I just saw this on the wikipedia page, I didn’t know the prime games were considered part of the main series. Also has anyone played Federation Force?
@beets I have played Federation Force! It feels like it has nothing to do with Metroid at all, and like it was developed with multiplayer in mind. As far as 3DS action-shooters go, I liked E.X. Troopers more.
@beets Oh yeah, Metroid Zero Mission actually adds some stuff to the story to connect it a little more to Prime. It’s why the new final boss is a big Ridley robot - it’s supposed to be a prototype Meta Ridley
EDIT: Actually, I just checked a wiki and that’s sort of up in the air. But it’s how I interpreted it when I played it, lol
This didn’t really occur to me! At least in the way you’re describing it. I agree you’re totally right about the way those games emulate 2’s hostility in a mechanical sense, and when I was comparing Prime to Prime 2 in the other thread I completely forgot 4 and 2 have that same critical path structure. My comment about 1 & 2’s designs not being felt in later games I guess referred to just the conditions under which they were produced, i.e. they were aesthetically restricted/defined by the low-powered tech of the time and weren’t drawing from mechanical/semantic conventions of the series (given that they invented those conventions). For lack of a better way to describe it I basically mean you don’t “feel the budget” in 4 or Prime 2—both incredibly smooth and easy-to-swallow aesthetic objects—in the same way you do with Metroid 1 and 2, which I feel is where a good deal of that sense of alien hostility in the latter comes from: sparse and dissonant music, monochrome graphics and repetitive tiles, Samus needing to take up an amazing amount of screen real estate in order to be visually comprehensible (making the game feel more claustrophobic; the frame in Fusion and Zero Mission is too distant I think to replicate this sensation).† These elements couldn’t reasonably be recreated for later games because the games are products, they need to sell, they need to “look good,” yadda yadda. Bit of a loaded statement here but making a Metroid game which feels like Metroid 2 would be unthinkable today without the excuse of technical limitations to make it happen. 4 does some of the dissonant music stuff, which is cool. Portions of Metroid 2 are just totally silent!
. . . . by which I really mean to say my earlier comment about the “design philosophies” of M2 not being carried forward was the wrong way to phrase it and a load of bull; I was making more of an aesthetic observation
†guess this answers my question about why even modern Metroid-likes wouldn’t want to zoom the camera out too much
I had not noticed this at all, excellent point!
I should read that essay you and treefroggy shared and educate myself . . .
That’s is a fairly odd perspective; I have hardly done any more than tool around in a Metroid for a somewhat insignificant amount of time. For me, this is an excellent opportunity to hop on the train while it’s at a station. For example, it’s much easier for me to pop open a Zelda 1 or 2 after playing so many newer entries, and I’ve never had that moment for Metroid
@dylanfills I personally don’t think that Metroid [1] has aged very well. Even Metroid 2 is more playable and had learned from several years of game design progress.
@dylanfills Sorry, I didn’t mean for that to sound so pessimistic or dismissive of people looking forward to it. It was just part of my general questioning of what makes Metroid what it is: besides the Nemesis/SA-X style robot in Dread I have no idea what they’ll do in a new game, and Samus Returns and AM2R both relied so heavily on repurposing older mechanics and aesthetics (in ways that don’t even have anything to do with being a remake of an older game) that I find myself really hoping Dread has more of its own identity (speaking as a longtime series adherent).
@captain I cannot fault your pessimism. I did not have high hopes for Breath of the Wild, of all things, after Skyward Sword
I guess it’s probably not my favorite game in the series but the one I always think back the most fondly on is Samus Returns for the Game Boy. I had a mom that was notorious for clipping coupons etc and for some reason she always saved the Kool-Aid points off the packets we used while I was growing up. Since we never really used them for anything, when Kool-Aid did team up w/ Nintendo to give away Samus Returns for Kool-Aid points, I had more than enough to turn around and send in for it on the spot. As a kid that rarely got to “own” his own games, it was nice to have another addition to my limited Gameboy library.
I’d have to go with the baby at the end of Metroid 2. I remember really freaking out the first time it hatched at the end and thinking I’d have to fight another boss. It was a really interesting moment from a gaming perspective for me and felt like an appropriate surprise since Samus’ gender was already known by that point.
I’m firmly in the camp of “The Prime Series is Not for Me” as I never bothered with any of the Prime games, which can simply be boiled down to having never felt engaged enough to want to actually try to learn to play a FPS style game. (Wolfenstein? Doom? Half Life? Quake? Portal? Nope to all of these) I’ve watched friends play bits an pieces of Prime but also don’t feel like I’m missing anything by not engaging with them either.
But don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they exist and I’m glad people enjoy them and they’ve done well. I’ll just always have that chip on the shoulder that I’d have preferred the resources go to making the 2D style versions instead.
I don’t recall the secret message from Fusion but I also haven’t played it since launch. I’m guessing I probably didn’t on my run as it does seem a little too technical for me. Cool that it’s there though!
As far as music goes, I’m sure this has already been posted in some music list but this is the sound of Metroid for me.
@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
“Search Action” is in the grand tradition of “Tactical Espionage Action”.
Like Tim would say: you gotta invent a new genre.
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 4x4 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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.
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)).
<3 <3 <3
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.