. For a lot of people it's just a sense of relief that a hellish segment is over which isn't a bad feeling but really isn't a positive one either. There's no sense of actual reward when that happens.

You summed up my feelings about such stages precisely.

Though actually I normally *do* get that rush, provided something is hard in a way that I perceive as fair. If I feel like the difficulty is coming from something due to bad design, I just find myself cursing the one who designed that hot mess.

[Dark Hunter]

I'm curious: has raocow become The Guy? I know he's never done an LP of it, but I know he plays a bunch of games he doesn't LP.

The Kid's warp zone I actually found fun, somehow. The moment I entered it and saw what was coming up I was all like... I got this. I'll die a million times getting there, but I got this. It was like familiar territory: super hard but doable if you just smash your face into spikes enough times.

The lack of Delicious Fruit in the actual warp zone was a disappointment though.

[Crow]

Yelsey, you might've been falling victim to the same bugginess as here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2oBeHISaAY&t=38m30s

[YelseyKing]

Yelsey, you might've been falling victim to the same bugginess as here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2oBeHISaAY&t=38m30s

Yeah, that was definitely my experience. It's weird, it seems like that jump is bugged somehow, because it seems like you either get past it easily without thinking, or it's a completely insurmountable obstacle. I wonder what causes it... The guy there did it once, by what seemed to be pure luck, just like I did... huh.

Patience, aka "find the safe spot and camp there for 20 seconds"

Where is this "safe spot"? I just tried that stage for like a half hour, and the only even remotely "safe" spot I found required that I do something like ten frame-perfect jumps or else one of the "ar-mega-don missiles" would slip in and kill me.

[Crow]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQqQjV4a7SU

[AlchemistHohenheim]

I feel like Skyscraper was created for the sole purpose for manually forcing the player to appreciate the fact that the main game has unlimited lives.

[YelseyKing]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQqQjV4a7SU

Finished it. Turns out, I was on the right track, I just needed to figure out the timing. Still, urk, that was annoying. Glad it's done. Only six more stages and I'll have 106%'d the game!

[noterday]

I gave up Super Meat Boy for a while when I saw how crazy some of the steam achievements are which is kinda weird since I don't care a lot about achievements normally.

Maybe because I was approaching the game like Binding of Isaac Rebirth and that game gives you achievements for pretty much everything you do.

[NegativeZeroZ]

The lack of Delicious Fruit in the actual warp zone was a disappointment though.

This.

Though, I will say, whoever said the Kid's warp zone was out of character obviously never got past the first screen of IWBTG, or the first level of the warp zone. The

precise jumping around an ocean of spikes,

walking back and forth on lifts

and

smashing spike walls

are all very referential. The warp zone just didn't have any mandatory trial and error, which is, well, good design.

But the warp zone expects you to be able to do THAT with a character you've never controlled before, and that's a problem. Even if you played IWBTG before, he controls differently from the source material. He controls better, yes, but it still takes getting used to.