Because in the past you didn't had analog stick.

Not good enough reason. There are LOTS of things in SMB that weren't there in the past. E.g. short levels with limitless restarts, free selection of levels and other things. It's a perfectly modern arcade game, it's simply stylized a bit like old ones, that's all.

Why isn't there a way to smoothly control meat boy's moving speed with the keyboard? There should be no advantage to using the controller.

There SHOULD. Otherwise all this stuff about 'controller isn't necessary but neither is bathing', etc. is just pointless blabbing. In most modern PC games that were originally developed for consoles the advantages of gamepad are absolutely obvious (say, one of my favourites, Assassin's Creed, but it's true for modern arcades too), while in SMB it's by far not.

Yes, I just realised this a minute ago. I knew you could change the .cfg file, but thought it didn't work.

I wrote it in the first post btw. Yeah, when I used keyboard I changed that to Z for acceleration and Shift for jump (like in Mario Forever), that's much better.

The idea is: if there's a gamepad and there's an analog stick, why isn't there a way to smoothly control meat boy's moving speed with the help the analog stick? Why doesn't his moving speed differ at all no matter how hardly/how far you're moving the stick?

I'm using Logitech Dual Action. And you know what? Damn all your funny startup messages about how useful the gamepad is -- keyboard is just the same. There's no smooth control, thus there's no difference between keyboard and gamepad.

So the question is, why ISN'T there a difference? Why not utilize analog stick properly like in most arcades?


P.S. Well, to be precise there IS a difference: you can control meat boy's movement with two fingers when using keyboard (while using one thumb with gamepad), which may be even more comfortable sometimes. But also fingers are a bit different and move a bit differently, thus using keyboard you may find that performing, say, a complex jump to the left is simpler than the same to the right and so on.

P.P.S. Of course I may be wrong about everything and maybe there's such a feature but it simply doesn't work with my gamepad. That's sad then. And it was a real pain in the ass to get Logitech Dual Action to work with this game (even more pain than with most games nowadays which can only utilize X360 controller).

P.P.P.S. I could also ask why there's no proper way to change keyboard controls in the menu, but what the hell, editing buttonmap.cfg is easy enough.