10 ms·
A Maze of Murderscapes: Metroid II (2015)
- tarun01 5y agoaadssa
- slothtrop 5y agoIf you can find it, Another Metroid Remake 2 the fan-game is arguably superior to the 3DS remake. Was taken down to protect IP.
- vlz 5y agoA 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!
- gary_0 5y agoOne 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. The low-level details of how the game stored its level data is documented here: https://wiki.metroidconstruction.com/doku.php?id=return_of_samus:technical_information:level_data_banks https://wiki.metroidconstruction.com/doku.php?id=return_of_s...
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoFor a modern take on the genre, I can recommend Hollow Knight. It's challenging though, but gratifying and weirdly endearing given the oppressive setting.
- kremlin 5y agoBrilliant game. Also of note is that metroid itself has a recent addition to the series, a side scroller on the Nintendo switch.
- tshell 5y agoAs 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!
- ryneandal 5y agoI 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.
- filoeleven 5y agoI’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.
- keyle 5y agoWhat 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!
- anthk 5y agoSuper Mario Land 2 was similar and it didn't look as narrow.
- stared 5y agoThere 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!).
- adamrezich 5y agothe 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
- aikinai 5y agoNot 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.
- anthk 5y agoThis. For us people living with NES/SNES/MD/GB plataforming games, Ori's difficulty was just the standard for its day. Metroid is easy, Megaman is hell.
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoWell, 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. But if you do want that, you can.
- Waterluvian 5y agoI’ve spent a long time trying to figure out why I liked M2 better than Super Metroid despite what most others feel. 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 https://youtu.be/67qytrErmaE
- foo_barrio 5y agoThe 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!
- Waterluvian 5y agoThat’s probably it, re. sounds. Getting hurt in M2 was such an alarming sound vs. a cute little “bloop!” sound for Super Metroid.
- steve76 5y agoSomeone else's mind just took a giant shit on my eyes.
- debo_ 5y agoI 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.
- bitwize 5y agoI'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 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.