@artee which metroid is this ???
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oh, that must be from a leaked PC build of “Project Valkyrie”, back when it was going to be a Wii U game but Next Level Games still didn’t have a devkit :]
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I forget if I posted anything about the MetConst Ocean Ruins Contest here, but I think it went pretty well. Voting still hasn’t happened, but after two months I’ve finally gotten around to playing all of the entries (pretty crucial, as someone on this contest’s committee). I had a good time with all of them, though your experience might vary depending on your tolerance for water physics and oxygen meters (perhaps we should pick a different theme for the next contest).
In total we had 7 hacks (the historical average is around 4 or 5):
| Game | Hack | Author | O2 | IGT | RTA | Item% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SM | Riptide Palace | nodever2 | No | 0:34 | 0:40 | 19%* |
| ZM | DIVE | LTF | No | 1:05 | 1:30 | 92% |
| SM | Weekend 7 | dewhi | No | 0:21 | 0:30 | 16%* |
| SM | Subnautroid | Tundain | Yes | 2:27 | 3:05 | 94.0% |
| SM | Houston Goes Swimming | OmegaDragnet | No | 0:41 | 1:00 | 88.2% |
| SM | Subterranean | Croakomire | Yes | 2:47 | 5:40 | 79% |
| SM | dogtroid | RT-55J | Yes | - | - | - |
*Item percentage appears to be calculated incorrectly.
Impressions based on the order I played them in:
Riptide Palace by nodever2
Perhaps out of a sense of pragmaticism, this goes for a sort of 8-bit feel. Graphics are primarily from Zelda 2 and the Little Mermaid. It has custom music from classics such as Zelda 2, Link’s Awakening DX, and, uh, Deltarune Chapter 5. Also, there’s no map and walljumping is disabled entirely. To make up for that, the world in this is actually pretty small, and it introduces a fun new movement item pretty quickly. The first room sets the expectation that this will be a bomb-n-shoot everywhere kind of deal, but the game also forces you to be judicious with your bombs because they’re consumable.
Pretty solid design all around. The small scope works in its favor. Feels pretty recommendable.
DIVE by LTF
Samus gets sent to this planet because there have been “irregular flooding patterns” there and also Ridley’s there. Mechanically, this manifests in a bunch of switches that change the water level when you shoot them. Thankfully (or not if you’re a sicko), the water level changes are only local to individual rooms and reset when you enter them. The hack makes pretty good use of this gimmick (and a couple other water-related ones).
The scope is larger than I would have expected from a contest hack. For the first part of the hack I found progression to be fairly straightforward, although by the time I got to the undersea palace area finding progress became a bit more difficult, for better or worse.
I tend to not have a lot to say about Zero Mission hacks, but I thought this was pretty good.
Super Metroid Weekend 7 by dewhi
dewhi wanted to collab with somebody, but the collab fell apart so he made this little thing instead. As you can infer from the title, this hack was made during a weekend, and this is the 7th time he’s done this.
dewhi’s Weekend hack series tends to have a bunch of relatively simple rooms with economical tiling arranged. They tend to be arranged in a navigable but slightly confounding manner. Usually there’s some baffling thing that will leave you scratching your head, and some gimmick or tweak that feels more high-effort than you’d expect from the timeframe.
Anyhow, this is a pretty decent One of These. There is at least one moment in this that would stand out even in a higher-effort production.
dewhi describes this as “an ocean of the soul” (whatever that means). There is some water in this, but given that you start with the gravity suit it’s entirely irrelevant (lol). I don’t really get any “ruins” vibes from this, but music selection does a lot of heavy lifting at making this feel like a place.
Kinda insubstantial, but not worth not playing, if you catch my drift (pretend that’s a water pun).
Subnautroid by Tundain
Tundain is a stunningly prolific hacking polymath. He has a good handle on all of the game’s major systems, is very efficient at working with them, and it able to pump out hacks at an astounding rate. This is his third release this year, and yet somehow it manages to have a bunch of custom stuff that puts the rest of the entries here to shame (some of which I’d rather not spoil).
I can tell this wears its Subnautica influence on its sleeve, but I’m not familiar enough with it to tell how deep it goes.
This is one of three hacks with an oxygen meter. (None of us shared any code with each other.) It has the usual oxygen tanks you can collect. There are little air bubbles you can collect to refill a small amount that can drop from nearly any enemy. And if you run out of oxygen your health starts draining pretty quick. It’s kinda annoying early on, but once you get past the early-game hump it’s a lot more manageable.
Some of the platforming is trickier than any of the above hacks, but I’ve been informed that a lot of the jank has been reduced compared to the version I played. I’m not sure how to recommend this, but imho it’s the most impressive hack the contest has to offer.
Houston Goes Swimming by OmegaDragnet
This is the author’s second hack starring everybody’s favorite Nintendo Power Metroid OC, Armstrong Houston. You can tell you’re playing as him because when you die your sprite is topless and has short hair. (For some reason there’s some strange woman after the credits tho.)
As for the hack itself, I liked it. OmegaDragnet’s hacks tend to go for simpler room geometry than most, but they end up being quite playable and polished. This hack doesn’t have any particularly stand-out gimmicks, but it’s nonetheless well-made. It also provides more routing options than it appears at first glance too.
Currently, the hack is half-finished, but it still provides a reasonably fun experience with a defined endpoint.
Subterranean by Croakomire
also known as OhNoACroakHack.IPS (his name, not mine)
what a hack
I was dreading this one. Real croak-heads know the feeling.
The fact that my real-world time finishing this hack was over twice as long as my in-game time should tell you a lot about this hack already. And even just going by the in-game time this was the longest hack of the bunch.
but, man, what a hack
It turns out that, like Samus Wants Robot before it, I enjoyed this much more than the median player. (It is impossible to recommend.)
In terms of tech skill, this honestly doesn’t ask for much. If you’re comfortable with underwater movement, can mid-air morph, and can crouch jump, I think you technically have all the skills needed to beat this.
The real difficulty with this hack comes from the oxygen mechanic. Unlike the other hacks with O2 meters, this doesn’t provide any free-floating bubbles you can farm or anything like that. Oxygen can only be replenished (a) at the ship, (b) at specialized refill stations (which don’t save), and (c) at save stations (which only give a pittance). It’s tempting to be too greedy and dive too deeply, but without a proper game plan you’ll be a dead woman swimming for an uncomfortable amount of time.
One interesting quirk with the oxygen system is that you only have a concrete number for your remaining air when all your tanks are empty and you’re just breathing your final 99 pips of it. When you have more than that, it just tells you that you have 99 plus some squares that only provide half a tank worth of granularity. It’s odd, but I really like what it does to the psychology of exploring.
Another wrinkle to this hack is the pressure system. There is a depth meter that tells you how far below the surface you are. At certain intervals as you go deeper, the pressure (p) increases by an increment, causing your jumps to become weaker (somehow). While this works the opposite of how I would expect, it adds yet another reason to fear exploring the deep.
Some of the level design is questionable (I’m looking at one dark maze in particular >:[ ), and the runbacks can be tiresome, but I admire just how much the hack is committed to its concept and its odd little world. This is one that I respect more the more I think about it.
BONUS MATH QUESTION: According to this hack, 1 screen (256 pixels) is 0.1 kilometers in height. Samus is 42 pixels tall. How tall is Samus?
dogtroid by me
i made this you can play it play it now
Closing Thoughts
Rather than giving a ranking of these hacks in terms of pithy things like “quality” or “recommendability”, here’s my ranking in terms of how much they activate my cartographer’s itch:
- Subterranean
- Riptide Palace
- Subnautroid
- Weekend 7
- DIVE
- Houston Goes Swimming
the end
9 Likes
Ravenous
japanese site is up with some small lore tidbits if ur into that sort of junk:
the helmeted baddies are called スペースニンジャ (Space Ninjas) lmao (i demand royalties)
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not feeling as much identity as i did from the dread trailer
yes im into vore samus thanks for asking what do you mean you didnt ask
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Wow this dogtroid romhack was pretty swell. For being a romhack about a dog pokemon trying to make a burger it was more coherent than 4 Heroes of The Land.
Extremely impressive work. I was never annoyed!
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glad you liked it!
oops i mapped like a whole quarter of this while on VC with a friend last night
(i love games that are impossible to stop thinking about and impossible to recommend)
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I wonder what it is about the suit design but I prefer Samus’s Dread look much more than the new Ravenous design
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that got rid of most of the detailing on the lower half of her suit. not even her butt was spared
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if you want to learn how to use a bizarre level editor and contribute, here is the project:
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some rooms from memory:
as i struggle to figure out why my tilework doesn’t match my memories of the original, i embellish things slightly in other ways to compensate
(also, if i find my memories are conflicting, i think it’s more interesting to combine them in an artistically interesting way, rather than picking one or the other)
10 Likes