This past week I finished a 100% playthrough of this, and then decided to try and see if I could beat it under 4 hours to get the ‘best’ ending. Ended up with a 3:36 with 34.7%. I’ve now lent the cart to my brother (I guess in return for him lending me BotW), so I might as well effortpost since I’m done with the game for now (some slightly more positive comments to go with what Spiffl said earlier).
Playing through it again gave me a better appreciation for the new power ups. Best in show is the Lightning Armor. Originally I just used in situations where it was clearly telegraphed (evil vines, etc.) or as a makeshift reserve tank. Once I started going for speed, I noticed a bunch of other semi-obvious uses for it, like running through those stupid flamethrowers. Another feature I didn’t discover until later on was how it greatly increased the range of your swipe. This makes it the most efficient way to deal with swarms of bugs for most of the game. It also makes the ice beam->swipe combo much easier to pull off. (Countering doesn’t do anything but stagger enemies minding their own business, but it one-shots frozen enemies. Also, the freeze-time of enemies is proportional to your charge-time. Do the math.)
Your magic aeiouandsometimesyn “aeion” abilities are stackable, so you could in theory run around in slow time with your shield on and machine gun in tow while pulling off a scan pulse – but I don’t know why you would ever do that since the scanner was practically useless to me.
Speaking of scanning, the game is mercifully bereft of written ‘‘lore’’. There’s even a special gallery of pictures that’s gated by your completion percentage, and even though it appears to show a story it doesn’t have any text associated with it. Considering some of the other nonsense the game does, that’s some rather remarkable restraint.
Other random things I want to sputter about but can't coherently connect together because my brain is in idiot-go-to-sleep-mode right now:
- The default level of zoom that the game has makes the viewport about 13 blocks wide by 8 blocks tall (give or take a block since I’m bad at counting). This is roughly the same scale as the original. Some rooms are fitted to this viewport, making them more claustrophobic than the original. Other rooms were made multiple blocks wide/tall to match the feeling of vastness in the original.
- The game has you pass through an acid room before fighting the first metroid, but the original doesn’t. I’d classify this as a definite improvement.
- Ammo and energy recharge stations are these things that you have to stand at and play a long cutscene, but MP refill stations are just orbs lying on the ground like the original’s recharge stations. I don’t get it.
- Damage done by any continuous damage source (acid, lava, evil vines, etc) is relatively painless at first, but quickly ramps up after a few seconds to be dangerous even with loads of e-tanks. (I recall a SM hack doing something like this.) This unfortunately makes it less likely for acid-diving hijinx to be a thing (unlike the original).
- The way that they designed the various types of doors made it much easier for my partially-colorblind self to distinguish between them than compared to before. On the other hand, the various kinds of blocks have never been easier for me to mix up. Whoopsie.
- Some of the coolest looking creatures are giant monsters just milling around in the background, unconcerned or unaware of the player’s ongoing ecological destruction. It’s great.
- The bats everywhere are the worst. the worst
I’m sitting on the fence as to whether I’d trust these guys with a follow-up.
If you need me, I’ll be hacking the original game because I’m an idiot.