Played 30 minutes of Vitality. Pretty cool atmosphere. After I used a save state it started chugging around 80%. So far it has had those sandhell traps as atmosphere and deliberately not made you try to jump out of them so better than SM in that respect.
It’s really thoughtful and that scares me. Am worried the environments are too puzzly that it will be hard to circle back to look for more tanks. But it feels like the creators predicted a little too accurately what any given normal players inclinations are.
It’s also perfectly reusing assets from SM but the seams that everything is repurposed is there.
I feel like the OG Metroid quadrilogy had design and artistic goals that existed beyond “this is The Next Metroid Game.zip”
every Metroid game since then (with the possible exception of echoes) has set out to be The Next Metroid Game.zip and little else. the spark that the IP was built to contain has been superseded by the aesthetics of its container. it ends up, like, flourescent rather than incandescent
I recalled Spacelords/Raiders of the Broken Planet having decent production art but now I can’t seem to find any. I thought Lords of Shadow at least had decent environment art but it’s been a minute since I saw it running and it’s a PS360 era thing.
Watch if you want to see someone expertly crush nails with their teeth for over 2 hours. Very risky route at play, very high execution barrier, very high risk risk of death, lots of difficult sequence breaks.
Here’s the Twitch VoD YouTube upload of the SM Redesign run if anybody is curious (audio is messed up for the first minute):
Very solid performance by the runner, especially the first hour. Lots hair-raising tricks and terrifying sequence breaks, and (despite how little it resembles a normal playthrough) an excellent demonstration of why you should never, ever (ever) touch the hack.
Metroid 2 is good because it only has hatches inside of ruins, blocking off major items. Also, it only has items inside of ruins or within their immediate vicinity — I mean, why would powerful ancient weaponry just be sitting in some random non-descript cave behind a naturally occurring shinespark puzzle?
SR added doors everywhere because of course it would.
it’s funny because shinesparks are also one of the most fun and unique and celebration-worthy mechanics of the metroid series so i don’t know how you would go about reconciling that with the ecological focus
I’m less familiar with Metroid stuff than most of you but that hasn’t stopped me from developing the snobby opinion that the NES and Game Boy games are the real deal! It took me multiple attempts over a couple years to finally beat Super. Gonna give it another go this year cuz it’s cool but idk why it didn’t click like its predecessors. Maybe it’s too sprawling and overly schematised to keep me invested. I have the feeling that an in-game map ruins a lot of the magic I get from first two. Acquiring greater proficiency at navigation through intimate investigation of the environment is a lot more engrossing and rewarding without the safety net of a map I didn’t have to make myself.
Also the narrative arc from 1 - Super is gold. Everything after is whatever. Which is probably churlish of me to say since the first Prime and Other M are the only others I’ve played but that trilogy is such a potent parable because of its simplicity. Like, I was ogling the manual for II and loving these illustrations and thought, “What’s the deal with the creatures that hold the beam upgrades?”
Decided to play the highest rated Zero Mission rom hack, Metroid: Scrolls Six. It started out as a collaborative hack for some contest a couple years back. In terms of scope, it’s certainly impressive. I mean, it even has its own (almost) completely new soundtrack! The composer even put it on SoundCloud:
best amiga soundtrack of 2018 right here folks (it’s so corny i love it)
Anyhow, as the title suggests, Scrolls Six has a pseudo-fantasy theme. This mostly manifests in an avoidance of tech-themed areas (except for the final area, bizarrely), and the items being renamed to sound more magical (this has zero bearing on how the game plays). It’s novel for a hack, but not especially coherent.
They kept the bubble doors and some of ZM’s techy accoutrements, leading to some minorly interesting juxtapositions:
In terms of world design, it has a hub-and-spokes structure. Collect a magic rune artifact from each of the six surrounding areas to gain access to the final area (actually 5 areas, but one of the areas is effectively two areas). Technically you can’t do the areas in any order, but the game does offer you a fair bit of choice in terms of where to go and what to do. The inter-area dependencies aren’t quite on the level of sophistication as, say, the Y-Faster series, but each area does at least provide on worthwhile reward.
Platforming-wise you start with the Power Grip and wall jumping isn’t required (IIRC), so if nothing else that means this was made by sane people. None of the areas struck me as having outstanding design, but they all at least achieve a base level of competency and mostly avoid hatefulness, which is more than I can say about a lot of low-effort or try-hard hacks.
Going in blind I finished this in less than 3 hours with 98%.
Final verdict: I enjoyed this more than the vanilla Zero Mission (3.75 item orbs out of 5).
i still think this game looks good. i can’t 100% put my finger on why i think it looks good, but i’m just detecting some sort of a subtle touch that i didn’t get with Samus Returns — and even then, i was mildly intrigued by some of the promotional art they had over here in australia:
i like the way they’ve given foreground elements this ultra-high contrast but the background kind of gently falls off into this uniformish haze that has hints of what could be “busy” details but doesn’t occupy too much of your attention. i mean i’ve never really warmed to 2.5D graphics but realistically there wasn’t any other way this was gonna happen and there seems to be more going on here to try to sell me on it than i’ve seen in other projects so far
i like this rust-red + turquoise palette they seem to have committed to for samus. sort of eye-catching and neutral at the same time? i really can’t tell what it makes me feel, which makes it interesting
the e.m.m.i. chirping noise is pretty distinctive and memorable and sort of brings me back to the feel of metroid ii’s non-musical sound design. the fact that the trailer was willing to let this stand as the iconic soundprint of the new title, and not fall back on any of the “classic” recognisable themes or jingles for easy applause, gives me hope. it’s also nice to see that the metroid series is still interested in quiet moments and hasn’t lost its teeth.
there are definitely edges that can be sanded down and parts that remind me of things i don’t like. i’m not gonna try to roll off a defence for every creative decision, but for the moment i’m still fully in wait-and-see mode
am2r-guy has a countdown on his blog for what looks like the 5th anniversary of am2r/the 35th anniversary of metroid as a whole
what could this possibly be? (probably just a commemorative blogpost) what would be the most unrealistic thing to expect from this? what would be the funniest thing he could announce?
these questions have been racing through my mind for the past few hours, and i’ve determined that nothing would be funnier (to me personally) than if he announced that he got a job at mercurysteam
