T O U R O F I T A L Y (Super Metroid hack)

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THIS HACK HAS BEEN VETTED BY A CERTIFIED ITALIAN CULTURAL CONSULTANT

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Hello, Yoshio Sakamoto and Kensuke Tanabe. This is my pitch for Metroid 4.5. Please review it carefully.

This is my first Super Metroid hack. I spent the last two months making this for a hacking contest. While I have a fair amount of self-criticism regarding the project, I think the end result turned out pretty well. The design is fairly open ended, but should also cater to players of all skill levels.

There are a few finishing touches that I want to give this at a later date, mostly in terms non-gameplay polish, but as-is it a fully complete game from start to finish.

Now available on Metroid Construction:

Forum link

There are also at least 10 other hacks that got submitted to this contest.

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Tell me more about the Italian aspect

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It’s really stupid that’s what it is.

The setting is a space station (per the contest rules) owned and operated by the Italian Space Agency. It made Neapolitan ice cream (the variant that’s more Italian flag colored).

Some of the item names are changed, based on some suggestions from my Italian friend (also some of the items are new).

There are inclined elevators (these were an incredible pain to code and responsible for some bugs the crept in hours before the deadline).

I was going to have a custom soundtrack, but that’s gonna wait until the post-contest version.

There were also gonna be multiple data logs left behind by station personnel, but those got cut to meet the deadline as well.

The final boss is incredibly stupid, and let’s just say you get to kill two birds with one stone there.

(The other half of this hack is that the name is a riff on V I T A L I T Y that someone in the community had been making in streams as a joke for some time, though in aesthetic and execution it has almost nothing in common, except for the part that is a direct parody.)

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I never played more than an hour or two of Super Metroid. Would it be funny if I played this to completion instead?

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I think it would be funny.

I mean, based on my testers this hack is less than two hours long, so it’s not like it’d be a big commitment anyway…

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wall jumps necessary?

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none whatsoever

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It’s official:

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With 3 5/5 orb reviews, Tour of Italy is now the highest rated hack of MetConst. Play it today!

(obviously this isn’t going to last very long, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling unreasonably chuffed rn)

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the wall climbing tool is very fun and novel. reminds me of a pizza cutter

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tfw your community is galactic u_u

Super Metroid (Japan, USA) (En,Ja)-0000

is there life on marsios?

might try to get this on the CRT set up later (my time for v-game lately has been next to nil but TOI is top of the playlist) all the secrets/upgrades so far have been ^___^ would you believe you’re my first metroid hack @RT-55J ? :it:

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aw shucks :3c

sorry to be your introduction into this world of hurt

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hell yeah

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This is an extremely funny answer having played the hack.

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i’m stuck! i only have pistachio beam and espresso ball and i feel like i’ve explored every area (like p v & c) twice over now. it may not have helped that i’ve walljumped to a bunch of places (bc i did not read this thread before playing) which has made my search area bigger than it should be? i’ve unlocked at least 3 gates that required walljumping.

i seem to be gated by the following:

  • orange door in p
  • doors with buttons on inaccessible sides in c
  • large vertical climbs that cannot be walljumped for geometry or water or spike reasons in v & c

any ideas on what i’m missing?

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i figured it out –

in the pistachio → vanilla connection area there’s a non-falling bridge followed by a bridge that you can fall through. both times i was there i tried to espresso ball over it but i guess i didn’t give myself enough of a running start and fell through it instantly. me being mistaken about the mechanics + there being a really big punishment for failing here (you have to go around a really long way) convinced me this was inaccessible.

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FWIW, this hack is designed to be quite non-linear. Most obstacles have multiple solutions (more so of you’re doing any advanced tech), and items found in one area tend to have uses in other areas. What you did there, for instance, was one of three intended non-advanced solutions to get that item (depending on whether you got a particular major from P, V, or C first).

I will admit that, having seen several people play through this, that in some cases progression ended up being more effectively hidden than I anticipated. The hiddenness is somewhat intentional, partly as a means of goading expert players into doing stupid stuff (especially in C), though I might increase the level of hinting in one or two places in a future update.

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yesterday I watched a friend stream the hack, and he came to the exact same conclusion as you with regards to progression, up to and including thinking that bridge crossing was required and complaining about the terrible loop back up. he even thought that the whole open setup with the three sectors was “bait” (empathically, it is not)

i haven’t been keeping track of any solid numbers, but i feel like somewhere between 30-40% of players run into your problem of exploring all 3 areas and not finding any major progression items. while i don’t necessarily mind having players getting lost, i do think this indicates some degree of failure on my part in communicating my design intent, both in terms of the overall structure of the hack and the general need to observe the environment for hidden paths. (perhaps the solution here would be a slight rework of the opening 3 rooms)

at this point i have no desire to make any major changes to the structure of the hack, but i do have some ideas with regards to smoothing out a couple common pain points (particularly, people missing the visual cues that lead to the ice beam and high jump boots)

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anyhow, this is all to say that y’all should finish playing my hack so you can watch this astonishingly-quickly produced TAS of it:

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all-items TAS (includes the secret rooms):

also, my buddy ambureon just added a detailed map of the hack to their site

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so, this was a contest hack, which implies some sort of selection process for the contest winner.

now, a lot of Metroid Sickos these days don’t know how to do anything else besides play in an endless procession of randomizer tournaments, eat hot chip, and lie. this includes the admins ostensibly running the contest.

per the rules of the contest, the winner was to be decided via a tournament bracket.

3 weeks after the end of the contest, a seeding vote was finally held to determine initial placements on the bracket (an understandable delay given that they wanted people to play the hacks first)

one month after voting closed for the seeding vote, they finally announced the tournament proper

voting would take place live

on twitch

in a single day hour

i had to make a post begging the admin for the actual time of the stream to get him to actually pick a time (less than 24 hours before the stream, mind you):

hey MST-chan!! MST-chan!!! :flap: do we know yet when the voting stream is gonna start on saturday!?!?

(i only mention this post because ppl wanted me to make fanart of MST-chan so i drew some, and don’t want that picture to go to waste as a Discord Exclusive)

the voting stream felt very much like “guy just wants to get over this as quickly as possible.” i’m still not sure how i feel about this as a voting format (given turnout, time zones, etc.), but it was fun at least

anyhow, given the fact that i’m posting about this in this thread rather than the general metroid thread, you can guess how things went:

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:3c

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never forget :pinched_fingers:

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