they are pretty awkward and arbitrary, but i don’t remember any of them taking too long, and they accomplish the positive residual effect of making you suspect any room could be crawling with offscreen secrets. maybe I’m cutting fusion slack here just because that was an element that took me out of super metroid, which seemed to be trying to sell its world as something much less artificial, but still went and cluttered it up all these obvious codified videogame objects. fusion never lied to me goddamnit, it wore its bullshit proudly on its sleeve
ahem
reminds me, one underrated aspect of the first game (quite possibly a product of memory limitations rather than intentional design) is the way several rooms in each region would have bombable patches of wall in the same places, even if it didn’t lead to a full passage. for one thing it was a timesaver, since you’d only have to “bomb everywhere” once, but it also fit right into the sense of scientific curiosity - you were discovering these hidden rules and regularities underlying the world as it appeared, akin perhaps to a geologist studying structural properties of the earth’s minerals