fuck me are the morph ball-oriented boss fights in prime 2 (boost guardian, spider guardian) hard as hell. i love it though
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Prime 2 has some really good experiments like this. I love how stupidly unforgiving it is.
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one of the things i dislike about Super Metroid and by extension the Prime games built in its template is that, for a series whose magic supposedly comes from being able to comb through and discover more to old areas once you have a new ability, the way these more guided games ultimately take you in loops back to where you need to be pretty much guarantees that the only thing you accomplish by exploring on your own terms is wasted time.
the first ball-sized tunnel in Prime 1 (after the missile boss) comes to mind: all you gain by going to the effort of backtracking there as soon as you can morph is the elevator to Magmoor Caverns which are inaccessible without the Varia Suit, and an early energy tank, i guess (energy tanks are always the “lol come back later” consolation prize). but then going the critical path which grants you Varia immediately prior to where you’ll need it just makes one wonder why the game included heat as a barrier in the first place, when all it serves is in practice is a “fuck you” to the more observant player.
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I think that kind of open backtracking is tricky in the Prime series because of travel speed (always fairly slow to accommodate stopping and looking around to scan stuff) and the 3D environments requiring very bespoke ‘secret area’ construction.
I feel like their strength comes from immersion into environments and the suit. You could maybe solve it by having more complex, maze-like construction of areas generally so that they felt more like sprawling facilities or nests. You could even provide multiple routes to objectives that aren’t sequence breaking but then this likely doubles the amount of stuff you make that developers will say ‘why waste time on stuff most players won’t see/will get lost in’. Morphball sections in particular could easily be made more complex but bombjumping is a bit slow so having too much to retread could feel like a chore.
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i really wanna play through the primes again, i wish they’d drop them on switch already
there was a lot of stuff to balance and that clearly wasn’t one of their top priorities, yeah; overall i’m very impressed with what they were able to pull off. that said, they sort of already wasted their time in that sense by including back entrances that the player has no incentive to use, other than completionism. my gripe in this regard is more about about killing the player’s buzz; having a very blunt/obvious lock encountered directly after one that seems more out-of-the-way, and therefore is exciting to notice.
there are other, more positive examples in the game of what can be done to make a player return later without directly obstructing them - one that stood out to me on a replay was a purple locked door you might see high out of reach on your first route through Phendrana Drifts, without it being obvious how to actually get to the upper pathway there. then when you come back with the Space Jump, you immediately suss it out naturally (iirc it was through a crumbling side building whose interior merely registered as wall on the first visit), and you likely already picked up the Wave Beam by that point, so the lock isn’t obtrusive (but it is memorable). so the lesson there is that placing a visible, unnatural barrier behind an invisible, natural barrier sort of achieves the best of both worlds in terms of player psychology.
another great success i think are the Boost Ball half-pipes nestled innocuously into the wider level design - they don’t stand out as locks until after you’ve discovered the key, which then sparks excitement in the imagination (“what else have i missed?”). unfortunately one of them did stand out enough on my first playthrough that i spent a few moments trying to roll my way up, which tripped the game’s hint system to confirm it to me.
for the more general problem of backtracking i think it’s worth noting that it only seems a chore if you’ve failed to make environments that a player enjoys simply spending time in. this is where single player games can probably learn most from MMOs, which have to consider their spaces not just as thoroughfares but as potential hubs of activity to accommodate, and thus make it higher priority to impart a sense of tranquility or subtle liveliness within those spaces. even just including a smattering of “RPG elements” as Symphony of the Night does goes a fair way to making “idle” engagement with the gameworld seem more valid in the player’s mind, as the background simmer of numbers going up bars it from feeling completely unproductive (until of course you realise the rest of the game is now insipidly easy).
incorporating some dynamic/random activity or hidden variables i think would also encourage revisiting; it’d be especially cool for a game as encyclopaedically detailed as MP to encompass a kind of in-game bird watching where you’re never sure exactly what specimens you’ll encounter in certain locations depending on the time and conditions. despite my earlier complaint, i do think the first segment in the Chozo Ruins does a pretty incredible job of making the world feel alive and responsive in a way deeper than meets the eye, with new creatures stirring around you as you open up pathways out of the central plaza area and the music becomes more layered and involved, eventually culminating in lasting changes to the setting as a whole as you remove the source of the poisoned water. more stuff like that in environmental exploration games, please.
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This is a good description of half of why open world games have taken over much of the single-player sense. The sense of a living world is described in Ubisoft’s preferred design language as fulfilling social needs – the player desires to feel part of a group, to feel recognized. In single-player games, this is through NPCs reacting to the player and through the social space created by players talking about the game.
Player agency is the other, and more important identified feature where open-world game structures meet player needs better than linear ones. Of course, Metroid-like game structures are some of the closest 2D platformer cores get to open-world games and they should be seen as connected.
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I read this in David Attenborough’s voice. This is a good example of where they’re stepping in the right direction though.
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I think pretty often about Rudie’s (?) common complaint about search-action games, how stuff like obviously telegraphed obstacles such as double jump ledges might as well be replaced with signs saying “Fun coming soon!” or something to that effect. Reliance on obvious barriers like that takes what should be a mysterious and captivating experience into something rote, and superficial. The world thus devolves from a place to a checklist.
Stuff like the block-type icons in Super Metroid drives me kinda batty — they limit the imagination of both the players, and just strike me as an over-correction from the obtuseness of Metroid 1. I feel like the game’s visual language is strong enough as is, and that the overall changes necessary to excise that weird meta-layer from the language wouldn’t be too drastic (maybe). In fact, if that were the case I feel like the bit with the glass tube would have stuck the landing better for more people.
Anyhow, with regards to things like heated rooms, I like them in theory because they can act as a soft barriers to progress. Like, in Super Metroid it is reasonably possible (with 3 e-tanks) to make it from the heated rooms in Norfair to bubble mountain, which is an unheated room with a save point. From that point it isn’t too hard to get all the major equipment in upper Norfair, opening up a large portion of the world in the process. This genuinely feels like a possibility that was discovered and accomodated for in development, and it kind of rules.
(It’s also possible to book it through Magmoor in Prime 1 without Varia, but the margin for error is low enough that I don’t think it was intended or anticipated.)
(Also, I just want to mention that the acid in Metroid 2 fuctions this way as well, and speedruns take advantage of it. It owns.)
Now, I like these soft barriers, but I’ve played enough hacks to know that they aren’t without their issues. Being able to elegantly communicate to the player “you can go this way if you want, but if you’re having trouble you should go somewhere else” is a cursed-ly hard problem. Moreover, if a first time player accidentally breaks the standard sequence, they can end up inadvertently punishing themselves, as the unexplored traversable space rapidly balloons in size (much of it being quite dangerous (especially in a game with damage scaling as aggressive as SM’s)), and the item(s) needed to make it tolerable to explore all that new space become paradoxically harder to find.
I could ramble more but I want to post hack screenies now.
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oh yes!! my favourite moment with that game was when i missed a metroid in one area, then thought (based on the unyielding harshness of the presentation) that it actually intended for me to dive through the acid. which worked, remarkably, as long as i chose the path that led to an energy refill (i didn’t at first, but inferred that it might since the other one restocked missiles). most edge-of-my-seat experience i had with the series.
longing for a world in which ecology in videogames is developed enough that he’d take to reviewing them
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more hot metroid 1 hack screenshot action on your local forum
Screenshots
(I have no idea why the player sprite is glitched like that, but other people who’ve played this have experienced it as well.)
This happens to be the closest I’ve ever come to beating FF1.
Not too bad of a hack, but I just wish there was a bit more to it than its wonderfully absurd theming.
Corporate Craig’s HQ is a brief spoof that was just sitting on the metconst forums, ignored and unloved. It’s the kind of creation I’d expect from the old days of Zophar’s Domain, and yet it was released just last year somehow.
Evidence of the rampage
Unfortunately, due to a scrolling glitch the elevator behind Kraid is inaccessible, rendering the game uncompletable. I fixed it up in the editor, but then found the ending was unchanged (sad times) (my fixed patch has 2 downloads).
Metroid Genocide is a hack I remember playing not too long after it came out. I still had the map I made back when I played it, so I used that during my replay.
“beta” metroids…
Screenies
Brinstar has a surface-like area, which is cool even if it only uses one 16x16 tile.
This Ridley fight is kinda-clever/really-annoying because he can really easily knock you out of the room or down the pit, forcing you to re-enter the room and restart the fight.
I have a couple issues with it, but this feels like one of the better hacks of it’s era. I definitely appreciate the ambition, at least.
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currently playing through Prime 3, for the first time
dear lord am i sick of looking at this yellow vomit gel. the shooting is ok. i don’t mind the new grapple beam gimmicks, though i’m wondering if they feel any more natural with the original motion controls (i have them assigned to mouse wheel). i like the ship command element, but i’m hoping it goes on to feel like more than just a handful of scripted activation points. the cheesy sub-Marvel bootleg companion heroes are hilarious. i’m not sure if i want the plot to take itself more seriously so i can laugh at it, or less seriously so i can laugh with it
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feels like there’s a bit of art nouveau influence in the environment themes this time around. it can be very pretty in a “playing through concept art” sort of way, though i do miss the granular, designers-gone-wild insanity of Echoes:
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probably gonna port the trilogy whenever retro gets around to finishing prime 4
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i’m a big dumb idiot baby and as long as there are more ball mazes and rube goldberg contraptions to get flung around in i’ll keep playing these things no matter how “Halo-lite” they become
i feel like Portal 2 was trying to re-create a lot of the sensations these games pull off (seemingly) effortlessly. in that case Valve should’ve stuck with what they were good at; ironically i find the first one succeeds a lot more at creating an immersive, lonely, inhospitable atmosphere than any 3D Metroid
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gosh idk i just really love the super metroid soundtrack though
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What if we took the muddy, indistinct quality of the SNES soundchip and made it a strength instead of a weakness
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internet: nooo the prime sequels aren’t authentic metroid games this is a betrayal of the series integrity you can’t just turn your brain off and have fun
me: haha weaponised boost ball go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrtrlrpflrtrltrptr
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It’s been a long time since I played them but I remember liking Prime 2 the most. 1 felt like a retread of Super and somehow the artifact hunt felt better in Prime 2 idk maybe I liked returning to those environments more because of their atmosphere.
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i remember thinking Prime 2 was cool but i was also the kind of dweeb who would patiently wait for Samus’s health to refill at every light crystal so i can’t be trusted. annihilation beam looked sick as though
i remember reading guides on the prime games talking about how the dark/ice beams actually had a decent rate of fire if you timed your button presses well, and the light/plasma beams were effective against multiple targets if you eschewed lock-on and aimed manually. i never achieved these pro strats but thought about them a lot
i did think it was dumb as hell but also kind of sick (like everything in the game) that it was obviously optimal in Prime 3 to stay in phazon beam mode for too long so that it self-propagated and you got like twice as much bang for your buck at the infinitesimal risk of losing yourself to it
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