Ever since gaming saw its humble beginnings, side-scrollers have always remained close to gamers' hearts. In recent years though, there have been far fewer options for sating the 2D addiction.

Enter: Team Meat, developers of the 2010 smash hit Super Meat Boy. Not only did the game receive glowing reviews, but it managed to remind players of their love for insanely difficult side-scrolling action.

Months later, Super Meat Boy is still going strong, having received a full retail release and proved that it deserves all of the praise it received early on. While Team Meat have stated that there will be no sequel, fans of the game have been left wanting more. Luckily for them, Team Meat has exactly what they are looking for.

For gamers playing the PC version of Super Meat Boy on Steam, you may have noticed an update to the game. With this new update comes the hotly anticipated level editor - which promises to give gamers the tools to create some of the most infuriating level designs known to man.

While the obvious use of the editor is to create single levels which you can then share with the world using Super Meat World in game, there are more ways to utilize the updated features - which go beyond simply creating levels. Making use of Super Meat World, gamers will also have the chance to rate levels created by other players. While the community may not be as large as that of Little Big Planet, here's hoping that the feature will allow gamers to sift through the less exciting levels in order to find the more spectacular creations.

Super Meat Boy Ultra Edition For Retail

Even more exciting though, is the ability to create something more than just singular levels. The level editor also allows gamers to create whole chapters. That's right. Once you've concocted a healthy amount of maddeningly difficult levels, you will then be able to link them together to create chapters for other side-scrolling enthusiasts to enjoy.

With Team Meat constantly contributing to the game through added chapters of downloadable content, the addition of this level editor for PC gamers has the potential to expand the game almost infinitely, giving gamers the ability to create complete chapters to share and play. While many asserted for a time that co-op is the future of gaming, it's arguable that this element of creating and sharing massive, fully-featured, player-made portions of the game is truly the future.

Have you played Super Meat Boy yet? What plans do you have for the newly-implemented level editor?

Super Meat Boy is out now on Xbox 360 and PC and will eventually be making its way over to the Mac.

Source: Team Meat