i think playing nes/fds metriod with cheats on is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. heck, it’s still harder than zero mission with infinite everything!
The very first Metroid, easily. It’s the first video game that scared me. I was around six years old and staying at a Lebanese friend’s home for my first sleepover. His entire extended family of well-off Beiruti were refugees from the War stuck in a gigantic house in the center of Paris. There was a constant musk of olive oil and hummus inside the house, and a weird atmosphere of mediterranean warmth weighted down by unspoken social malaise, that a child can intuitively perceive yet not intellectually explain.
My friend was about my age but way smarter and slightly more mature, possibly due to his circumstances. In any case, he was much better than me at video games and had just received Metroid as a gift from his father’s latest business trip.
Imagine playing Dead Space for the first time? That’s the tension I felt watching my friend play Metroid. It was a few months before I discovered Zelda and, with it, the concept of games being a source of mystery and adventure rather than a straightforward challenge like all the arcade-type experiences I had been exposed to until then.
The idea of being lost in a dark and seemingly endless maze filled with alien monsters was both fascinating and horrifying. The music was hypnotizing and probably the best game soundtrack I had heard so far. My friend played it for about six hours straight in front of me and went pretty far for a first try by a six years old, in retrospect. I could not sleep that night, probably due to the stress of a first night sleeping in an unknown bedroom and, as the street lights would periodically cast terrifying shadows on the ceiling, my wide open eyes kept thinking back about the corridors of Metroid. I received a NES and my own copy of the game a few years later.
I completely missed the release of Super Metroid. Never felt that big of a deal around me during its original 1994 release, to be honest, surrounded as it was by trendier RPGs, fighting games and early 3D experiences. I rediscovered the game around 1998, together with GameFAQs. That’s where my views clashed with North-American gaming culture for the first time and Super Metroid was clearly one of the most popular and revered games on the site.
Due to this constant online praise, I kinda forced myself to play the game but, by then, I had already played Symphony of the Night to death – unaware of how much it took from Super Metroid – and a similar experience but without RPG elements, cool monsters dropping new equipment, or charismatic characters sharing cheesy retorts felt like a huge step back. ＋the obvious contrarian opinion of a teenager. Since then, I have of course learned to better appreciate its influence and many innovations but I must admit it was always intellectual acknowledgement rather than personal endorsement.
I never really gave it another chance until this summer. Like seemingly many people, I played Super Metroid on NSO on the week of Metroid Dread’s announcement. Despite having watched something like 49 AGDQ speedruns of the game, I got stuck on a very notorious spot for forty minutes, looked up the solution online and was directed to a thirteen years old GameFAQs conversation, which is a cute poetic callback to my first experience with the game, I guess.
I did appreciate Super Metroid much more in 2021, especially the environmental narration, and the game peaked for me while inside the ghost ship. But one criticism I can’t shake off is Super Metroid has the worst controls of any great Nintendo game I know. The button placement never feels right. Inventory management is a constant chore. Tons of mechanics are conceptually or visually unintuitive. (I spent literally an hour on a stupid series of wall jumps that ended up inconsequential to clear the game.) The last few areas are painful to traverse. The sand caverns! Gah!
I consequently finished both Fusion and Zero Mission over the past few weeks, playing them on an original GBA, and one thing I will give them endless credit for is how much they improved the overall controls despite missing the X and Y buttons. Samus is a blast to handle on the GBA and I almost regret Super Metroid was never ported to the handheld.
The squishy Metroid amiibo. Because it is pleasingly squishy.
I think only Americans can answer this question.
Not me, but your question made me look into it and it’s a cute easter egg!
Agreed that the controls feel imperfect—having an entire button dedicated to sprinting feels superfluous on one hand, but on the other it adds a dimension to platforming I find compelling for a Metroid game, being able to alter speed affecting jump arc and so on. I do find it interesting that no 2D game since Super has had the grapple beam in it, despite the fact that almost every game in the series makes it top priority to include basically all the same power-ups—wonder if it’s because they couldn’t think of a more elegant way to map it to GBA controls or if the design itself was no longer compelling for R&D1.
Would you say this is unique to your experience, or is Super generally not cared so much about by French game-players + journalists? (Maybe was would be the better question—I imagine game opinions have become homogenized in our 2020s Internet world.)
Furthermore,
did Prime not make a very big splash chez vous?
I phrased it as a more personal experience since I didn’t know of any data but Europe overall seems to have been a very tiny market for Super Metroid (less than 10% of known shipments if I can trust the Japanese Wikipedia page for the game).
Keep in mind the Super Nintendo only came out officially in Spring 1992 in Europe and Australia (June 1992 for France), for a variety of reasons, so a lot of releases had to be crammed in this tight calendar in order to catch up with other territories.
Kids also had to catch up: by Super Metroid’s European release in Summer 1994, you would only have had at best two birthdays and two Christmas as opportunities to receive games, even as an early adopter, and cartridges were pretty expensive as personal purchases. That’s a lot of excellent games competing for attention.
Also, Super Metroid came out just a few weeks after this so it had very tough competition in France (and Spain). My recollection is local game magazines where much more focused on anything DBZ, fighting games, RPG imports and the upcoming Donkey Kong Country but I know Nintendo experts, sales experts and Nintendo sales experts so I’ll try and ask them if they have a better idea of Super Metroid’s actual impact in France.
The honest answer is I did not have any interesting to say, but I like to tease American Gamecube fans about their disproportionate love for the Gamecube. 60% of worldwide Gamecube sales and 70% of Metroid Prime sales came from North America.
The game is definitely beloved by local Gamecube fans and felt, in my impression (and as far as I can remember), like a much bigger deal than Super Metroid in the gaming press, in stores and among players in general. It also had less Gamecube releases to compete with, which must have helped.
But once again, keep in mind the calendar specifics of each market. Metroid Prime was a Christmas 2002 release only in North America. Europe and Japan got the game in Spring 2003 so I suspect it did not benefit from the same retail exposure in those markets.
That being said, sales and market opportunities alone don’t explain everything.
Super Metroid shipped more copies in Japan than North America yet it clearly does not have the same aura in Japan, as evidenced by the sales of the GBA sequels thereafter (let’s forget Prime which had way too many hurdles to cross) and the overall lesser popularity of modern metroidvania-type games in Japan.
In fact, until Hollow Knight which seems to have also benefited from an interest among Dark Souls fans, I am not sure of any true massive worldwide success for a 2D Metroidvania. Until very recently, it was almost as American of a sport as Madden.
I think the de facto rebranding of the genre as “2D souls-like”, combined with the growing trust in indie games, has been a huge boon to its popularity among both developers and gamers outside North America. A good example is the Spanish developed, Spanish Inquisition-themed Blasphemous which ① would have never existed ② would have never found such success before Dark Souls.
So, to come back to the topic at hand, Metroid now returns into the public eye for the first time in a post-Dark Souls world, and I wonder how this affects both the upcoming Metroid Dread but also the modern understanding, design digestion and cultural appreciation of Super Metroid (e.g. the aforementioned “environmental narration” aspect).
@captain Ok, I have started Metroid… and it certainly does not hold one’s hand in any way! No map, no real direction. The player is just thrown in to the world and (perhaps) wished “good luck!”.
There’s no real hint that a pathway is not the right choice of the moment.
https://i.imgur.com/xwlyGL4.mp4
:(
@rejj pewpewpewpewpew… [sadly] pew, pew
samus returns had grapple, right?
@rootfifthoctave It did! Added to a lot of the “physicality” in that game.
Fascinating stuff! Thank you for the very detailed reply. The differences between NA and EU markets are interesting, although this is has added educational value for me as I wasn’t an adult when le Gamecube was released. It hadn’t occurred to me that a particular sort of video game fan would be drawn to or away from the Gamecube (or that Dragon Ball ZED was popular enough among SNES fans to draw from Super Metroid sales)—the world I live in is one where older consoles are cheap and emulation is easy: Gamecube, PS2, Xbox games all (mostly) easily accessed, it’s not a matter of choosing with your wallet as much as a matter of choosing what to spend your time on. Though this is also the world where one may have to choose just one of the expensive current-gen consoles, none of which I myself own, so I just wasn’t thinking very hard about it.
It is certainly ironic that Metroid-likes being rebranded as Souls-likes has led to to greater worldwide sales/popularity—thinking about how often game-players in NA like to describe Dark Souls as “basically a combination of Metroid and classic Castlevania.”
Ah! I never played Samus Returns. Thinking about how the grapple beam worked in Super Metroid, though, I don’t really know if I’ve missed it in subsequent 2D games. Was it used in much the same way as in Super? Suppose I ought to just play it and find out . . . (I gather that @Creekgrin appreciated its inclusion).
I booted it up for the first time in a long time recently and had nearly the same experience as you in what I would say is the same hallway, but who knows, half the halls in that game look the same. :')
The key difference was I kept getting hit by those flying things and died
Think you’ll stick with it much longer?
@captain I backtracked, went down another branch/path and found the missile. I then went down some huge elevator that I probably should not go down yet and died shortly thereafter. I think I need to go back up and scout out more of first, or go back and shoot that door in my clip above with a missile.
I’ve never watched any footage of this game to my knowledge. I’ve seen bits and pieces of Super during some GDQ segments here and there, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually watched a run of that game either. I certainly cannot remember anything about it, if so.
I’ll keep playing, I’m only putting in about 15-30 minutes at a time presently. I’ll see if I hit the progression wall that has been mentioned in this thread, and if so, how bad it feels.
I simultaneously agree and disagree, but I would love to have a conversation about this! I suspect that some of this is based on the different cultural assumptions we have in controller button placement. This is a User Experience (UX) and human interaction design problem I think about all the time!
For convention, I’m going to call them “North, South, East, and West” to represent the generic 45° placement of a four-button controller. The Sony PlayStation controller famously has X and O in the South and East positions. I have been told (as a non-Japanese person) that there are cultural assumptions about the semiotics of these symbols, that X represents “no” and O represents “yes”.
On the SNES controller, we’ve got A in the East position and B in the south position. And there are similar cultural symbols associated with A being “primary” and B being “secondary” both in Japan and in primarily English-speaking countries like the US.
So where does that put us with Metroid 3? This puts the “primary” button on A in the east. This maps to Jump which you probably do the most. I would love to record some game play and know if you jump or shoot more, but this is where we’re starting.
So then you’ve got the ball of your your thumb resting on east and the pad of your thumb on north or X on the SNES controller. That’s fire. It’s extra spicy from a UX perspective since through much of the game, you’re charging shots and you fire your most important shots on button up instead of button down.
So you’re left with “Run” and “All Clear” (which is the terminology the game’s button configuration uses). Run should be close to jump which puts it in the south position on B. West/Y gets the leftovers.
As a counterpoint, you’ve got Super Mario All Stars. First, UX of that game assumes it’s a two-button game so you’ve got Run and Jump. But if you’re playing a port of an 8-bit Mario game, you’re holding down run all the time and they decided to break the A/B East/South convention from the NES for default controls. Page 7 of the instruction manual of the game teaches you how to hold the controller! I love it!
I just find this so improbable, I don’t want you to have a bad time or anything but feel compelled to encourage you to continue, if not for fun, then in the pursuit of science!
@antillese Do you modify your control scheme at all when you play Super? I did the first few times I played (ten+ years ago). Jump on South, Shoot on West, Run on North, Cancel on East. The most recent time I played (still several years ago) I went with default controls. In both cases my problem was the awkward distance/positioning of my dash and jump buttons; I played with a Wii Classic Controller, whose button cross might be more horizontally compressed than the SNES controller(?). In any case one solution would be to learn from the GBA games and map diagonal aiming to just one shoulder button, freeing up the other to be dash or cancel or item select, etc. How to hold the controller is very important!
I mean, I’ve seen the sprites before. I’ve seen a two second clip of Samus taking off the helmet. I’m not wholly unaware of Metroid as a game, but I’ve never watched it being played before. I certainly have no familiarity with any of the map/rooms/etc.
I guess I am just one of Today’s Lucky 10,000! (even though I’m not in the US, but this xkcd comic is great)
That is a wonderful comic. Hope I haven’t come across as poking fun!
Now that I think about it the only reason I know any of the layout of Metroid is because I’ve played it. Before and since then I haven’t seen a huge amount of it online beyond what you described.
Absolutely not!
If anything, you’re more leading me to the store!
@captain i don’t remember doing much swinging with it, which probably means the grapple swing is fine! in contrast, i have vivid memories of super’s grapple flinging me every direction except the one i want to be going in.
it’s used as a key to unlock some morph ball tunnels and for some morph-tunnel-puzzlin’. in my head there was an electrical charge/drain function as well but i may have imagined that.
there’s also some combat applications for the grapple which is, perhaps, my favourite use for it.
Update: I have since taken the important step of reading the manual!
I backtracked, went through that door, and got the bomb powerup. I went down some other big lift I’m not sure if I should have or not, and as far as I can tell the level designers are outright trolling the player:
…and that’s where we leave it for today. I’m not (yet!) save-state scumming, but rather than write passwords down I’m taking a save-state when I get the password screen on a game over, so I can restore back to that rather than inputting it from the menu.
Related, what did everyone do when they needed to stop playing but weren’t dead and had heaps of energy left? Is there a way to get the password for your current progress, or did people have to throw it all away just to get the password to be able to continue at a later time?
i started playing fuision to get ready for dread and WOW I’m not feeling it at ALL
My biggest gripes so far are 1: I don’t like the mission-based system and 2: due to said system, the game feels a lot more action-oriented, BUT the action feels kinda sloppy?
I just finished the first visit to sector two and I also do not appreciate the amount of bomb-every-wall-age that it already hit me with. Was super Metroid like this? I remember some serious bullshit, yes, but I don’t recall any mandatory bullshit right from the get go like on this one (I dunno tho my memory really sucks)
So yeah, does it get any better than that? Or should I expect all of this for the entire game?
Here is a second PV for Metroid Dread.
