super metroid wall jumping
- yay
- nay
0 voters
Super Metroid is unimpeachable and the perspective of people who don’t like it is completely opaque, everyone is banned
12 Likes
I think the missle energy tank powerups buried in walls thing is kind of silly and I hate to see it perpetuated but it’s small
1 Like
Super Metroid was great for the time and it has stayed great in large part because speedrunners and ROM hackers have kept finding profound depth and variations in it. The combination of the fantastically complex and glitchy control scheme, with the wide range of potential routes/categories is what keeps it alive.
Also, the pixel art and music are low-key the best on the SNES. They’ve likewise held up with age – the fine detail comes out on high-contrast-ratio monitors and bassy headphones.
1 Like
I think Super Metroid is a close to perfect game, but it’s something I’ve only played with my SNES copy on a CRT in my bedroom floor when I was 14. I think playing it any other way kind of detracts from the experience a bit. It’s an extremely immersive experience, even by today’s standards. Part of that immersion came from playing it for the first time with the lights off and no guides or tutorials
6 Likes
I do think whoever designed the Joy-cons should be fired
5 Likes
god forbid any game require me to press the minus button for any reason
only way they could have made that button less convenient is if you had to unscrew a little lid
6 Likes
That said I should say I also bounced off Super Metroid a couple of times myself when I tried playing it in the early 2000s. The early part between entering Green Brinstar and Kraid is a low point, being extremely easy and linear, and containing the worst miniboss in the game (Sporespawn). I kinda stopped playing before finding Kraid because it wasn’t engaging me. So I get what you’re saying.
Mercifully the speedrun trick to skip Sporespawn is one of the easiest to do
Metroid takes me to a place and something about the atmosphere allows me to just roll with the rougher stuff no problem. I get the same tuned-in immersion in Prime which still impresses me.
Castlevania Bloodlines had me in this space last night.
Bloodlines is so flawed. The deeper I get into it the worse the deaths got yet my enjoyment of the music kept ramping up so I just kept grooving with it.
The game isn’t doing a lot of terribly sophisticated things. Standard castlevania controls with the addition of the high jump attack for Eric Lecarde. The high jump has some beautifully abusable invincibility frames. The control is good enough to deal with minor surprises but like older castlevanias its a game best played once you have it semi memorized.
The pace of the game is sort of up to you but I find that slowing down is often much harder than reading ahead as much as you can and rushing in full speed.
The stages are all about fun set pieces punctuated with traversing long segments of repeating enemies and increasingly difficult platforming. The balance of elements in the stages is overall kinda lumpy. The pit deaths in the factory section is just a total black mark on the game. I dont mind it in the visually impressive clock tower segments but generic factory visuals, jumping on conveyor-belts and projectile skeletons are a big oof when combined. Someone spilled punch on that part of the castlevania cake and its linear so you can’t eat around it.
Played with a game genie for more lives after I got tired of playing a tense half hour to get 5 more minutes into the game. I did okay with the stick but I think Id suggest a pad for this one unless you have a cat that nuzzles you while you play.
Also played some Valis III and after a short time I was asking myself:
This game is rough and dumb and I do not know why I love it.
(okay I know why, its magical sword girls, BIG EVIL and manga cut scenes)
9 Likes
Yooooo Lonely Mountains: Downhill is GOOD. If you have Xbox Game Pass you should have access to it now for “free” even.
5 Likes
ugh I want that game real bad
it is what I thought descenders would be
it is the closest to SSX 3 FULL MOUNTAIN RUN I’ve seen in a really really long time
(oh it’s out imma get it right now)
2 Likes
Can you elaborate? I was really interested in trying Descenders but totally forgot bout it.
anybody here play the second ds Chibi Robo, Happy Rich Oosuji/Clean Sweep? Im stuck on a few things
1 Like
I replayed a bit of descenders to figure this out so yeah
the biggest issue with descenders is the way it’s structured - when I think of going mountain biking or just biking in general, I think about exploring a place that I haven’t been before and slowly getting more and more familiar with the area until I know it pretty well and can feel myself getting better at navigating it
this is why i love SSX3’s full mountain run so much - it takes something that you’ve been doing in 5-7 minute chunks at high speed the whole game, with you thinking you’ve mastered most of the twists and turns of each individual course, and suddenly presents it to you in one un-broken sequence that you have to navigate and it takes like half an hour for you to get all the way down. I’ve never really felt anything like it since, and I think it’s because SSX3 very intimately understands the way that simply stringing a bunch of these courses together can change the way you think about each one. it’s leveraging your knowledge of the discrete parts while changing the context that surrounds them and it’s just so fucking fantastic I love it
descenders does not understand this. it is a game that is simply about going real fast and doesn’t understand that the reason you want to go fast is because you’re trying to navigate a space that you’ve seen before EVEN FASTER than you’ve done it previously
descenders’ structure is split up into individual courses, which are procedurally generated, and each course is one of like 64 on a “mountain”, which is also procedurally generated, and each course has a vague rating for the jumps, the speed, and the technical aspect. you’re supposed to navigate from the top to the bottom without losing all your lives by falling off your bike, and you gain more lives if you complete the randomly selected challenge at the beginning of each course
but because everything is procedurally generated, you can never really get intimately familiar with any given course the way you can in SSX3 (and lonely mountains). there’s no discovery because nothing’s actually been laid out for you, it’s just been assembled semi-randomly and put in front of you, and even on a per-course basis you’re not really forced to follow the path laid out - you can careen off and end up at the finish line without paying attention to the constructed track
all of this serves to make the game feel utterly pointless in the worst way! why bother doing any of this stuff if it’s all just randomly thrown together? it feels lazy, even though there was clearly a lot of work put into the sense of speed and the procgen - I don’t get the sense that the devs have really ever really gone on a bike ride that they’ve felt like they’ve “earned” the knowledge of (despite somehow being utrecht-based? wtf?) and so it’s just a mountain that you’ll never really know and thus never really love. the game offloads all of the narrative responsibility of your relationship with this digital mountain onto the player; it seems assume your desire for an infinite mountain that you’ll never understand
lonely mountains is really great - the game totally nails the physics of like, being JUST inches away from careening out of control but skidding to a stop and sprinting out of it. but more importantly it understands the reasoning behind why you’d want to spend time going down this mountain and doesn’t fuck around with any procgen stuff - everything seems really carefully laid out and even the structure behind the “challenges” is meant to ease you into how the trail will go. the first challenge is to simply get to the bottom of the trail, and then it starts timing you and asking you not to crash. but because it’s given you a sense of understanding around the space you’re navigating, asking you to do the trail in 3 minutes or w/e is not NEARLY as arbitrary as it is in descenders. and there are so many tiny little paths - I feel like I’ve spent so much time already discovering a new jump or a new shortcut on every run and I’m only on the second trail of the first mountain
11 Likes
Hey thanks for breaking that down. That totally makes sense, and I agree with your take on familiarity and motivation. I want to check out Lonely Mountains now.
Y’all Shenmue 2’s handling of a trans character is not great.
I don’t remember that, what section was it?
My Shenmue 2 experience was
first section AWESOME, IT’S JUST LIKE SHENMUE 1
second section (walled city) THIS IS THE WORST THING I HAVE EVER PLAYED
third section THIS LOW KEY ADVENTURE IS AWESOME
It Is “I don’t want to talk about it because I feel like I would be directly hurting multiple forum members” bad.
3 Likes
UNDERSTOOD
If I’ve got the character right Yuan it seems they were redubbed in the US and Pal versions in such a way that seems like it was trying to remove that implication from the character? Namely, by never suggestion they aren’t a cisgender woman, and have cisgender women redub the character.
Which is potentially why it didn’t jump out to folks who played those versions.