I can't like this game.
This game is everything I hate about games: overly-difficult, underwhelming and unrewarding. There's little plot to speak of, instead relying upon obsessively practising pixel-perfect jumps with millisecond precision in a battle against fiddly controls to engage its players.
Some people are actually able to beat this, and good for them. I simply don't have the time nor dexterity to try, and judging by much of the feedback, neither do most people. In the end, I felt less like I was playing a game, and more like the author was playing with *me*. Indeed, half the fun seems to be in beating the game (or at least pretending that you can it) and then assiduously deriding anyone who can't in semi-literate g33k-p1dg1n. (Kudos to those who can, but resist the temptation to be an ass about it.)
What's sadder is that I really don't mind the odd impossibly difficult game. I Wanna Be the Guy is a fantastic game despite sharing many attributes with this one, because it is filled with fantastic references jokes, surprises and creativity, and I've played it plenty. I also loved The Lost Levels, played it like crazy when I got a SNES with Mario Allstars. This game, however, had none of the charms that those two boasted, and consequently bored me to the point that I gave up and went and watched a video of someone beating it to see if the ending was worth it. (It really isn't.) If I learned a lesson from reading The Wheel of Time, it's that if something you're not far into is boring you to tears and you have eight more volumes to go, it's probably time to look up a plot summary instead of battling another four out of pride.
I'm sure a lot of work went into making the level *just barely beatable*, which is the only reason you get any stars at all. But I found this impossibly dull, which is a remarkable achievement for someone whose recently-finished bedtime reading was a dense textbook on topology and metric spaces!