IIRC Prime Hunters did that as well
Hunters is shoot by tapping the stylus, right? That would track if, in both cases, they’re trying to make it easier to get burst shots out because the button input is hard to mash.
count me as appreciating the burst fire (every trigger action should have full auto/turbo built in imo) but it should be a toggle
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That’s what I was thinking, it reminds me of accessibility options that replace mashing with holding or slow tapping. I’m pretty sure Nintendo is still rating simple menus with few options above accessibility options, though I’m not sure how deep that extends to their partners.
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A streamer I watch, thedagit, (who has been playing through every Super Metroid hack) finished his playthrough of Metroid Mission Rescue yesterday:
it took him 69:16 (real time), or 47:11 (in-game time) to finish with 76.0%
the escape timer is 80 minutes — with savestates he was able to complete that segment in 111 minutes
He got fed up with the hack around the 10 hour mark and used the “GT code” at the first chance he got — the GT code is debug code gives you a healthy loadout of health and ammo, and every item except for screw attack (and wall jump, in this hack’s case). There are like 7 copies of the Golden Torizo in this hack, so he had the chance relatively early on to cheat the system and break the game’s stingy progression.
The next major item he found was the wall jump boots, about 30 hours later (around the 40 hour mark).
After that, it only took him another 10 hours to obtain the screw attack — the exact location of which he had known for several hours by that point. The problem was that it was behind a room that looked like Ridley’s arena, but Ridley wasn’t spawning. It turned out that the reason Ridley wasn’t spawning there was because that was Ridley 4’s room, and Ridley 4 doesn’t appear until you kill Ridley 3. (idk the actual numbers)
Anyhow, now that he had Screw Attack, he could jump like 5 times in the air (space jump only gives you 1 extra jump in the air), and so he finally had every major item in the game.
It still took him another 20 hours to finish, and that’s with him finally breaking down during the last 8 hours to use a map.
The issue is that the hack’s final area is locked by 20-something odd doors, and opening the doors isn’t just a matter of finding a trigger an shooting it. No — you have to hit a sequence of vaguely hinted triggers in a specific order, sprawled arbitrarily across the game’s map, for each of the ending doors. thedagit gave a rant at one point that summarized the experience:
https://www.twitch.tv/thedagit/clip/AliveCrowdedArugulaKappa-bYlAaPo-Rk6nqCBJ
I can scarcely imagine the malicious, alien intelligence required to design something like this. It’s like the author saw the length of the event bit array, and told himself “I must make every single one of these bits required to finish the game.” It’s the kind of design that makes one yearn for the simpler things like “bomb every tile on the planet three times just to be sure.”
(Speaking of the planet, a friend of mine clocked in the size of the game world at about 7700 map squares. Finding a good estimate for Hollow Knight’s size in comparable units is very difficult for some reason, but my best estimate/hunch is somewhere between 2500-3500 map squares.)
tl;dr under no circumstances should you waste your time with this hack.
you are loved. you are valuable. do not do such a thing to yourself
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Also, the other week I made some maps for every currently released Metroid 2 hack.* In the process of providing some context for each hack so I could post them on Cohost, I ended up writing a short history of the M2 hacking scene:
* statement soon to be out of date
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GaRan, hack TASer extraordinaire, has tackled the of the mother of all spike hacks:
contains the most ridiculous draygon fight i’ve ever seen (both in terms of the room and the strategy used) at about the 27 minute mark
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omg he loses half his health before the boss shows up
AND THEN DASH ATTACKS?? power bomb??? I am. incredibly just a regular ass super metrod player but this is wild
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there’s an ““advanced”” (frame-perfect) trick called a “spikesuit” where if you hit some spikes, unmorph, and activate a shinespark with just the right timing, samus can store a shinespark in her pocket to activate later.
with the hack having so many spikes around, the TAS can basically do this anywhere, so it just uses this trick to chain dash attacks back and forth on draygon even though there is no runway in the room.
the power bomb refill thing is an intended part of the fight (insofar as anything in this parody of a hack is “intended”), though all three of the actual humans I’ve seen finish this hack had to do it at least three times during the fight (do not play this hack)
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Planet Novus is legit, and Planet Enigma is conceptually a very good idea for a procgen metroidvania (provided you have a well-curated roomset)
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I made some rooms in Metroid Planets a few months ago. This one was my favorite.
It’s a pretty fun editor. I just wish I could make a whole game with it.
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Metroid: Reborn: A Call to Valor (2020)
This is a very bizarre hack for 2020. It feels like an artifact out of time or from an alternate universe.
When the author dropped this hack out of nowhere, he offered this very curious sentence:
The game map data has been optimized for space, so MetEdit isn’t able to interpret what is provided.
In short, the author:
- Was unaware of the existence of Editroid, which came out a decade prior.
- Was therefore unaware that Editroid could expand roms automatically, making space a non-issue.
- Opted to completely rehaul a significant portion of the game engine to implement some offhand suggestions that Snowbro offered decades ago in the help files of MetEdit to make the level format just a smidge more efficient.
- Thus made the hack incompatible with any existing tooling.
- Made a (nearly) full hack regardless.
I love outsider art like this. Dudes rock (genuinely).
The end result of his herculean efforts might not necessarily meet the community’s modern standards of polish or variety or novelty, but I can’t help but love the moxie (especially since the ROM size is the same as the original).
Now, as for the hack itself, it usually ends up looking very vanilla on a screen-by-screen basis (no graphics or palettes were changed to my knowledge), and it is still quite repetitive — I feel fairly confident in just guessing that the freespace gains from the author’s engine rehaul are at least 4 times smaller than simply hitting the “expand ROM” button in Editroid.
Still, there are moments where it finds a way to look cool:
Even with the amount of repetion, the workmanlike nature of the game’s world made it a fun experience for me to map. I especially enjoyed playing Qix as I shaded out blocks of unused map squares, large and small:
(Full disclosure: I peeked in RAM to find out the position of the starting point, and peeked some more times during the second half of my playthrough to make sure I wasn’t grossly miscounting any distances (apparently that only happened once).)
The game has several over-the-hood tweaks that are actually noticeable to the player. The most noticeable is Samus’s speed. The hack has two versions – a “fast” one and a “slow” one – but even in the slow one Samus is noticeably much faster when spinjumping. (I appreciate how this changes the dynamics with the common swooping enemies.) It also comes with some variant of the Wave+Ice patch (though it didn’t work the first time I collected both beams (??)). Probably the coolest bit is the fact that beating Kraid and Ridley gives you new items. In Ridley’s case it’s supposed to be the Spring Ball, but due to what I assume is a coding error it is more like a Space Ball. In the context of Metroid 1, it’s an especially broken power-up.
There are some more subtle changes as well, such as enemy damage now being decided per enemy instead of per area, and the world map properly handling wrapping around the edges (normally it’s quite jank — trust me). To demonstrate this last point, here’s a map with the areas colored:
And here’s that same map unravelled:
Sadly, the hack was never properly finished due to technical issues issues with Tourian — as consolation, the final elevator just takes you off the planet instead.
Overall, in spite of this having some design issues, the hack won me over in the end (note: do not take this as a blanket recommendation).
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In 2010, six years before releasing AM2R, Milton Guasti released a fangame called Metroid Confrontation, which mostly acted as a proof of concept for his for his gamemaker engine and Samus controller.
In 2017, somebody demade it in Metroid 1:
It looks and plays pretty nicely:
While I haven’t played the source material for a decade, the author here seems to have had good instincts regarding what needed to be adapted, added, or changed to make it a cohesive game.
The worst thing about this is that it uses a version of the “respawn with full health” patch that starts you off with the low health beep until you collect a health drop. It’s very weird.
Anyhow, I don’t actually have much to say here. You all know the real reason I’m posting here is that I made a map:
For comparison, here’s an “official” map of the source material. It’s interesting to see what all the differences are:
(“Official” map from here)
until next time…
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the amount of highly specific knowledge in this sentence just makes my heart feel so full
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I posted about this hack in the screenshots thread about a month ago. I liked it.
Since then, I’ve made a map of it:
I think it looks nice.
(This is the first map of a reasonably large Super Metroid hack that I’ve made.)
self-promotion → https://samarantes.neocities.org/maps/
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i like it too, those are some real jagged caverns
I had some doubts whether it was gonna turn out any good, but once I got the left half of the starting area put together I was like “awww yeah that’s the stuff.”
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i never got around to writing my full thoughts on the game, but coming back to this i do wanna say that the Pirate Homeword fulfilled my desire for a confusing 3D maze, that is, one that uses every direction available and actually compels use of that nifty map they give you. layout-wise, Prime 1 isn’t so much a 3D Metroid as a Metroid in the horizontal plane; even the Phazon Mines mostly consist of three independent layers (and i believe the map doesn’t even join them). it did get a bit tedious, comparable to parts of Echoes or even Banjo-Tooie with the train system, but the series hasn’t made me feel so dauntingly lost since the gameboy.
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BIG POST GOT TOO LONG SORRY LOL
I just replayed Metroid 1 2 and Super 3 and now im gonna fork off into Prime 1 before doing Fusion. I have not replayed either game in many years. its a toss up whether im going to love or hate them! I loved them both, once. but my last playthrough left sour memories (im pretty hard on Fusion itt). i wish i could get the Fusion suit in Prime by beating Fusion first but you have to beat Prime once? Nintendo you would have me buy 2 games for a bonus i can only get playing one of them twice?? thats really dumb.
Still absolutely love the first 3 though!! (if you beat Metroid Fusion you can unlock Metroid 1 as a bonus in Metroid Prime!!!1!) I drew a fairly detailed map of the first one at first by pausing every screen length… eventually it’s not hard to guesstimate and fill in repeating room. I also used cheat codes that increase energy pickups to 30 and missiles to 10 (which carried over to the upgrades even)
With these tools, Metroid is actually a pretty chill experience! the most interesting thing i learned about Zebes from mapping it is that its not nearly as full of inescapable acid death pits and trap shafts you have to climb out of via vertical stacks of destructible blocks as i remember. Sure those are both extant, there’s a shaft before Kraids that’s arguably mandatory (but never walk back from Kraid or Ridley, just dive into acid and send yourself straight to hell and respawn at the elevator). and sure there are “dead ends” you have to bomb your way through – but not that many?? and they’re pretty well telegraphed? and the only two you have to remember are the floor above lower Norfair (which tbf is pretty devious) and the passage below the high jump that takes you to the screw attack. It is not as “roll around and bomb every tile as a first principle” as its often discussed.
I felt the same way replaying Return of Samus re: spiderballing over every surface. I kept a shittier chicken scratch map (it’s kinda hard to map SR388 and not often necessary cuz most of its linear tunnels) and again when i kept track of exactly how many instances i had to repeat tricks, i found my memory was exaggerating. It’s easy to forget Metroid II is really short (none of these games are long its a strength of theirs) and you get the space jump like a half hour after the spider ball, and “climb every wall and comb every ceiling” turns into “jump everywhere” for another half hour, and then youre in the endgame and its all straight down hallways baybee. because M2 gets cited as the weird linear handheld one where you have to climb on everything people often miss that its a whole game about practicing what Super Metroid perfects: the first is cool unstated visual storytelling. I cant believe i had forgot about the chozo statue closest to the Metroid hive that is shattered, or the part where a Metroids 2 The New Batch hatches and your counter suddenly ticks back up… Second, its forgoing the nonlinearity partly to put more work into the “trap-puzzle box” design, where you learn to use new skills by escaping the area you just acquired them. Super’s awesome at that, and for as down on Fusion as i am i remember it having some excellent trap boxes to puzzle your way out of.
it’s always rad to me how much of this game is just eerie silence punctuated by little chirps and squeaks, presumably made by the various oddly cute critters of SR388’s underworld lazily buzzing around in the darkness
i get the impression that Super Metroid has been shaken from its pedestal a bit around here, that’s great im happy with it kill yr darlings no sacred cows be the best sbutts you can be. Can’t pretend i didnt have a fucking blast replaying it though lol it’s probably still my favorite Metroid and hmm im gonna say it’s my 2nd favorite search action game. I don’t think i have anything new to add or any misconceptions this playthrough corrected for me. I liked Maridia better than usual this time (finally got That One Missile You Gotta Shinespark To there), and Ridley’s lair a little less than usual, because i didnt get turned around for once/got totally turned around, respectively. Kraid is bae.
To end on a spectacularly whiny sbutt note its incredible that everything between Samus’s opening monologue and credits in Metroid 3 is this near wordless, beautiful solitary experience bookended by some of the finest nonverbal storytelling in a video game (let alone an action shooter) and then in 2002 both visions of Metroid 4 were like, lets never shut up again
spoiled in case you were enjoying the otherwise good mood of this overly long post
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