Castlevania Dracula X Chronicles.  It's a remake of Rondo of Blood, but there's a few changes outside of graphics that balance the difficulty a lot better and clean up the stage design.  Stage 5' is a completely remade stage rather than what was in Rondo of Blood.  The game is difficult without being cheap, like Super Meat Boy which is pure frusturation rather than a good platformer. 

Prinny Can I Really Be The Hero and Prinny 2 are also great but difficult platformers, again, not cheap, but very hard.  Just like the classic Castlevania titles, the Prinny titles have the stiff movement and jumping, where once your action is set in motion, it can't be undone, although while Prinny can do a single jump, Prinny can also double jump, do the butt stomp like Mario 64, or even do a slow starting dash which even has some invincibility frames. 

Here are some videos.  First one is a recording of mine.  The framerate issues don't exist in the actual game, they come from being recorded through a fat PSP through the use of custom firmware and remotejoy lite.  I should actually rerecord them since I have a slim.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey84svvU6_0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnp93PM95oA

Sorry but you are dead wrong about Super Meat Boy. I have zero patience for cheap / poorly made games in general which is why I'm glad that my favorite game isn't either of those in the slightest. Every time you die it's 100% your fault because you can not blame the level design or physics.

That's why it's an opinion.  I'm really good at the platformer genre and I think most stages in Super Meat Boy are designed to be cheap. 

Here are examples of the cheap design.  One vertical stage in the salt factory is easy enough to finish, but if you want the band aid, you have to drop to the bottom to get it  In order to get back up, the first salt waterfall has where you can jump over to the right side of the stage.  The second salt waterfall has where you have to use a dash jump on the bottom to get to the bottom of the third salt waterfall which is touching the salt wall which will also kill you. 

Or the special stage on the first world.  You need to do jump to slide upwards along thte first wall, do a hop off the wall to avoid a saw.  Hop onto the next wall do another hop to avoid that saw.  Drop down to the outside and do a running jump to a small platform.  Hop around it so you're on the other side, then do a dash hop all the way across to the other side, then two saws are going at different intervals, which you need to get in the center of them and then do a zig zag jump up the wall in order to avoid the saw blades and complete the level. 

That second example is only one of the many levels of memorization.  Imo, memorization based platformers are by far the worst of the bunch.  A good platformer involves hand eye coordination, not a death because you didn't memorize exactly how you were supposed to do something.  Not a death because you didn't judget the perfect velocity your jump should be made and how long you should have held the button down before letting go.

 Not only is the design cheap but there are several stages that the platforms blend into the background, specifically the ones where the background is bright orange and the platforms are sort of peach in color.  Or those black stages that the salt blends onto your platform, and until you die you don't even realize it's salt, orr the sections that look like it's a platform but it's not.  Let's give it an applause for trying to look like it's got some artistic design when you really can't see shit. 

Super Meat Boy.  Overrated as fuck.  I'm sure the only reason it's got as much praise as it has is because games get so much praise for being a hard game among the boat load of easy games now days, especially when it's advertised to be a hard game.  When it's advertised to be a hard game, everyone seems to think "Oh, I'm not a shitty gamer, it's just hard, so I won't bother about taking away points for shit design."  Compare this to other difficult games that are hard but not advertised as such, then you have these "gaming journalists" bitching about how they have to make pixel perfect jumps, rather than the true reason which is because they suck balls at video games. 

The irony...

[...]

Super Meat Boy.  Overrated as fuck.  I'm sure the only reason it's got as much praise as it has is because games get so much praise for being a hard game among the boat load of easy games now days, especially when it's advertised to be a hard game.  When it's advertised to be a hard game, everyone seems to think "Oh, I'm not a shitty gamer, it's just hard, so I won't bother about taking away points for shit design."  Compare this to other difficult games that are hard but not advertised as such, then you have these "gaming journalists" bitching about how they have to make pixel perfect jumps, rather than the true reason which is because they suck balls at video games.