I only trusted them to make a game better than SR, and frankly that’s good enough for my perverse tastes.
yeah you’re right
Back in May this year a hacker by the name of Daltone (who made the short “Grand Prix” racing hacks back in '09) posted a 90% completed full-scale hack that they had abandoned some time ago due to life circumstances, called Super Duper Metroid. In terms of level design, all that remained was Lower Norfair and Tourian.
Metaquarius (the Y-Faster/X-Fusion bloke), decided to take it upon himself to rebuild the hack (on the latest version of Project Base) and finish the remaining level design. He released the fully finished version last Saturday, to the tune of this trailer:
(lmao)
It’s a good hack tbqhimho.
It’s sort of like Hyper Metroid, except without the nonsense it cribbed from Redesign (and without all the cringe).
Hyper Metroid’s design was rather at odds with itself. It provided a huge world for you to explore, but in spite of having barely any guiding hand at work it still had a decently rigid sequence you had to follow (unless you were a pro sequence breaker). For many players, this effectively turned it into a game of searching for needles in an ever-increasing haystack.
Super Duper has a similarly wide open world, but now it’s properly matched to a much more free-form sense of progression. You can go multiple directions from the start, and whichever way you go you will end up at a statue holding the morph ball. The different routes all provide a slightly different tenor to your experience in the opening third of the game. I like it.
Items still have their utility, but now most goals have multiple routes to reach them. A wave gate might be circumvented by doing some challenging platforming with the grapple beam, or by finding a remote switch hidden elsewhere in the room. An area sealed off by powerbombs could be backdoored with some clever use of the speedbooster. Rocket jumping could make up for the lack of a mobility item, etc., etc.
Actual non-linearity is not unique amongst metroid-likes, per se, but it’s not very common to see one so disinterested in making sure players collect (nearly) every major upgrade their first time through.
Overall, it has a lot of clever ideas and is a strong contender for my personal Metroid of the Year award.
(Now, in terms of how much I’d recommend this hack to the general public of SBdotnot: regardless of your route, some amount of suitless water traversal is required (caveat ludor).)
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I am about to start Metroid Dread again!
I remember someone suggested some modifications to the control scheme, but I don’t remember which ones! Care to write them down again?
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I switched the shoulder buttons because it’s more comfortable to hold the Z buttons, L → ZL
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Thanks!
Afflicted with perpetual nightmares, JUNKO is determined to defeat the manifestation of her dreams - the serpent trickster ASMODEUS.
A pleasant total conversion. Knocked it out on whim in less than 2 hours today. The new soundtrack is interesting — has a bit more of a Compile flavor than a Metroid flavor.
The animated tiles (not pictured) give this a lot of off-kilter flavor.
Not very much in the way of custom code, but it still manages to be quite clever with the stuff it has to work with. The difficulty is also rather well balanced, imo.
Easily a top 5 or top 3 Metroid 1 hack for me, and quite a bit more approachable than Rogue Dawn imho.
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oh, funny - just grabbed this rom the other day because it looked interesting and didn’t even realize it was a hack (didn’t play it yet). i just thought it was some Japanese search action game i’d never heard of lol
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lol that’s pretty great
also, just so you know, v1.1 was released just a couple days ago (version number should be on the title screen), so you might have the old version
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This is bad ass, thanks for recommending it
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This was really good! Gonna make a post about it in GWPT hope more people give it a try!
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remembered that i once re-drew the super metroid map in symphony of the night style to see if it would cross wires in my brain in a funny way
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interesting. zebes is closer in scale to a dracula castle than i previously thought
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new big chonky-sized SM hack came out of nowhere:
is it any good? i dunno, but it looks kinda neat
http://edit-sm.art/subversion/
(lol that domain name)
the developers of this are apparently responsible for the modern SM editor SMART (modern in the sense that it’s actively maintained, and doesn’t expect you to do barbaric things such as “manual repointing”), which they apparently made to make this over the past 6-7 years
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played an hour of this and my general impressions are:
- room quality (in terms of visual interest) is varying wildly early on (kinda expected this)
- otherwise, this whips
the metroid primey logbook is for sickos who still find that kind of stuff interesting in 2022, but otherwise this seems catered to non-sickos who can tolerate standard metroid trappings
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I finished Subversion with 100% and 9:05 on the clock (probably a couple more hours IRL).
Definitely the best Metroid hack ever named after a piece of version control software. 10/10
There were a few sicko-moments later on — a cold-temperature run (slow health drain, absent in easy mode apparently), a particularly nasty customized boss, and a few puzzles that are slightly too execution-heavy. Also, maybe the world is a bit too large (probably). Still it’s not too hard to recommend this hack.
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so apparently this hack has a hidden special mode behind a weird in-game meta-puzzle (ARG-ish logic, but all in-game). I spoiled myself on the solution to access it, and boy is it something.
What it is is a “2nd Quest” where the major items are swapped. Basically, it plays like a semi-nasty randomizer seed, requiring esoteric knowledge of the map and usage of some advanced tech to progress. It really reveals the purpose of so, so many odd wrinkles in the game’s rooms. Granted, as interesting as it is, I’d say that only true sickos need apply (I love it).
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2nd quest completed: 69.6%, 4:48 in-game time
Spoilers
This mode was an interesting exercise because the majority of the difficulty came from finding the route and traversing it. The traversal difficulty is compounded by the fact that this mode buries various QoL upgrades like high jump or space jump very late in the game (IBJing is required).
Fortunately combat was a non-factor since the foundation of the route is that you are given screw attack rather early, which opens up a lot of shortcuts you are forced to use. This also has the consequence of making the majority of bosses are trivially skippable.
It is possible to softlock yourself in this mode (especially early on), but never in a way that would screw your save over.
Anyhow, if you don’t mind spoiling yourself on this mode, here’s the route the game expects you to take to get speed booster (note: this is not where the item is in the normal quest). It’s by far the hardest part of the 2nd quest. I lost track of how many tries this took.
Super Metroid Subversion - Sicko Mode - YouTube
(BONUS: features 30 seconds of me failing to perform a bomb jump)
10/10, don’t do this
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