Super Meat Boy is platforming honed. It’s as if developer Team Meat took a great block of code and carved everything away that wasn’t a platformer. What’s left moves fast, never wastes your time, and really captures the joy of learning a difficult skill.

Although it’s a 2D platformer, LIMBO is a horror game, so come prepared. Whether you’re fleeing a giant spider or succumbing to brain worms, the game is stark and disturbing. That makes it incredibly compelling. Add that to the black and white silhouette art, vivid animation, and precision platforming, and you have a great game. It’s just not for the faint of heart.

Rocketbirds Revolution! plays it straight. Between the deadpan retelling of cold war action flicks to the run and gun platforming, you could almost miss it when the game winks at you. Just remember that subtlety is a sign of refinement and you’ll find that Rocketbirds is an elegant and compact example of its genre.

Bonus news bit: Developer Sian Tan let us know that Ratloop Asia is hard at work on a port for Rocketbirds to PS3. They’re still early in the development process, but hopefully we’ll hear more details soon.

Snapshot looks to be a more clever puzzle-platformer than we were worried it might be in our original impression. The GDC build of the game showed off how the camera mechanic could be used both as a glorified inventory system and as a very different way to solve puzzles. This charming game boasts incredibly easy to pick up controls, making the game instantly accessible to anyone who has ever played a platformer before. Not much about this game is written in stone, but it will prove to be a game to watch for as it develops.

Night Game is an original puzzle game set as a side-scrolling platformer. The game is visually striking, has great music, and is different from other puzzle games we’ve played in the past. This Wii-exclusive title finally cashes in on the promises of third-party developed novel gameplay to owners, though the controls use the NES configuration of the Wii-mote.

FEIST is a charming platformer that focuses on simplicity and fun. The student-developed title currently sports five levels of “go from the left side of the screen to the right side,” with the unusual twists of a silhouetted art style and procedurally-generated content. The way the students put the game together, however, is the key to why this title feels like such a solid piece.

Take a few steps into Polarity and the game looks like a typical platformer; run and jump to navigate from one end of a 2-D level to the other. Soon, however, you’ll discover that your avatar’s suit is magnetic, and so are most of the surfaces in the game’s four levels. From there, it’s all about manipulating your suit’s polarity and the strength of your magnetism to fight gravity and manipulate objects in the environment. It looks and plays like a platformer, but it’s a puzzle game at heart.

The game was actually developed by a group of students from Carnegie Mellon University. We talked to Daniel Bryner, Howard Braham, and Przemyslaw Iwanowski how a game development education can be handy, how playtesting molds accessibility, and the game’s future. Hit the jump to read on and then go play the game.

It turns out that simple, deep, and clever games still exist. They’ve just moved to the internet. Flash games in the same vein as Popcap Games are the new stronghold for simple innovation, and they’ve charmed hardcore and casual gamers alike. The flash roundup is dedicated to these unsung and sometimes unpublished games. Each installment will pick out a handful of notable examples of genre flash games based on innovation, accessibility, and outright fun. This week: Platformers.

Mega Man ZX slaps another coat of paint on to the paper-rock-scissors gameplay that has nurtured the franchise through dozens of repetitions. The tweaks are minute as ever, so standing fans and longtime critics needn’t think very hard when deciding on a purchase.

Sly Cooper may be the only stealth game that balances challenge against failure gracefully enough to keep the pace quick and the gameplay fun. A modestly kludgey control scheme and some graphical slowdown keep the gameplay experience from flowing perfectly smoothly, but the game delivers an otherwise polished experience.