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watching a junkoid LP right now and i think the suit is important to me. this poor touhou girl in her red pinafore is just not dressed for spelunking. maybe overalls and a respirator with her hair tied back but really the body should be mediated
it is cute that she turns into a rat though
i am still a character design practicality type hater at heart. party like it’s 2012
the suit is important because it reinforces the theme of the hostile environment but also structures progression for mobility and defense in a practical way that’s not magic. bequeathed to you by bird statues. that part could be finessed.
i really really like when you absorb the x parasites in fusion. can you believe that
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watching rotoscoped animations may as well be dragon’s lair in terms of distance from metroid and the divine psychic connection between player and 6’3" alien bird woman who can curl into a ball. what are you gonna do, rotoscope the guy curling into a ball? i don’t think so
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IMO rotoscoped animations are satisfyingly committal, like Dark Souls giant club attacks. They’re due for reconsideration
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tbh the only from game i’d want to replay is the one where i can blink dodge and stagger enemies with a blunderbuss. incidentally the most metroid of them for unrelated, covered in blood reasons
thinking about bloodborne in the context of metroid prime 4 is depressing, honestly, like it’s just not going to be what it needs to be
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For me a core metroiding element is the suit. (well duh, bear with me)
Its a protective bubble and prison. Like a shark cage or hazmat suit. It allows the game to be cumbersome and slow or give you incredible agility. Its an element I think the 3D games got really right.
As you get more power youre deeper into the suit, safer from old blunders, able to go more places but the monsters’ claws are sharper.
So yes there should be no melee because “stay the fuck off me” is a core metroid feeling.
I admit this is not functionally different from games just having power-ups but its a contextual, style feeling that makes it all makes sense to me.
I think the SNES sound design is also in support of this feeling (or its where I got the impression, same thing to me). All the metrod sounds feel like they have the highs rolled off. Like you’re in a tin can and/or under water.
Metroid fusion is a direct violation that confirms the feeling. Something got through the suit. Something got IN ME. I… don’t hate it? Im still IN HERE but HERE is also alive now. Youre being more part of the place you are exploring now, further highlighting how much you dont belong.
I should acknowledge this is more than probably due to metrod cribbing from Alien. But Ive no comment to make other then to acknowledge it.
To me a good metroid should feel like cave diving into hell.
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i mean, i like a good power suit. i like the way they obfuscate the wearer’s gender and humanity in exchange for power and protection, but i also like how junko eschews that protective layer entirely, bringing the fragility of her physical being to the forefront. imo having her look as vulnerable as she is adds to the unease and meaning when the games interrogate her relationship with her own womanhood. it’s a distinctly different affect, but not one that runs completely contrary to the metroid ethos (arguably it’s within throwing distance of the suitless segment in ZM (which, for all my kvetching about it’s structural place, at least succeeds in its goals))
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sincerely 100% convinced re: junko’s outfit by this post
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Junkoid Owns.
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the main deck from metroid fusion could be the aesthetic that has stuck with me most but the wrecked ship is also very good
the splash when you enter water in super metroid is wonderfully viscous
i really like how the high jump in metroid 2 causes you to accelerate mid-ascent, as if lifted by a gust of wind
best ball is the spider ball in prime 1 with the green glow, i like looking at that thing move more than i like looking at the environments
i like aliens more so that explains it. PRESS A TO RELEASE PHAZON ENERGY TOWARD THE CORE!
for real, if the detailed, evocative art is still there, it doesn’t really add or take anything away what tone the story is running with. i am an avid fan of the early ratchet & clank games as well. the prime games increasingly take the best possible inspiration from the death star aesthetic, and the pirate homeworld in particular frequently feels like you’re playing the buzz lightyear videogame from the opening of toy story 2. that’s an excellent thing, it hits all of my buttons
i haven’t played metroid dread yet but i’m allured by the way it moves. i like these tuuubes
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Important:
source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Metroid/comments/1g5326l/1993_kelloggs_frosties_nintendo_collector_cards/
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Oh, so I wasn’t misremembering re: the text being a lot better in the Gamecube version. Good to know, I suppose. Been playing Prime Remastered for the last week or so- was enjoying it more than I honestly expected to initially, but at some point I lost the plot and ended up muddling through the latter parts of Phendrana and most of the Phazon Mines on autopilot. Will probably end up setting this playthrough aside indefinitely and just sticking with the original Prime in future.
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finally made a proper map out of this:
(that custom logo is more than this hack deserves)
for a fun time, find out how to get to the bombs from the start (bonus challenge: find a shortcut)
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today i learned about some absurd glitch in super metroid called “artificial varia” (which was discovered several years ago). all you have to do is corrupt some memory by using the xray scope out of bounds to create a block that gives you the varia suit when you shoot it:
(should be timestamped)
one of the developers of the SM practice hack wanted to know why this glitch was resulting in a crash in the practice hack (apparently people practice this trick???). the discussion was interesting enough that i wanted to preserve the conclusion for posterity by giving a play-by-play of what’s happening when the block is shot (i didn’t suss this out, my friend neen and some others did)
first thing’s first: the collision type of the block is F (bombable block) with a subtype of 7A:
how different kinds of collisions are resolved in SM is stupidly complex, but the gist of it is that for each type of collision with the level tilemap (whether by an enemy, a weapon, samus’s feet, face, insides, etc.), the game calls a different function depending on the collision type of the tile, and then that function can choose to do whatever it wants with the tile’s collision subtype (or “BTS value” in hacker parlance).
so, in the case of a bombable block being shot/bombed/grappled, it calls this function:
https://patrickjohnston.org/bank/94#f9FF4
the crucial part is that LDA $A012,X, which pulls a pointer from a table to determine what actor will be spawned by the routine called by the JSL on the next line. the value of 7A exceeds the bounds of this table (because the game doesn’t need that many kinds of bomb block), so the game pulls some random bytes from some code that will be interpreted as a pointer later on (from address A106 in bank 94):
SNES memory mapping is weird, but 0A42 points to RAM in this case, so the game will read whatever’s there to spawn the actor. what’s there?
RAM address 0A42 has E695, and 0A44 E725. the first of those numbers will be treated as a pointer to a function meant to initialize the actor (or “PLM” in hacker parlance). the second number is a pointer to the actor’s “instruction list” (which is itself a list of function pointers, rather than ASM code).
so E695 points to the middle of an instruction list for the spazer beam item (in bank 84):
https://patrickjohnston.org/bank/84#fE67D
unfortunately, the game is interpreting this as ASM code, so it’s complete nonsense (just trust me here okay):
somehow, the game manages to return from this code, but not if you’re playing a specific version of the practice hack (we’ll get to why later).
now, when the actor runs it will start executing functions starting at E725 in bank 84. i wonder where that is:
it’s right exactly at the point in the instruction list for the varia suit actor where the varia suit is given to samus. magnificent.
now, why in the world did those RAM addresses hold pointers to those two specific places? let’s check the ram map:
https://patrickjohnston.org/ASM/Lists/Super%20Metroid/RAM%20map.asm
it turns out that E695 and E725 are just the normal values stored at those memory addresses during normal gameplay.
the thing is, those are pointers to functions in a completely different bank!!! (bank 90, just so you know) — it’s just a complete coincidence that (a) an out-of-bounds array access even reads a spurious pointer to those RAM addresses (the 0A42 and 0A44 from earlier) and that (b) the pointers those RAM addresses contained happen to correspond to things that are (1) harmless and (2) useful in a completely different bank!!! if it weren’t for the completely asinine way that the SNES’s 65816 CPU handles memory pagination, then this glitch would be fundamentally impossible the way that it happens. and the most absurd thing is that you can just place this block in an editor and it just gives you the varia suit when you shoot it as if it’s a perfectly normal thing:
(touching it might crash the game tho)
now, as for why shooting it was causing a crash in the practice hack, it’s pretty simple. let’s go back to nonsense code from earlier:
that eor $e067e0 is referencing a memory address that doesn’t exist in Super Metroid, so it reads from the “open bus” (which basically contains whatever byte was on the bus last). the practice rom, on the other hand, is expanded so it can hold all of the practice features, so it just points to the rom (after some mirroring shenanigans). this results in the practice rom and vanilla rom from doing different things with that branch instruction (the bcs there).
the solution to fix the crash, then, is to just put the value the vanilla game reads from the open bus at the corresponding address in the expanded rom. to wit:
in conclusion, i love software
This has been another episode of Behind the Code by Retro Game Mechanics Explained for Displaced Gamers. If you enjoyed this video, please consider liking, subscribing, following, reskeeting, and forfeiting all your mortal possessions to me.
(for the record’s sake, i was just a bystander for this entire convo)
post-script: “how did anyone find this stupid block in the first place??”
super metroid fans are tied with super mario 64 fans as some of the craziest people on the planet
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kaleidoscope by neen
neen calls this hack a “oil-on-super metroid project.” It has a distinctive look, and a certain rough, irregular quality to it. It’s as polished and unpolished as he cares for it to be. Comparisons to their hack gossamer from last year are quite natural — while kaleidoscope doesn’t quite reach the same extremes of psychedelic absurdia as gossamer, neen has honed his craft of squeezing weird visuals out of the SNES to produce genuinely novel effects, and the baseline level of visual interest is (on average) much higher.
As far as game design is concerned, I like it. The world has an interesting shape, the new custom mechanics provide an interesting sense of progression, and (to me) it threads the needle of being reasonably balanced while still making you to fear the local fauna.
The hack is slated to be released on the 27th, but neen has secretly released it about a week early on my forum (it’s been effectively done for the past month). Please enjoy this secret to everybody (try not spill the beans 
).
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do you think Metroid Prime 4’s soundtrack will still use the same terrible choral samples?
judging by the bit of music at the end of the trailer in the forest area, i’d wager yes
wait they’re not the same samples from super metroid are they?
i don’t think so, they seem harsher and more artificial
Kind of upset that there’s just one metroid prime game at a full price on switch instead of just the trilogy, as was on wii
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