Hey, do you remember when games were hard? No, I mean, like "some guy you didn't even see just shot you in the toe with a single, pixel sized bullet and your entire body just exploded in a shower of blood" kind of hard. The kind of games that make Contra look like it was tailor made for pretty princesses who wear sundresses and have teaparties with stuffed animals. Well, I Wanna Be The Guy is the game that takes every single one of those other games out behind the woodshed and beats them in the face with a brick wrapped with barbed wire and poison ivy until they understand what a hard, bloody, itchy place the universe can be. This thing is so hard it makes neutronium look like sponge cake.
No, really. Take any game you've ever played that you thought was "hard." That game is a six month old quadraplegic, and I Wanna Be The Guy is Mike Tyson. Actually, Mike Tyson is a boss in this game. Except he's fifty stories high, towering above the cloud tops and breathing fire as he punches apart the building you're trying to stand on top of. No, seriously. That happens. In fact, it's become something of a popular pastime to make Let's Play videos of people doing everything humanly possible to conquer IWBTG, and failing.
This scene was later re-used for The Hangover.
So why would you ever willingly subject yourself to that kind of punishment? Probably because as piss-ass mean as IWBTG is, it is also fair. Sure, you're going to constantly suffer an endless barrage of humiliating defeats, but in pretty much every case you'll look back and think "Yeah, that was entirely my fault." Whether it was because you failed your fiftieth attempt and a near-impossible series of jumps through a gauntlet of spikes, or because you thought you actually found an easy way through a harmless looking room before Street Fighter's Ryu hurricane-kicked his way up through the floor and made you explode like a blood grenade. Eventually you'll learn that trust is a meaningless concept, except when you're trusting the universe to screw you over in every way possible while still leaving the narrowest possible window to victory.
Meanwhile, even as the game is pimp-slapping the crap out of us with one hand, in the other it's offering you its heart. And that heart is full to bursting with retro-gaming love (and also blood). You'll catch references to everything from Street Fighter and Punch-Out to Tetris and Mario Paint. Except now they're all out to kill you even harder. Sure, the game sounds like a pure, unrelenting hell. But even as its handing out the ass-kickings, you can't help wondering what clever, unexpected new ass-kickings are lurking within the next screen. In fact, the game has been popular enough to inspire a fan-made sequel, which you'll almost never get around to playing, on account of the original will make something burst in your brain and turn you into a vegetable.
