Metroid Ðread

captain

Unbeknownst2U Huh, don’t think I’ve ever met anyone categorically against first-person perspective games but all respect to you. For what it’s worth the only similarity Prime bears to those others is the perspective and not the controls or level design, though I’m sure you’ve heard or observed as much. I got into the series through the 2D entries and did avoid Prime for a while for I suppose a similar reason (despite enjoying other F-P games). I felt like Metroid just didn’t make any sense without every jump being a somersault.

I can’t tell what’s more sick—your story about getting M2 through Kool-Aid points or that Metroid Resynthesized disc!

tomjonjon

antillese

tomjonjon
“Search Action” is in the grand tradition of “Tactical Espionage Action”.

Like Tim would say: you gotta invent a new genre.

rootfifthoctave

What’s your favorite Metroid game? Why?

i think it has to be Super, for the reason i trot out every time i feel like singing its praises - “super metroid tells more of a story in a single 4×4 set of environment tiles than most video games manage over 8 hours.” what i mean by that is, so much of the environment perfectly conveys a sense of decay. you get a sense that parts of upper norfair were some kind of artificial construction long taken over by flora and fauna. there is a version of this feeling for every room in the game and few games come close to that.

What’s your favorite Metroid? Why?

samus returns does an excellent job of raising the difficulty whilst making you fight the same metroid variants over and over, and some of those fights are incredibly satisfying. but my actual favourite is probably the first one that escapes from the Aliens glass tank in Prime 1. like Resi’s first zombie, the first is the most memorable.

What is the point of making a Prime 4?

i have long held that much of the first Prime is the team falling ass-backwards over reused ideas from Super, miyamoto’s vicarious dreams of making a first-person adventure game*, and inimitable black magick. you could not pay me to replay prime 2 and 3, i think they really suck. so why make a 4th? well, i guess they can lift the Prime 1 template (just as it lifted from Super) and the gap is long enough that people won’t notice, or those that do won’t mind.

*i don’t know how accurate this is, but the story oft-repeated in nintendo magazines at the time was, retro started work on a third-person 3d metroid game but it was going badly. miyamoto had always wanted to do a first-person game and early ideas for an n64 zelda were from a first-person perspective. nintendo sends miyamoto to retro to crack whips or skulls or whatever, convinces them to switch to an FPS style game, and that’s what worked.

captain

rootfifthoctave you could not pay me to replay prime 2 and 3

Curious to hear whether you think 2 and 3 have the same problems or if your hatred for each is distinct. I always liked 1 and 2 but have little affection for 3 myself (and just replayed 2 to figure out if I still like it (I do)).

super metroid tells more of a story in a single 4×4 set of environment tiles . . .

<3 <3 <3

GigaSlime it does have some cool ideas

Agreed about the bug creatures, I wish there had been more with that (maybe requiring you to interact with it before getting the Varia suit, for example, (although that would go against Metroid’s convention of not requiring you to do anything before it’s harmless to you)). The morph ball cannon gimmick didn’t do a lot for me, but I like that you can shinespark in morph ball mode—makes those item puzzles more interesting (though again not used enough).

What I’m wondering is whether Nintendo mandated that Prime 2 and Zero Mission share certain features, like the ball cannons and the evacuation music. Zero Mission also has the war wasps (or differently-named flying bug creatures whose hives you have to destroy) from the Prime series.

treefroggy

Yoshio Sakimoto, creator of Metroid and director of Project Dread, had dreadlocks in the 70’s. (this was stated in an interview)

This was a direct inspiration for the titular 2022 game, where Samus stops brushing her hair and over the course of her mission, her dreadlocks form as the game clock counts forward (one hour = one day, as it has been since the first game). Keeping her hair from dreadlocking becomes a new incentive for speed runners, as the state of her dreaded locks is reflected in the ending animation where Samus takes off her helmet to reveal herself to the player, who may not have even known she is a woman. (a tradition since the very first game)

beets

I beat Metroid Other M for the first time tonight. The story cutscenes near the end somewhat impressed me with the sci fi themes they were going for. With some work I could see the story outline being adapted into a short low budget sci fi film which gets well received reviews. It’s a shame that right after those cutscenes it threw me into the worst boss fight of the game.

Overall I quite like this game, the gameplay has some depth with it’s dodging and strange aiming. I like the secret item system and how it works with the map, it’s always rewarding to figure out where the secret in the room. The story is ambitious and has a bit too much expository but makes up for it with an intriguing plot. A feature which I think is neat is the character menu which will tell you where characters are, what they’re doing and if they are alive or not.

GigaSlime

I played through more than half of Metroid Zero Mission last night, figured I’d play through at least the main series before Dread comes out. I’ve always kind of thought of it as this superfluous Super Metroid retread, and it is, but it does have some cool ideas. I like those annoying little bug things that can latch onto your suit that later turn out to be able to eat through those indestructible plant things. They’re the kind of creature I always like to see in Metroids, the kind that seem like they have their own animal behaviors and a life outside of what you see as an obstacle in your path.

Looking forward to giving Samus Returns another shot. I played it when it came out and I remember liking it but I got distracted and never finished for whatever reason

TheFragranceOfDarkCoffee

I have somewhat of an unusual relationship to the Metroid franchise. I grew up as a big fan of the series (I still constantly waffle on which is my favorite), and when I was in college one of my friends, though I can’t remember who, was feeling inspired by Zeldathon. For those unaware, Zeldathon is a big charity event which plays through every Zelda game for charity once a year and we had a buddy who was somewhat involved with it.

As you’ve probably now intuited, we got the idea to do the same thing with the Metroid games. So in 2015 or so a small group of about four college aged goofballs streamed through every single Metroid game from my bedroom over a weekend without sleeping. There were games we had never practiced on display and very few plans for logistics. We had people sleeping on a bed in the same room as the ongoing marathon. We raised $178 for charity and immediately decided to do it again next year, but better.

Now Metroid Marathon has held an annual event every year since then and we’ve raised over $10,000 for charity. We’ve now been going for so long that an entire new Metroid game came out (Samus Returns) and now another will come out in October. We are all, needless to say, very excited about this (Though I wonder what the heck the schedule will look like once Prime 4 comes out). We’ve actually been doing a 35th anniversary celebration lately where we stream a couple games a week in the lead up to Dread’s release, which we’ll play through it live as soon as it comes out as a little mini charity event. If you’re excited about Dread and you want to hang out with us while we play it, consider yourself invited to do so here.

All this to say; I hope that my favorite Metroid game becomes Dread. I can’t say for certain that Fusion is the best Metroid game, but it sure might be the coolest one, and I’m very excited to see how Dread carries on that Fusion style.

antillese

tomjonjon

rootfifthoctave

captain

Curious to hear whether you think 2 and 3 have the same problems or if your hatred for each is distinct. I always liked 1 and 2 but have little affection for 3 myself (and just replayed 2 to figure out if I still like it (I do)).

I haven’t played 3 recently enough to comment beyond “it’s just a pretty mediocre game from top to bottom”. but 2 i just find to be a total slog. the level and world design is bad, the environments are mostly drab and/or purple/brown, the encounter design is infuriating a lot of the time. obviously, it has okay moments and the movement i like from prime 1 is carried through for the most part, but so much of it is simply not fun that any positives are heavily outweighed. the morph ball bosses! my god! there is not a moment in that game where i wouldn’t rather be playing prime 1 (or anything else for that matter)

captain

rootfifthoctave Hmm, I suppose the consistency of 2’s drabness convinced me that the world felt “real” and “lived in” and I enjoy the aesthetic quality they achieved with that. Prime 3 on the other hand came across as sickeningly artificial—it’s been a while since I’ve played it but I recall that being the emotion (or lack of it) I felt playing it. Elysia looked pretty good, though.

The boss in my bonnet from 2 is the Alpha Blogg (charging underwater worm thing). That thing sucks!

baftaboo

I had a lot of fun with prime 2 deathmatches back in the day, especially the space station map. Midair morph ball cannon collisions, hacking your opponent’s visor, the goldeneye-esque moments where someone finds a hidden nook and you call a truce to explore what’s in there but then you don’t actually keep the truce. I don’t love the campaign though. The first two prime games both ended up feeling trudgy and bloated to me.

Creekgrin

captain

captain What’s your favorite Metroid game? Why?

It’s the boring answer, but it’s gotta be Super Metroid. From the moment the title screen boots to the text at the very, very end it does such a good job of sucking you in and immersing you. It even has “story/lore” rooms like the eye that examines you when you first land or the broken Metroid container after Ridley’s room. It’s willing to spend it’s resources on tone and setting and it’s also a really damn fun game to play on top of all that.

captain What’s your favorite Metroid? Why?

Well, I really do love the buildup and payoff of the titular one in Metroid Prime. The logs you can find detailing the energy it’s absorbing in the impact crater, the arachnid exoskeleton and gooey, phazon center… and then it menaces you for two whole games after that! Never got sick of the darn thing, but I hope it doesn’t cheat death in Prime 4.

captain What is the point of making a Prime 4?

The state of first person games, both technology and innovation-wise, is very different from 2007, the last time we had a crack at this. I think that especially with a fresh set of eyes and a big pile of money there could be something unique in this take on fps stuff. Also, a metroid prime on a controller with a real double analog setup! How about that.

captain Did anyone here get the secret message in Fusion?

Nope, got too distracted during my Fusion playthrough last week and forgot. Wish I had remembered, but I’ll survive. Hope the hints at sinister federation goals continue in this game, though. Never liked those military stiffs…

I actually quite liked Prime 2, though I mainlined it in a few sittings and didn’t go anywhere close to 100% The attitude towards exploration was a lot more manageable for me than Prime 1.

captain

Creekgrin “Boring” answer or not, it blows my brain open that a game from 1994 in an extremely popular genre still manages for many people (maybe me included) to remain the peak expression of that genre. Aesthetically, mechanically—I do think the physics are a little frustrating but at the same time they create a super high skill ceiling/wide possibility space for movement in that game.

I hope it doesn’t cheat death in Prime 4.

same . . .

The attitude towards exploration was a lot more manageable for me than Prime 1.

Is that because of the way the game is basically structured one area at a time, or do you mean something else?

rootfifthoctave

it’s weird that metroid prime and zelda: wind waker both have these late-game “retread the entire game collecting stuff that you could not possibly have gotten first time round” when really, the games would be adequate length without them. like someone at nintendo said “we paid for these worlds to be built, we need to force players to see as much of them as possible” but it mostly just annoys people.
i don’t think metroid should ever ask you to collect anything that doesn’t make samus stronger, story macguffins do not improve the metroid experience.

captain

rootfifthoctave i don’t think metroid should ever ask you to collect anything that doesn’t make samus stronger, story macguffins do not improve the metroid experience.

I agree. I do think it’s a good excuse to go back and collect some power-ups you may not have found (or had the ability to find) the first time around, but in my recent playthrough of Prime 2 I did do a bit of pointless running back-and-forth to certain areas where I was able to get power-ups but not the temple keys (or vice versa), which made it a bit frustrating. For Wind Waker I do feel it’s a more frustrating exercise. The Triforce hunt also takes super long, doesn’t it? I don’t think the artifact/temple key hunts take more than an hour or two.

Creekgrin

captain

captain Is that because of the way the game is basically structured one area at a time, or do you mean something else?

Metroid Prime 1, while being an overall great game, has a nasty habit of forcing you through boring choke points that don’t change much over the course of the game. I’m mainly thinking of Magmoor Caverns but there are other spots as well. Because you’re constantly switching things up between light and dark worlds nothing quite felt that way in Prime 2

Hey, while everyone’s here I’ve got another survey question- What’s your favorite version of Ridley? I think this is another area where the prime games excel- the big luminescent wings casting shadows over different areas on Tallon IV…

rootfifthoctave

i’m quite partial to the half-built mecha ridley from the end of zero mission. it looks really stupid and goofy, which is funny, and it gets stronger when you collect 100% of items. on low% or hard mode 100% that fight can be a real pain!

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