N

The game itself is probably more of a 3.5; somewhat similar in gameplay to Super Meat Boy, it's addictive, challenging, with a smooth and dynamic control scheme dependent largely on the shape of the map rather than the inputs, but with a kind of ugly and repetitive level design. What bumps this up all the way to 4.5, though, is through its user map archive, which was once something of a full-fledged culture rather than a community. The output has slowed to a crawl since, but from around 2006 to 2012 there were at least a dozen new maps daily and several mapmaking and highscore competitions happening at once. In its eleven years of existence, it's spawned nearly 240,000 user-generated maps. Still now, maybe a hundred mapmakers are talked about as auteurs, and well-informed users talk about their lineage and the trends of certain years.

Beyond this game's once-respectable popularity, I think there's a couple of reasons why its online culture became what it was. The single-screen display and simple allows an emphasis on aesthetic composition, requiring users to put a lot of thought into the map in order to make it look nice, but giving the composition a frame for it to be easily examined. The base game's maps may be a little unsightly, but a lot of user maps are ~really~ ~quite~ ~lovely~. The same goes for the gameplay; because of the precise inputs and the dynamic physics engine, there's a lot of room for clever gameplay that isn't necessarily present in the base levels. (Heck, I think there's still boundaries to push gameplay-wise, but that's just me.)

Download it, play until you're at a competent level, and then ignore the rest of the base game and just explore the map archive.

unlike Banjo-Kazooie the individual levels in this don't turn me into the joker. rather the game itself does it is so unbelievably hard

one time one of my friends got so mad at this game he shouted the n word at the top of his lungs at 2 am