The 350-level Super Meat Boy easily marks its territory as the year's most difficult platforming game, but its real claim may be the startling gap it opens between challenge and frustration.
Super Meat Boy
For: Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade.
Coming soon for: Windows PC, Macintosh, Wii via Nintendo WiiWare Channel.
From: Team Meat.
Rating: Teen (animated blood; cartoon violence; crude humour, language).
Price: $US10.
SMB's levels are extremely short - many of them require fewer than 10 seconds to complete - and the goal is simple: guide Meat Boy to the goal by running, jumping and using his unusual body composition to slide down walls and make perfectly timed jumps above, around and through perilous traps.
SMB's difficulty escalates quickly, and some insanely tough levels await players who push through to the game's second half.
But SMB significantly curbs frustration by making it so easy for players who fail, to try again.
A failed level reloads instantly without prompting, and outside a few side challenges, players have as many chances as they need to get it right.
The reward for finishing a tough level - watching a simultaneous replay of every single attempt - is as amusing as it is gratifying, and SMB rewards players who keep at it with an impressive handful of unlockable playable characters (with different attributes) from other independent games.
Games this tough rarely bend this far backward without losing their edge, and while SMB looks great and controls perfectly, its pitch-perfect understanding of this balance is what makes it one of the year's very best downloadable titles.
