I like the doors. They make it feel like the pirates have gone everywhere are repurposed the entire planet, modifying the existing structures to suit their needs.
thinking about the pirates not going through a single door until they install one of their own proprietary doors is a very nintendo way to go about it. okay thats canon i hate the doors a little less now
metroid fusion has nice doors
metroid fusion is such a great little game. honestly has aged better than the rest of the series.
Today I want to talk about the hacks of a fellow who went by the name of Nathan Serubin. Looking at the very extensive readmes of his hacks, he made (or at least had plans for) at least 4 hacks, but AFAIK only two of them have survived, and I hate them both (affectionately, of course).
The first is called Metroid Adventure. The author provides an odd introduction for it in the readme:
This hack modifies the layout of the map itself, but the the graphics, screen designs, and item locations are all unchanged from the original game. This means that the only interesting screenshot I have of the hack is of a copy of the starting screen using Brinstar’s alternate palette:
The author goes on to explain all of the twisted qualities of the map design. My favorite was his explanation for “missing items”:
Anyhow, after reading all of this I decided that it would not be worth my time to play this hack on the author’s own terms, so fired up the editor to crack open the secrets of his twisted map so I could play it on my terms:
You see those two vertical shafts spanning the entire height of the map, and the corridor along the bottom of the map? That’s the intended route to bombs. (Yes, really.) Brinstar’s whole design is amazingly hateful like this.
There are some other things to point out, like Brinstar and Norfair overlap slightly (its fine), or how Tourian has a backdoor that requires wall-crawling to get to, but I think the funniest thing is that despite the author’s attempts at being twisted , both Kraid and Ridley’s Lairs are less twisted than the original game’s designs.
As far as playing this was concerned, with judicious use of this map and some wall-crawling I was able to complete it in an hour (fast enough to get the best ending). This is the only way I’d recommend approaching it.
Do not play Metroid Adventure.
The other hack of Nathan Serubin’s that I played was called Project Ridien. Here’s the logo that was on their site (the rest of their site was in Flash, and I’m too lazy to figure out if I could get it working):
For comparison, here’s the game’s logo as depicted in the actual game:
Promising.
The game itself is an earnest attempt at making a total conversion. The readme has thousands of words worth of backstory and lore. It is dizzying to read.
The basic backstory is that you play as Ridien, as Samus clone developed by the Space Pirates to defeat Samus. Ridien was formed from a partial DNA sample of Samus they found on the cadaver of a metroid that had attacked Samus, spliced with the DNA of a dead federation cop they had laying around. Also, somehow they extracted all of Samus’s brainwaves when she raided Zebes, and they stuffed all those brainwaves (unmodified) into Ridien, inadvertently making their clone rebel against them.
Anyhow, enough with the lore. Let’s talk about the only good part of this game, the teleporting room at the start:
This is accomplished through extremely clever use of door blocks and the game’s out-of-bounds mechanics. It’s very janky and fragile, but I’m amazed that it even works at all.
There is only one other teleporter in the game besides the one here at the start.
Screenshot Dump
This hack’s map design isn’t quite as evil as Metroid Adventure’s, but it’s still fairly annoying. I tried playing for a bit making a map by hand, but after a while I determined that it the exploration just wasn’t rewarding enough to justify the effort. The areas are way too sprawling and sparse. Also, the sequence is surprisingly rigid for a Metroid 1 hack, with wallcrawling being impossible where it would be most useful in eliminating backtracking.
Anyhow, this hack has some more of that Poetry we crave:
The end:
Don’t play Project Ridien.
when i first played super metroid (as my introduction to the series) i thought the green bubbly region of norfair was way too cool and alien-looking compared to the rest of the game’s art direction; surely it had to be from the original. turns out that was right! some of the creatures in maridia are also from return of samus
Man idk i think Fusion has aged like milk! incessant bland dialogue, Samus has her agency taken away by a man computer and is forced to chase a bunch of quest markers around for nearly a whole game, the play leans way into the highly attritional combat and it makes a lot of the boss fights a slog, the music is all military spy thriller shit instead of the cool bumping atmosphere of Super. When the game came out i thought these elements were “controversial” but sort of neat? now i just think it’s silly that they threw out half of what makes the series compelling for their last canon 2D game. Like gee i wish they hadn’t done that and had made another deft masterpiece like Super instead
obligatory “the SA-X is cool”
It’s interesting how much the judgment of each Metroid game depends on tone, setting and Samus. Like is it possible for a Metroid game to not be about Samus or is this Samus’ series? I didn’t play Prime Federation Force but the backlash to that and later Metroids often feels like the tone of the game is wrong or that Samus should be the primary agent (ideally one that doesn’t babble incessantly).
i have never been able to make any progress in Metroid 1. i have tried multiple times throughout my life to play that game without a walkthrough and my brain simply cannot make any sense of it. one of these days i will use a walkthrough and finally beat it.
i think the only Metroid i really love is probably Super Metroid, which i know isn’t super beloved here, but imo it manages to maintain the “figure out where you have to go” thing without making you feel like you’re completely lost at all times.
This is also reinforced by the fact that the space station at the beginning does have different doors.
you’re right it is a bit cheesy
EDIT: gdi i quoted wrong
I just think those are all mostly good things lol. the narrative stuff is problematic and annoying for sure but aside from that I think recasting the metroid experience as a spy thriller is actually a really cool idea and is executed exceptionally well especially for when the game was released.
I don’t mind it being more linear at all, I actually think that’s a strength. it just isn’t as much of an exploration game, but it still has decent environmental puzzles. it eventually gets to asinine tile-hunting like many metroid games do but imo zero mission is waaaaaaay worse about that.
i don’t feel a particularly strong urge to defend fusion as it kind of falls off into boring, familiar territory around the point where it needed to truly step up and underline its thesis, but i definitely prefer playing it moment-to-moment over super. just this tight, propulsive, weird hybrid action/puzzle/visual novel thing, doled out in tactually appealing bite-sized chunks. it really felt like they tried to imagine what a “modern” portable title should look like at a time when more story, cutscenes and progression systems were creeping into console gaming and as a result the game feels suspended in this sort of nebulous overlap of paradigms, with hints at but no clear outline of a way forward. which for me is an exciting, bubbling feeling, a sense of some volatile, mutable vision that’s cool to hang out with. and it certainly felt like it was going places for a moment there.
i couldn’t figure out how to progress in rogue dawn pretty early on but that one seemed pretty cool. i’d like to at least watch a playthrough of it at some point but i remember all the videos on youtube being obnoxious
you might like the environmental design from sm: eris if you haven’t looked at that already
i have and i’m hopelessly stuck
while i’m describing the games in terms of textures, fusion has always felt “sticky” to me, and i’m pretty sure it’s because samus has a brief acceleration period (300ms*) at the beginning of her run, but instant deceleration when she comes to a halt. it gives the physics a strong sense of grip which complements the rubbery appearance of the suit
(*zero mission, on the other hand, only has 200ms of acceleration, making it infinitely less satisfying to play, somehow. i don’t know)
yeah the progression falls apart a little once you start collecting… artifacts i think they were called, i got like 70% of the way through the game but was happy to finish with a video at that point
this sums up what I like about fusion so perfectly
Are Rogue Dawn and Eris 2012 playable by normal humans?
Eris? No.
Rogue Dawn? I think so but I’m not sure. (At the very least, don’t feel guilty about quitting once you get to the final area. It’s twice as long as it needs to be imo.)