metroid quarantine thread

[RT-55J]

I’m playing through every single hack of Metroid 1. I don’t know what’s possessing me to do this, but whatever it is I suggest that you avoid getting it.

Anyhow, some context to the pictures I posted in the games-you-played thread:

@RT-55J

The first three pictures were from Metroid Challenge. It’s an 87% complete hack from around 2002 (from the same group that made Zelda Outlands). Apparently, from what I can tell it was unpreserved, but somehow has been sitting on my computer for who knows how long. I only played it long enough to get some screenshots to upload it to metconst.

The second screenshot is the first door transition in the game, if you go left from the starting point. That also happens to be the required path to get to the morph ball, if you ever happen to get that far.

@RT-55J

These are from Zebian Illusion (version 0.4). That third screenshot is pretty much what all of the vertical shafts in the game are like.

I remember back in the day the author of this hack talking about how he regretted making it. I can see why, but I can appreciate it as a grotesque aesthetic artifact.

I played it for 20 minutes before I decided I had had my fill.

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Early Metroid 1 hacks were hamstrung by the fact that moving items around was not fully understood. Sure, you could move an item to a different screen no problem, but having that item not respawn upon death or password entry was a problem that wasn’t solved for several years. As a result, hacks either ignored (or were unaware of) this limitation and had things like respawning missile and e-tanks, or they kept items in the same places and tried to rearrange the map to make up the difference.

Metroid X, the first Metroid hack, probably best exemplifies that latter approach. The morph ball is still in its same place, on screen left of the start, but the game gates it behind the wave beam, making it mark the end of act one.

While Metroid X isn’t perfect — it takes the original game’s iceberg and flattens it into a thin sheet of ice — it is overall remarkably cognizant of the limitations both of the original game and of the hacking tools available back then. It succeeds at its own goals quite well, and chronologically speaking I don’t expect to find anything of the same caliber until at least 2006 at the earliest.

In conclusion, let us appreciate the stilted poetry of these ending screens:

(Wart’s Invasion, Metroid Remix, and Metroid X, respectively)

please post your own metroid opinions here

[villain]

@RT-55J

You have saved Mario and returned peace to our land.
Unfortunately, our Princess is in another Galaxy.

[captainlove]

Prime 2 is a favourite. Of all the Prime games I felt it communicated the remoteness and alienness of its world the best. It’s a really miserable place and I like that the Luminoth and Ing aren’t really connected to anything else apart from a few Chozo mentions here and there. It barely even has metroids in it. I’d like to see rezbit hacking come back in some way

I’d love for them to revisit the idea of the suit as a barrier between Samus and environment and this attack always made it feel like the suit was a tool more than anything.

[rasterradio]

Sky Temple has the coolest vibe of any place in the series.

I want to enjoy SM hacks but they feel so daunting, like they’re designed for people who can beat SM in an hour in reverse boss order. Are there any ZM hacks? I’m much better at that game.

[VastleCania]

Metroid Prime meets The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

[RT-55J]

I didn’t like Prime 2 when I played through it, though in retrospect I think half the issue I had with it is that I was just in a rather low point in my life when playing it, so most of the stuff just bounced off of me, emotionally speaking.

One particular complaint I do have is that the dark world was (a) too homogeneous and (b) too disconnected. Part of me thinks that it would have been better if one of the areas had to be accessed via an elevator in the dark world (at least as first), such as the Sancutary Fortress, and had the dark world version of that area be the primary version of that area, at least from an art/production perspective.

idk, I feel like I’d be more tolerant of some of its structural nonsense (like all of its keys) if I played it again, but the dark world still feels like a missed opportunity. As it stands, it mostly just felt like a shallow pool you had to dive in on occasion, and only rarely felt like it was able to capture the cthonic horror inherent to the concept, where you had to venture into deeper and more dangerous depths to progress (the endgame of Metroid 2 excels in this respect).

[captainlove]

Dark world is definitely a rough aspect of the game (and a big one considering it’s the main conceit of the game). A wholly dark area would’ve been super cool and makes a lot of sense with the randomness of it.

I’ve never really enjoyed any light/dark world switching but I liked how it themed the game a particular way in Prime 2’s case. It just makes everything miserable (traversing the map, tone of the story, early game difficulty). Retro seemed to be enjoying the freedom the middle of a trilogy brings and I just like how it doesn’t rely on a lot of Metroid staples for its best aspects.

I’ve been meaning to play Metroid 2 for ages since it sounds right up my street with the whole ‘horror in an alien planet’ angle. The size of Samus’ sprite in the game really appeals to me for how claustrophobic it looks. Something I love about Prime is how boxed in you feel.

[woudww]

there’s a few, yeah. here has some. i think i saw deep freeze at a speedrun event

theres a couple of v preliminary fusion hacks too, last i looked, but all you need is the one that removes cutscene text: http://forum.metroidconstruction.com/index.php/topic,5040.0.html

[RT-55J]

Played through “Pitoid” (not recommended).

Ridley’s Lair in this hack has massive “nobody playtested this” vibes, right from the start:

The little block in this tunnel makes most of the horizontal rooms untraversable (you have to door climb to get to Ridley):

Speaking of Ridley, his room looks slightly messed up:

As for the room behind his, well…

stunning

[RT-55J]

Tried playing Metroid Challenge:

Summary

starring Samus Aaron

featuring stunning architecture:

welcome to norfair:

I just noticed that if you roll into the hole on the left you are effectively softlocked unless you can bomb-jump five tiles high (not even sure that’s possible in metroid 1).

every single screen of this was a chore to play (more liek metroid chore amirite?)

I got to this point before quitting:

To get past that wall, you have to bomb that row of blocks at the bottom of the screen. Since that’s at the bottom of the screen, you are taking damage the entire time, and you can’t lay bombs in a consistent rhythm. The game’s map recommends having 285 energy for this.

(I guess I finally see how normies feel about hell-runs in Super Metroid hacks.)

Don’t play Metroid Challenge.

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Metroid M

This is a decently polished hack with obnoxious map design. I remember trying to play it like 12 years ago, mapping it by hand, and quit once I made the (correct) assumption that getting to Ridley would entail navigating a room the length of the entire map (also, death boots you back to the title screen, and passwords don’t work, so I would have had to make the entire trek in reverse as well).

Anyhow, this time around I just had the map open in the editor the entire time I was playing and beat it in an hour and a half (a petty and fruitless revenge, I’ll admit).

Anyhow, the hack’s opening mentions something about metroid offspring or something.

The thing is, though, this hack had no metroids whatsoever. Aside from Mother Brain and her cheerios, Tourian was a ghost town.

As proof that I’m not making this up, here’s me going up the escape elevator with only 30 ticks left:

Also the ending text is properly formatted (boo!):

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More poetry, this time courtesy of Metroid Planet:

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Metroid Quest was a sight to be seen. It’s a messy crossover graphics hack (I love it).

(this opening text was part of the screenshots on the site but not in version I played (dunno why))

More Screens Here

Link can shoot beams from his arms. Also, the morph ball turns him into Kirby:

Unfortunately, the Brinstar item rooms are bugged (at least in the version I played), and don’t spawn their items:

With that I decided to input JUSTIN BAILEY and play through the game that way (I forgot that password starts with both bosses dead lol):

[BustedAstromech]

Metroid sure looks pretty when people make it ugly

[cylindrome]

did anyone else ever feel like the environments in super metroid didn’t feel as solid as they do in the other games

something about the whole thing just seems kind of slippery and paper-thin in my mind. it was hard to really place myself “into”

[captainlove]

I have this issue with a lot of SNES games tbh. They’re all very colourful but environment art always felt a bit ‘off’. I feel like the sprite rotation and distortion contributed to the world feeling papery.

Really like F-zero’s feel though so who knows.

[BustedAstromech]

A lot of them get detailed enough backgrounds that they start to look like fancy wallpaper (Super Metroid didn’t trip this for me, though). More parallax layers become necessary if you’re drawing enough back there, not the SNES’s strength.

[cylindrome]

one thing i’ve noticed both SNES mario and metroid do differently to their NES counterparts is feature a “sliding camera” which tries to position itself so that the character is facing toward the majority of the screen space, rather than simply having them in the centre. i’m not sure whether or how much that contributes to an overall feeling of looseness but it always trips me up in SMW1 because the slide doesn’t kick in until after mario takes a few steps in a given direction

[VastleCania]

I agree with you, somehow, and I can’t entirely place it either. Something about the environments means that I have a general idea of what environments are where, and often I have individual rooms in my mind, but they don’t connect very well.

Not that I have a great memory in any case, but even in the act of playing I would often get lost just transitioning from room to room.

I think that getting the high jump boots is the point at which the entire environment falls apart for me. You cover so much distance with those that it compresses the physical space BUT you still can’t see very much of it. Spaces become second-to-second navigation challenges rather than environments to comprehend and dissect.

Honestly it’s one of the things I like most about Super Metroid.

[RT-55J]

@stavekoff

Metroid Samus Returns sucks shit. How did they fuck it up this bad

They farmed it out to MercurySteam, and we know what their track record is like.

One interesting tidbit I got from the developer interviews was when one of the guys from Spain said that they didn’t provide any musical direction to the composers — they just let them do their thing. Thus, when they requested a track for the lava rooms scattered around the game, they got Magmoor Caverns again, rather than something like an arrangement of the area’s theme.

I feel like that incident is very telling about the game’s production as a whole.

I like its kinesthetics and find it almost visually passable, but it feels like it suffered from a rather weak vision of what a remake of Metroid 2 should be like. AM2R is a lot better in terms of raw deaign, but also suffers on this front.

My elevator pitch for a Metroid 2 remake would be “a game with half a dozen areas that take cues from the design ethos and atmosphere of Super Metroid’s Wrecked Ship (the Wrecked Ship being an area from Metroid 2 in nearly all aspects except the game it appeared in),” but I also don’t think that Metroid 2 ever needed a remake in the first place.

Anyhow, by this point I’ve played ~60% of the Metroid 1 hacks out there, and a lot of them are very, very bad. Please look forward to more posts about them.

[daphaknee]

its because the doors are all the same design!!! why would the sunken ship have the same door as the rest of the planet? EVEN NORFAIRS DOORS SHOULD LOOK DIFFERENT THAN BRINSTARS but noooooo

the doors seperate things into a series of vignettes instead of a cohesive whole bc even though the map is interlocking and has a sense of space the identical doors everywhere make you feel like you’re not traversing anything

[Broco]

Why does it need so many blue doors in the first place, come to think of it. Why not just have a screen edge like every succeeding Metrovania

I think in NES Metroid it was because the wall-climbing critters were a major enemy type

[sleepysmiles]

The first Metroid is the best looking one. imo. Those pitch black backgrounds and alien bubble blocks and twisty machinery tiles. the rich dark color tones. It looks so cool