Super Meat Boy is set to receive a huge free update in the middle of January, adding editing tools that will let players create and share their own levels. A new area called Super Meat World will also be added, acting as a hub to which Team Meat can add further leves in future, and even offer up areas for guest developers to step in and create their own challenges. Read on for details.

The planned updates are being reported on IGN, and contain the following features:

Level Editor
Apart from boss battles, players will be able to create anything they see in the game. You'll be able to set certain restrictions that only allow your levels to be played with certain characters. Don't make things too difficult, though. You'll have to beat your own in order to be able to share it.

Online Level Portal
This will act as a sharing point for all user created Super Meat Boy maps. Each map will be rated according to difficulty, measuring the average number of deaths players experience when trying to complete it. There will also be a five star ratting system that will let players judge each other's creations.

Super Meat World
A special chapter that unlocks once you've collected 30 bandages. This will feature levels hand picked by Team Meat for inclusion. Guest developers have also stepped in to add their own challenges, including Jumper and Run Man developer Matt Thorson and Gaijin Games, who created Bit Trip.

Enter the Unknown
This PC exclusive feature will let you jump into a series of randomly picked user made levels at a difficulty level of your choice. It will only pick from maps that score more than 3 stars, and will arrange the series of levels in difficulty order to give players an increasing challenge.

There's no precise date for the update, but it's due a few weeks into the new year. If you're intrigued by the game, but aren't sure if it's your cup of corned beef, check out our Super Meat Boy review, or the official Super Meat Boy site.

If you picked up Super Meat Boy in the recent Steam sales, you may have noticed that it's quite difficult. In fact, it's face-clawingly, inhumanly hard. The whirling saw blades, infinite drops and traps of its many devious levels can bring tears of rage to the most hardened platforming experts. We're here to help. A youtuber who has completed and almost mastered the game has been throwing up a series of videos in which he completes each level for an A+ rating. It might not seem as though watching someone else beat the game easily will help with the crippling anger of being stuck, but in a game where timing and positioning are everything, the videos below provide a solid tutorial that could help you past the Super Meat Boy's most difficult challenges.

The player's name is MicVlad, and so far he's done videos of the first three worlds, for both light and dark versions of each level. You'll find the first three videos embedded below. In the description section for each video on Youtube there's a handy list of time stamps that will let you skip straight to the level you're stuck on. For more on the game, check out our Super Meat Boy review. The game's on sale right now on Steam.

The Steam Christmas sale has launched, kicking off a series of deals that will throw ridiculous bargains at us every day from now until the new year. As well as the daily deals there's a selection of developer and publisher packs offering as much as 86% off entire game catalogues. Read on for more on the spectacular deals on offer.

Today's sales have the rock solid platformer, Super Meat Boy going at 75% off, Fallout 3 at 33% off, the excellent action RPG, Titan Quest at 75% off. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is also on sale at a third of its normal price.

Every day one of the new offers will be eligible for a special holiday bonus. The discount on these games will increase if you own a certain game. For example, today's special deal is on Portal. It's 75% off everyone, but if you own Half Life 2, you'll get an extra 10% off.

The huge game packs and publisher catalogue deals will be available from now until January 2nd, and offer the biggest savings. The THQ pack is currently offering 21 THQ games for the price of one, and contains gems like Company of Heroes, Stalker, Dawn of War and Dawn of War 2. The Square Enix & Eidos bundle is also another great deal at 86% off, and that includes Batman: Arkham Asylum, Deus Ex, the Hitman series, Just Cause 2 and much more.

You'll find the full list deals listed on Steam. What will you be buying?

Imagine a bouncing cube of raw meat sliding into the teeth of a whirling saw blade. Spludge! Now picture thousands more—as many as there are letters printed on this page—all going splat and splot as they disintegrate into an ocean of juicy beef-stuff. Gross. But your mental slaughterhouse still has nothing on my Super Meat Boy death tally. I flung the game’s lovable, protein-based hero to his demise over 3,000 times just to beat the main levels of this relentlessly difficult 2D platformer. Include the search for collectables, the retro-themed Warp Zones, and the unlockable “Dark World” levels, and the number of exploded meat-bodies I’m responsible for is genocidal—but it’s the fun kind of genocide.



Dead meat

Each of SMB’s 300-plus levels are short-but-ruthless 2D gauntlets filled with hazards like piles of hypodermic needles, lava pits and meat-seeking rockets, plus devices like conveyor belts, fans and portals designed to fling you into them. Death is everywhere, and the only tools you have to avoid it are running and jumping. It’s more complex than it sounds. Precise controls (this game was really made for a gamepad, but I got by with my trusty keyboard) and cleverly designed levels will have you sweeping across the screen with the grace of an Olympic figure skater over ice—until you’re splattered about like discarded leftovers.



My replay of Level 5-20, for example, opens with about 100 Meat Boys (each reenacting one of my attempts to complete the level) dashing off the starting line simultaneously. Of those, 10 immediately slip into a pit of deadly salt and explode into meat-mush. Only inches further, another dozen meaty avatars are messily devoured by flying monsters. Above them, a small army is betrayed by disappearing platforms—they plummet into a pit of now-bloodied salt. The remaining Meat Brigade crosses the divide and reaches a small room, but is instantly scattered as rockets bombard the concrete floor. A few slip through rocket-made holes, but only one lonely survivor avoids the spinning blade beneath. The solitary hero bolts across a receding bridge and reunites with his eternally kidnapped love, Bandage Girl—but the reunion lasts only a moment before the evil Dr. Fetus steals her away again. Next level!





Acquired taste

The levels instantly reset after each splat—often before the death splatter of your previous body has hit the ground—and this rapid-fire repetition makes the most difficult levels feel doable. With each failed attempt you’ll learn a little more, and by the time you reach Bandage Girl, the bulk of it will be muscle memory.



If anything does stump you, though, you can skip any level to advance (except boss stages, which are required to unlock new worlds). But that would defeat the point. Super Meat Boy was made with love for fans of hardcore 2D platformers. It requires fierce trial-and-error, and getting your ass kicked a few (hundred) times is inevitable—that’s what makes it so rewarding when you succeed.

Full appreciation of all its charms requires that you have the platformer background to pick up on the Castlevania and Mega Man references, but even the uninitiated can have their socks charmed off by retro graphics, simple animations and brilliant music. A few minor, yet-to-be-patched bugs crawling in the meat can’t spoil its flavor; Super Meat Boy is a delicacy to savor—when you’re not swearing at it.