The best possible iteration, still, imo
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It always looked like in that first game that Retro was trying to honor the Nintendo Power interpretation of things
Normal looking human, matted, kind of sweaty hair. The best.
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I feel a bit bad putting all the⌠letâs say philosophical issues on Mercury Stream as I know they pitched a gameplay demo to Nintendo years back for Metroid and got rejected. While it is possible that it was for a Metroid II remake, I could just as easily see Nintendo getting back to them a year or two later and saying they could make it, but only as a Metroid II remake. If the latter is the case I could see how they ended up with a game that only pays the lightest of lip service to the original.
Not that like, you know, that really fixes anything.
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Well
I think itâs because maybe the kind of game we want is kind of impossible for a franchise like Metroid now? I mean - there was clamoring for years between Super Metroid and Metroid Prime for when Nintendo was going to make a new Metroid game. By all accounts, Metroid Prime ended up kind of delivering all the marks that players and the press wanted at the time.
Metroid: Samus Returns has pretty decent reviews on Metacritic and is being responded to fondly. It may just be that the average player and the games press wants A Metroid game with a cool lady with a powersuit almost completely divorced from anything else.
The fact that this game is pretty popular is maybe a reflection on what people are looking for now versus what we want them to be looking for.
It was mentioned upthread but I donât want it to get lost: anyone who wants more of the mood of Metroid II would be well-served to check out Rain World. It got exactly the response a game in conversation with Metroid II should get; hostility and secret cultish love for its lonely, hateful, squirreled-up world.
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And please try out Rogue Dawn, which I linked above. Ambiguous spatial possibilities, thanks to the black backdrop, fauna which simply exist in the world, knobby alien topography, really good minimal pixel art, not a big production. Itâs not a replacement for or mood-equivalent to Metroid 2, but it has more to offer than this remake.
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absolutely my canon samus
I totally agree with this. Your hypothetical account of events (where Nintendo was impressed by their demo, and then told them to do a M2 remake), seems very likely to me, based on, yâknow, How Nintendo Is. Perhaps they thought âhmmm, we donât want to entrust the Next Big Metroid Game to this random studio, so how bout we just make them to a low key remake of a game most of our fans donât like anyway?â If this is the case (not that weâre likely to find out), then I definitely give Mercury Steam credit for doing a really good jobâphilosophy aside, the game is fun as hell and looks fantastic.
Her Other M haircut is so cute :cccc
How is anything journalists write about this game real
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Does that literally say,
âPart of Metroid II is part of Metroidâs overarching story. You can play Metroid II.â
?
I canât parse it in a way that means anything.
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Yes. But also, you couldnât experience it âfirst-handâ before SR.
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so glad that Nintendo decided to make this remake after that accidental FBI crackdown a while back destroyed all copies of the original
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the more i think about it,which still isnât much, the more I am okay with weirdo point-missers Mercury Steam continuing to make nice=looking, decent-playing sequels and remakes that somehow surgically extract and discard the core distinguishing elements of the original franchises. Most of the âclassicâ platformers are dead/dying/dessicated at this point.
Give them 100 more people and $10,000,000 and let them make 2.5d jump-and-whomps forever: mega man, ninja gaiden, contra, metal slug, goops and glorps, klonoa, hammerin harry, commander keen, earthworm jim, claw, lady sia, abuse, genocide, word rescue, pickle wars, little ralph, blade kitten, return of the ninja, kirby, blackthorne, rayman, mohawk & headphone jack, froggato, devil busters, castlevania, popful mail, sexy hiking, megamari, realms of chaos, valis, drill dozerâŚwhatever. just go for it.
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I was on board until you let them have Drill Dozer
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 âbestâ ending. Ended up with a 3:36 with 34.7%. Iâve now lent the cart to my brother (I guess in return for him lending me BotW), so I might as well effortpost since Iâm 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 didnât 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 doesnât 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 âaeionâ 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 â but I donât 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 ââloreââ. Thereâs even a special gallery of pictures thatâs gated by your completion percentage, and even though it appears to show a story it doesnât have any text associated with it. Considering some of the other nonsense the game does, thatâs 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 Iâm 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 doesnât. Iâd 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 originalâs recharge stations. I donât 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 playerâs ongoing ecological destruction. Itâs great.
- The bats everywhere are the worst. the worst
Iâm sitting on the fence as to whether Iâd trust these guys with a follow-up.
If you need me, Iâll be hacking the original game because Iâm an idiot.
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Mark Brown gets it.
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