Spent like 2 hours in Receiver 2 laboring under the delusion of a very annoying bug that was very easy to interpret as entirely deigetic and… and… I think I’m in love
5 Likes
these are very good opinions
Super Metroid is so happy to bounce between very guided exploration and the original obscure wall-digging and it doesn’t do a good job indicating that it has code-switched.
1 Like
i agree with most of the hot takes but the soundtrack to link to the past is fucking gold
12 Likes
i have always wished that the superior light world dungeon theme was switched with the dark world one so i could hear it more. That’s my hot take
I love the way that game sounds but it’s one of my oldest favorite games so i can’t be objective about it
1 Like
Zelda 3 is a game I have to play on mute if I want to be able to play it for longer than like, 15 minutes.
2 Likes
If I went to a spa and they played the fairy fountain theme the whole damn time I was there I think I’d be fine with it
2 Likes
how about this
2 Likes
more of a cheerful dentist’s office imho
3 Likes
ooh, I want to hear more about this, to my ear the music goes out of its way to highlight what the SNES was poor at. And it’s spread around so poorly! Tracks like the cave theme get ten times the play of some of the better ones.
3 Likes
fast, shrill strings
The beginning of Super Metroid hasn’t aged that well. That’s where most of the arbitrarily opening/closing doors happens (I think the last one that really feels unjustified is the Kraid E-tank room). It corrals you, is too easy and has the worst boss in the game, Sporespawn. I had actually quit Super Metroid before beating Kraid and wrote off the game the first time I played it in an emulator.
It doesn’t really make sense to talk of Super Metroid as if it’s a timeless masterpiece from the usual standpoint of a game released once and then experienced once by a player. But if we instead think of it as the living center of a rich tradition of speedruns, romhacks, and other Metrovanias, then it’s not overrated at all.
8 Likes
Good posts!
I think my post got eaten by the forum. I didn’t delete it myself
i wish games (and all art) were evaluated on this basis less often tbh… like obviously there are massively successful games with relatively little community impact and vice versa but assigning value based on influence starts to feel a little tautological, especially given how much unfinished business and unrealized potential litters the medium’s history and development.
9 Likes
It’s interesting, there are definitely games hard to evaluate without that perspective: ZZT, Minecraft, much of the MUD and MMO scene
3 Likes
I completely agree with you. It is a pretty commonplace horror walking sim. But I really did love how inextricably Taiwanese it was, that even the most conventional parts of the genre it adopted were still noticeably accented with something very unfamiliar and novel to me. Its context as a delisted and censored game is also really exciting, and it was interesting to research the cultural reasons that made it so controversial. I felt subversive, engaged and inspired to educate myself after playing it. And I can’t say any other walking sim brought me anywhere close to that.
I learned a lot about the game’s context from this cool video here:
3 Likes
fixed!
1 Like
Well, the beginning of Super Metroid is still some of the most effective atmosphere building in the history of videogames.
But yeah the bit after the bit after you get the morph ball and the planet wakes up, like returning to the surface and then early Brinstar thru Sporespawn, is the weakest in the game.
4 Likes
Influence is worth tracking but mainly for historical purposes rather than aesthetic appreciation. To give a weirdly recent example of this: I’m currently reading the Bible as a project to learn more about its cultural and linguistic influence (I am not a Christian nor planning to become one). The text itself is fascinating when considering its original cultural context and what was later influenced by it, but the text itself? Goddamn. There is very little merit to it other than the incredible quality of the translation (reading King James version). I often feel like I’m learning about desert cultures and early media more than I am about personal morality or faith.
TLDR - I guess I’m saying Super Metroid is basically the Bible of videogames.
6 Likes
i wish i enjoyed any video game as much as other people who have played super metroid enjoy super metroid
9 Likes
tbh, I’ve never liked when ZZT as “a game” has meant anything more than the 4 initial Tim Sweeney-authored worlds and, perhaps, the world editor. anything else made to be played within the ZZT executable (even the Epic-published followups) is a separate game in and of itself.
When one says “I played ZZT and here’s what I think of it,” I think that should index playing Town of ZZT and maybe some/all of the other initial 4 games. To evaluate ZZT as a game in an expansive way that includes everything anyone has made for it in the past 30 years seems wild to me. The “playing” in “playing ZZT” is more often than not equivalent to that in “playing Nintendo.”
ZZT’s more like a fantasy console, I guess. A Bitsy or Pico-8 (more the former than the latter).
So it’s a question of what we’re doing when we “evaluate” something and different definitions of these things call for different systems, metrics, lenses, tools. ZZT, then, can refer to:
- The game (comprised of Town of ZZT and possibly 3 others)
- A creative tool
- A platform/system on which to play games made for ZZT
- The social space around ZZT at all/various times since it creation
And any analysis of ZZT that attempts to encompass all of these and put it in an equivalent discussion against an unambiguously singular game like, say, Sin & Punishment is confused. Not that anyone is saying that here. But I think talking about Super Metroid the game as an evaluated text doesn’t need to take into consideration the extensions of that singular text into system, community, and derivative realms. Those are different questions.
I mean do all of it and none of it as you see fit, of course.
More or less just thinking out loud here.
6 Likes