if you want to skip the health grinding:
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yeah grinding for health is the worst part of the game and i wouldn’t say you’re missing anything important by cutting it out. i mean maybe they were afraid of making the player too overpowered if they started with full energy tanks (i can respect that next to the attitude of modern games!) but i could have at least gone for keeping 30% of your total
i like that metroid 1 is the only game that saves items after dying. feels more like a bleak dungeon crawl that way, encouraging one-way trips into the unknown.
yep. i didn’t go in with high expectations, was mainly curious to see what people were doing with the game. it just reminded me how baffling i’ve found the complaints by SM veterans that a new game would deny the sequence breaking techniques of the previous one, as if there’d be any novelty to using those abilities in a game in which the designers have been aware of them from the start. they did end up getting their wish in zero mission, where the “sequence break” is just another sequence, only one built upon absurdly videogamey abstractions that obliterate any suspension of disbelief. i guess this just appeals to a sense of elitism? “i know something the casual player doesn’t know.” and somehow, i only feel more confined and anticipated in that game than in any other in the series. once again gamers ruin games >:(
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It was fun making disjointed mental maps and trying to spot the different permutations, but I’m going to start drawing it out now. I can’t find my way back to Ridley after getting the Varia lol
Noticing the transition between different area types has been helpful, I like those hallways which turn out to be vertical areas, there’s some inviting negative spaces that remind me of Wario Land 2.
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The health grind is better after getting the screw attack. Twofold after finding the Varia.
I remember seeing some bushes on the walls and thinking it would be cool if some of the dead ends and empty loops were populated with flora you could blast for guaranteed health. I feel it would pair well with the low health respawn as another incentive to explore and map. I still really like the idea of these useless areas existing though.
Thanks, I appreciate this. I’m playing on the switch because it’s the only thing I can really play anything on. I have a raspberry, but no monitor atm. I would like to check out hacks eventually, some of them look pretty cool.
the useless area in upper east kraid is so hilarious
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With regards to the lack of single-wall-jumping and infinite-bomb-jumping in Fusion, I feel like part of the problem people hack is that the wall-jumping and bomb-jumping that do exist in Fusion feels vestigial and perfunctory. They are included just because That’s What the Previous Game Did, but they were stripped of their utility to the point where I’m not sure why they were included.
With regards to Zero Mission, I definitely do remember a lot of speedrunners back in the day complaining about how non-naturalistic the game’s sequence breaking was compared to SM’s. I mean, they appreciated the routing options the shortcuts provided, but they felt very much shallowly pandered to.
I think a big issue with Zero Mission is that it’s just an unambitious game thrown together in ~14 months. It was just a fun chance for them to mess around with existing tech and design concepts, and is largely uninterested in pondering what it could mean for a Metroid game to be a Metroid game (the reason I’m so drawn to hacks and fangames is that they tend to be made by people who spend inordinate amounts of time pondering this question, often to bewildering conclusions). It is simply content to crib ideas from Super Metroid, except with a cheerful disregard for elegance and overall coherence. The stealth section feels tacked on the same way the speedbooster puzzles feel tacked on the same way the sequence breaking feels tacked on the same way the clauses of this sentence feel tacked on.
In a certain way, I can appreciate just how uninterested it is in being a landmark game.
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what’s that metroid (nes) hack with the good graphics where you play as evil samus
Rogue Dawn?
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i am posting the words
Super Metroid Vitality Digital_Mantra DMantra
in reply to this post because currently searching for “vitality” doesn’t bring up this post about it but it does seem like a very cool hack
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oh, i can’t believe i didn’t used the non-stylized version of the hack’s name in my post lol
lemme fix that…
(plz post your thoughts when you play it)
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the hand on the hip while going up an elevator is a nice touch, can’t remember if other metroid games have had a special sprite for that kinda thing before
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I gotta say, that’s quite the improvement compared to where the project was a decade ago:
I saw the announcement for that new demo a couple days ago and thought it was an april fools joke lol
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I think that was in fusion.
Also kotaku reported on this so get it before it’s nuked.
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in random not-news, apparently nintendo filed patents for two bosses from zero mission back in 2005
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20050170888A1/
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20050176503/
look at these beautiful illustrations:
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what is this baloney
[0018]
In one aspect, the game apparatus further comprises a game field generation means for generating a game field for playing a shooting game in which at least the player character and the non-player character are displayed, and for displaying the same on the display means. The game field generation means ( 40 , 70 ) generates at least a first area ( 108 ) where the player character is continuously damaged and a second area where the player character is never damaged in the game field. When a position contained in the first area is stored in the player character position storage means in the case where the target is in the effective state, the target state control means switches the target to the ineffective state. Accordingly, since the target is switched to the ineffective state when the player character is positioned in the first area of the game field and is continuously damaged, the player can concentrate on moving from the first area. This makes it possible to offer the player the original fun of shooting the target without causing him to unnecessarily feel restless or suffer from an obsession.
[0019]
In one embodiment, after switching the target into the ineffective state, the target state control means holds the target in the ineffective state until a position contained in the second area is stored in the player character position storage means, that is, until the player character relocates to a place where it never receives any damage. In consequence, since an attack never enters into the effective state until the player character moves to a place where it is never damaged, the player can feel safe to focus on moving from such a place as he continues to receive damage. It is therefore possible to provide the player with the primary fun of shooting the target without forcing him to get irritated or obsessed unnecessarily.
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I guess that’s just saying that mother brain closes her eye if the player drops in the lava (and keeps it closed until the player gets out) to prevent the player from adopting the degenerate strategy of sniping her from the acid.
I wonder if that’s how it actually works in the game.
(tbqh I can’t imagine these patents ever being enforced)
I’m just trying to imagine how many steps away from a designer prototyping out a fight is to it getting written in this language…and how well the lawyer writing this even understands what the game is doing or why.
It’s the perversity of trying to ‘capture value’ by people who don’t understand the value or how they could even begin to implement or exploit it in the first place
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thinking about the hack Metroid Mission Rescue, which might very well be the single largest metroidvania ever made. 8 areas (each with 3 sub-areas), 699 rooms, and somewhere between 4000-6000 screens (i ain’t gonna count it) all stuffed into 6 megabytes of cartridge space. just look at this map and despair:
while the author figured out how stuff more rooms into the game by converting the rom format to ExLoRom (whatever that means), they didn’t figure out how to expand the enemy data beyond the single bank it was situated in the vanilla game, resulting in this very big assemblage of very big rooms being very empty
backgrounds and foregrounds that are indistinguishable from each other, a bajillion different new door types, a 99 minute escape timer, text awkwardly pixeled into the maps themselves, and all other sorts of dizzying design and aesthetic choices thinly spread over the largest slice of white bread there ever was
just an amazing, colossal, terrifying piece of outsider art
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