A detailed analysis of Metroid II connected with a moving personal story. It fairly hihglights the games many qualities as well as its negative aspects. It does that by taking the game world very seriously. As someone who loved this game and played it a lot when growing up, I still found a lot of new thoughts here. I found especially striking how the mad "Maze of Murderscapes" inside the game blends into the mad social structure of modern life at the end of the article. What a fascinating read!
I imagine it's longer than many HN readers will feel they have time for within whatever routines they incorporate browsing HN into, but it is worth bookmarking and returning to
One thing the article reminded me of was the almost hallucinogenic quasi-repetition in the game's map. For a Gameboy game in 1991, it had a huge area to explore, and all that was packed into a tiny 2 megabit cartridge, with less than half of that reserved for level layouts. I recall the game having a lot of strange dead ends and misleadingly familiar passages because of how level layout data was re-used.
For a modern take on the genre, I can recommend Hollow Knight. It's challenging though, but gratifying and weirdly endearing given the oppressive setting.
As a lifelong Metroid fan, I can confidently say that Dread is already one of the best entries in the series. Worth picking picking a Switch up to play it, IMO. Metroid fans have been waiting for this game since 2004!
I haven't finished it yet because kids and stupid responsibility gets in my way, but I'm blown away by how much Nintendo can get out of that underpowered device. A few moments of slow-down here and there but Metroid Dread's mood and sound is stunning given the device's specs.
I’m glad you said 2004, when Zero Mission came out, instead of 2002, when Fusion was released.
Fusion is the previous game in the mainline Metroid series, but…I never liked it. It felt slow and clunky compared to Super Metroid. The SA-X scenes were uncompromising and required memorization to get through. It was also more linear from what I saw, with seemingly arbitrary access restrictions instead of solid level design, but I never finished it so I cannot say for sure.
Zero Mission was “the original Metroid game, remastered with modern features and new content.” As a huge Super Metroid fan, it was exactly what I had desired when I bought Fusion.
Dread takes the “unbeatable adversary” mechanic from Fusion and greatly improves upon it. The EMMIs are smart and deadly, and they have killed me dozens of times, but it never feels unfair like the SA-X did. I haven’t finished it yet, but it feels like it’s taken the best parts of the best 2D Metroids, current gaming sensibilities and expectations, modern hardware capabilities, and rolled them into a great game.
Yeah, I liked Fusion for the story and bosses, but it was definitely much more linear and less replayable. Zero Mission is closest in spirit to a Super Metroid successor, and Dread like you said seems to be taking the best aspects of every game so far.
It's way shorter, somewhat easier, more straightforward, and more expensive than Hollow Knight. Depending on how much time you have, all but the last of these can be pros.
Flip side the shorter playtime allows replayability. I love hollow knight but it is such a time investment I've only played through it 2x and I bought it not long after it came out. Dread I've already completed 4 runs and about to start a 5th so I can 100% every zone (the only thing I have left to get all the art unlocks and "complete" the game).
Hollow Knight is one of the better games I've had the pleasure of playing, and it's unquestionably the best indie game I've played. My rating is a nine out of ten, with one point deducted for some infrequent control functionality.
Have you tried Cave Story? It doesn't get any more indie than that- every single aspect of the game made by one guy. And it is also an incredibly tight and polished platformer that follows all the genre conventions, and then violates many of them intentionally and thoughtfully.
What I can't believe with these old game is how narrow the field of view was. It's like binoculars on a map. It would make your mental mapping exercise so much harder!
There is a return of "old school games". I don't mean only retro, with artificially pixelated graphics. I mean games, which are hard (compare and contrast with "keep pressing 'forward' to win") platformers (a genre that had a sharp decline as everyone wanted 3D shooters or at least 2D real-time strategies).
My favorite one (by a fair margin) is "Ori and the Blind Forest". Stunningly beautiful (visually, and I keep listening to the soundtrack over and over) yet devilishly difficult (with the culmination in the escape scenes). It has a wonderful sequel - as good as the initial (what I find very rare for games). Also, no sexist undertones.
Another one, also a Metroidvania game, is "Dust: An Elysian Tail" (a single developer!).
Not sure why you’re getting downvotes, Ori is a good recommendation as a modern take on a Metroid-like game.
But I strongly disagree about the difficulty. I’m no pro gamer, but I am from the NES era and in Ori I don’t think I ever died? Or if I did, it certainly wasn’t more than once in an area. Ori is not even in the same league as the old platformers like Metroid, Megaman, Ninja Gaiden, etc.
Well, if you want to go toward hard games, you have Super Meat Boy, vvvvvv, and Cuphead. Or even games that scales from "finishable" to "very hard to 100%" like Celeste.
So good hard games still exist.
It's just not the default difficulty anymore. Mario, Tomb Raisers, they all became very casual. I don't mind, I still enjoyed the Switch mario. I'm getting older, and I don't want to have to memorize entire levels with a ms timing to get through anymore.
I played Megaman recently and I was blown away by how often I had to memorize which part of the screen I had to fall through. Left, Center, Left, Right, Center, etc. And then I'd get it wrong and have to start all over.
As an adult with things to do it was infuriating. As a 9 year old kid in the middle of summer it was fine. I wonder if 9 year olds today feel the same way?
Well, I compare it to something of a normal-hard level of the games from 80/90s. There were many simpler games (Mario Bros, Contra) even if still more difficult from the current ones.
If you did the finished escape scenes on the very first run, my words of praise. The Ginso Tree took me something like an hour, and involved a bit of swearing (played on PC keyboard, I cannot compare it to pads). Many people quit the game at this point.
2, if not 3, of the examples you provided are generally considered amongst the most difficult NES games, and in fact led to the trope of "Nintendo Hard"
Much of it had to do with the technical limitations of the systems, which often led to requiring pixel-perfect accuracy to avoid hitboxes.
However, it also stems from the arcade legacy, where game plays were challenging and short, with very little handholding from the game design (i.e., throwing you in the deep end)
Replaying games like Megaman II and Ninga Gaiden on emulators, I now get a visceral distaste for the overwhelming difficult; however, back when I played them as a kid, it was just the way games were, and I would routinely finish these games in the 2-day rental period allotted.
(I assume some people have exactly the opposite reaction, pining for the days when games were merciless)
Basically, our gaming sensibilities have evolved (or devolved) as the medium has grown over time.
There's also the significant factor of input and display lag screwing up the timing, contributing to the perceived difficulty nowadays.
Playing on real 6502 hardware with a CRT, you get instant response, 17 ms at most. But play on an emulator on any modern OS on most any modern "smart" TV, and all those layers of abstraction often add up to an unplayable 100 to 200 ms. I've shown several people the difference between Zelda II on a PC emulator versus a real NES and CRT, and they all agree the real thing feels immeasurably sharper. Even Nintendo's own Switch console has noticeable lag to me.
It's less of a problem for Game Boy games, since their feel is more accommodating of lag in the first place, thanks to the slow response of the original LCD.
I'd also go ahead and disagree that Ori is a retro game. The controls and movement mechanics are decidedly modern. Your protagonist has the ability to fluidly maneuver in the air, slide on walls, wall-jump at any time, and other such affordances. Compare this to a game like Castlevania where the jumping mechanics are a lot more rigid and unforgiving and wall-jumping is not possible. Even look at Super Metroid which does have wall-jumping but makes the action itself heavily reliant on timing and precise inputs.
Modern games in general tend to heavily de-emphasize the demand for strict timing and input precision from the player. For an example of a proper retro game, created in the modern era but with the control difficulty of old NES games, look no further than La-Mulana [1]. Few people have played it and even fewer have finished the game but it's an extremely rewarding experience when you do.
the story of the development of Dust: An Elysian Tail is one of my favorites. dude was an animator who wanted to make a game, so he dove into XNA and figured it all out over three years, and made exactly the game he wanted to make. super inspiring
The old GB sounds were harsher and I am going to speculate it's because the SNES has a heavy low pass filter that smooths out things maybe a tad too much. The GB metroid sounds I feel like I can sit and remake them with square/sawtooth waves (both waves have sharp corners!) and some creativity. The SNES sounds sound like samples + DSP.
Metroid 2's world felt very alien, hostile and unforgiving to me as a kid. The complete black background and lack of dense enemies drove the point home that the metroids literally ate everything!
I found the parts where the author wove the Metroid 2 experience into their own reality to be much more moving than I expected such a combination could be. Thanks to the sharer for posting this.
I've been on a Metroid kick lately, still working my way through Dread which is excellent. Recently I also saw a video about Other M: https://youtu.be/KTuMfsWwd0E
The upshot is, while it doesn't make Other M a great Metroid game or even a great game, the original Japanese hits way, way different. Federation Army Samus is much more of a petulant child, and she doesn't crush on Adam so much as view him as a surrogate father. There's a line that in Japanese was something like "I didn't hate Adam for making me feel weak" and in English was like "I was fond of the way Adam would call me something delicate". Implying that while young Samus loved and admired Adam and her fellow soldiers, the way they condescended to her stuck in her craw. Eventually (after the incident with Adam's brother Ian) Samus couldn't take it anymore and struck out on her own as a bounty hunter.
This changes the story of the game significantly, and makes Samus more of a feminist than a lifestyle sub, more fitting with her character in other games. It also makes the story more redemptive: Samus is a prodigal daughter, and she and Adam are struggling to repair their broken relationship. Another line, by Adam, rendered as "I now authorize Varia Suit use" in English, is in Japanese more like "Turn on your Varia Suit right now!!" More desperate, more "What the hell are you doing, you idiot?!" Meaning that Samus didn't leave her Varia Suit off as some sort of token of submission waiting for Adam's command to enable it. Maybe she just forgot to turn it on? She seems more stressed and not functioning at full capacity in this game, as the bit with Ridley shows.
As for this article, I feel like the author is trying to hammer home a point, like "you are the monster, wiping out the helpless metroids" or something, which is just -- no. Metroids are living bioweapons, created as such by the Chozo with various attempts to revive and cultivate them by the Space Pirates and Federation Army. They can't space travel on their own, but they're usually carried to new places by other races intending to use them for their singular purpose. It's not their fault that they're indiscriminate killers, but wiping them out seems like the sensible thing to do (especially at Metroid II's point in the tineline) when they were engineered for destruction, letting them fall into the wrong hands almost inevitably leads to disaster, and you have the occasional incident like the metroid gain-of-function research depicted in Other M, which portends even bigger disaster. I get it -- deconstruction is pretty much table stakes for modern criticism, meaning you haven't truly analyzed a work until you point out how it subverts its own putative message. But that's not really a good thing. The Metroid lore pretty much reinforces at several points along the way that metroids are a galactic threat.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 88.4 ms ] threadI imagine it's longer than many HN readers will feel they have time for within whatever routines they incorporate browsing HN into, but it is worth bookmarking and returning to
The low-level details of how the game stored its level data is documented here: https://wiki.metroidconstruction.com/doku.php?id=return_of_s...
Fusion is the previous game in the mainline Metroid series, but…I never liked it. It felt slow and clunky compared to Super Metroid. The SA-X scenes were uncompromising and required memorization to get through. It was also more linear from what I saw, with seemingly arbitrary access restrictions instead of solid level design, but I never finished it so I cannot say for sure.
Zero Mission was “the original Metroid game, remastered with modern features and new content.” As a huge Super Metroid fan, it was exactly what I had desired when I bought Fusion.
Dread takes the “unbeatable adversary” mechanic from Fusion and greatly improves upon it. The EMMIs are smart and deadly, and they have killed me dozens of times, but it never feels unfair like the SA-X did. I haven’t finished it yet, but it feels like it’s taken the best parts of the best 2D Metroids, current gaming sensibilities and expectations, modern hardware capabilities, and rolled them into a great game.
It's way shorter, somewhat easier, more straightforward, and more expensive than Hollow Knight. Depending on how much time you have, all but the last of these can be pros.
My favorite one (by a fair margin) is "Ori and the Blind Forest". Stunningly beautiful (visually, and I keep listening to the soundtrack over and over) yet devilishly difficult (with the culmination in the escape scenes). It has a wonderful sequel - as good as the initial (what I find very rare for games). Also, no sexist undertones.
Another one, also a Metroidvania game, is "Dust: An Elysian Tail" (a single developer!).
But I strongly disagree about the difficulty. I’m no pro gamer, but I am from the NES era and in Ori I don’t think I ever died? Or if I did, it certainly wasn’t more than once in an area. Ori is not even in the same league as the old platformers like Metroid, Megaman, Ninja Gaiden, etc.
Metroid is easy, Megaman is hell.
So good hard games still exist.
It's just not the default difficulty anymore. Mario, Tomb Raisers, they all became very casual. I don't mind, I still enjoyed the Switch mario. I'm getting older, and I don't want to have to memorize entire levels with a ms timing to get through anymore.
But if you do want that, you can.
As an adult with things to do it was infuriating. As a 9 year old kid in the middle of summer it was fine. I wonder if 9 year olds today feel the same way?
If you did the finished escape scenes on the very first run, my words of praise. The Ginso Tree took me something like an hour, and involved a bit of swearing (played on PC keyboard, I cannot compare it to pads). Many people quit the game at this point.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NintendoHard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_hard
Much of it had to do with the technical limitations of the systems, which often led to requiring pixel-perfect accuracy to avoid hitboxes.
However, it also stems from the arcade legacy, where game plays were challenging and short, with very little handholding from the game design (i.e., throwing you in the deep end)
Replaying games like Megaman II and Ninga Gaiden on emulators, I now get a visceral distaste for the overwhelming difficult; however, back when I played them as a kid, it was just the way games were, and I would routinely finish these games in the 2-day rental period allotted.
(I assume some people have exactly the opposite reaction, pining for the days when games were merciless)
Basically, our gaming sensibilities have evolved (or devolved) as the medium has grown over time.
Playing on real 6502 hardware with a CRT, you get instant response, 17 ms at most. But play on an emulator on any modern OS on most any modern "smart" TV, and all those layers of abstraction often add up to an unplayable 100 to 200 ms. I've shown several people the difference between Zelda II on a PC emulator versus a real NES and CRT, and they all agree the real thing feels immeasurably sharper. Even Nintendo's own Switch console has noticeable lag to me.
It's less of a problem for Game Boy games, since their feel is more accommodating of lag in the first place, thanks to the slow response of the original LCD.
Modern games in general tend to heavily de-emphasize the demand for strict timing and input precision from the player. For an example of a proper retro game, created in the modern era but with the control difficulty of old NES games, look no further than La-Mulana [1]. Few people have played it and even fewer have finished the game but it's an extremely rewarding experience when you do.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La-Mulana
I think it’s because M2 had better sounds. They were less weak and piddly sounding, leading to better ambience and feel.
I dunno what is with the SNES but so many games have very cutesy sounding sounds. I’m not sure how to describe it. Pew pew pew vs. BLAM BLAM BLAM.
I’ll try to get some audio examples of the two soundscapes when I’m at my PC.
Edit: this generally demonstrates the sounds. https://youtu.be/67qytrErmaE
Metroid 2's world felt very alien, hostile and unforgiving to me as a kid. The complete black background and lack of dense enemies drove the point home that the metroids literally ate everything!
The upshot is, while it doesn't make Other M a great Metroid game or even a great game, the original Japanese hits way, way different. Federation Army Samus is much more of a petulant child, and she doesn't crush on Adam so much as view him as a surrogate father. There's a line that in Japanese was something like "I didn't hate Adam for making me feel weak" and in English was like "I was fond of the way Adam would call me something delicate". Implying that while young Samus loved and admired Adam and her fellow soldiers, the way they condescended to her stuck in her craw. Eventually (after the incident with Adam's brother Ian) Samus couldn't take it anymore and struck out on her own as a bounty hunter.
This changes the story of the game significantly, and makes Samus more of a feminist than a lifestyle sub, more fitting with her character in other games. It also makes the story more redemptive: Samus is a prodigal daughter, and she and Adam are struggling to repair their broken relationship. Another line, by Adam, rendered as "I now authorize Varia Suit use" in English, is in Japanese more like "Turn on your Varia Suit right now!!" More desperate, more "What the hell are you doing, you idiot?!" Meaning that Samus didn't leave her Varia Suit off as some sort of token of submission waiting for Adam's command to enable it. Maybe she just forgot to turn it on? She seems more stressed and not functioning at full capacity in this game, as the bit with Ridley shows.
As for this article, I feel like the author is trying to hammer home a point, like "you are the monster, wiping out the helpless metroids" or something, which is just -- no. Metroids are living bioweapons, created as such by the Chozo with various attempts to revive and cultivate them by the Space Pirates and Federation Army. They can't space travel on their own, but they're usually carried to new places by other races intending to use them for their singular purpose. It's not their fault that they're indiscriminate killers, but wiping them out seems like the sensible thing to do (especially at Metroid II's point in the tineline) when they were engineered for destruction, letting them fall into the wrong hands almost inevitably leads to disaster, and you have the occasional incident like the metroid gain-of-function research depicted in Other M, which portends even bigger disaster. I get it -- deconstruction is pretty much table stakes for modern criticism, meaning you haven't truly analyzed a work until you point out how it subverts its own putative message. But that's not really a good thing. The Metroid lore pretty much reinforces at several points along the way that metroids are a galactic threat.