I still contend that high-level play is its own reward, and the suitlessness is merely there to signify as such, and has no deeper meaning intentional or otherwise. That could just be me, though. I'm the kind of person who often-viciously lambasts literary thinkers and some writers for trying to make every cigar into a symbol, with that being the reason for my distaste of such so-called "classics" as Catcher in the Rye

Your other points i agree with.

Nor did i mean to frame this in the form of a competition, just that i took issue with your initial assertion in a way that i could not identify, but that Rol verbalized perfectly. We all hopefully learn something here.

The default presentation of sex as a signifier of progress is exactly what I was talking about anyway, and is still problematic both at large and more specifically in the case of Samus.

I agree that they should stop worrying about the fact that a beautiful woman is encased in the armor and just let her kill Metroid and space pirates.  Just show her getting into the armor at the beginning and out of the armor at the end of the adventure.  The game shouldn't be concentrating on how she's female which is basically what Other M did.  This isn't a sexist statement.  I would be just as annoyed with a game about how Mario is a man.  I agree with you that they should just return the Metroid series to what it was.  Just have Samus be a voiceless character encased in armor.  As I said, sexiness is not the problem.  The problem is the inability of Nintendo to write a story about a sexy and powerful female without mucking it up so they just should abandon the idea altogether.  

well whose to say exactly that it is intended to be an award? If i had a heavy varia suit, jumping around, turning into a ball, running through lava filled caves...i think id only have my boxers on too.

what would you wear? a sweater, jeans, khakis...
just a thought

I don't think the creators sat back and put as much thought as we think they did. We probably assigned waaaay more meaning to certain things than they ever intended.

Exactly.

THat's possible - even likely. It doesn't really take away from the point, though

At this point I don't really have anything to add, so I will just say that this is one hell of an excellent topic.

Well, yes, it makes sense for her to not wear a lot underneath her massive body armor, but there's still a couple of things that need to be considered here

1. When you are creating fiction, you create all of the parameters which determine the way your character interacts with the world. Samus wearing her udnerwear or the Zero Suit under her armor makes a certain amount of sense, but only because that's the world in which the designers chose to place her. This doesn't need to be worried about too much because, as I said before, the fact of her being sexy under the suit isn't really a problem.

2. There is a world of difference between exploitative and non-exploitative presentations of sex in art. Ripley running around in her underwear in the first Alien movie was, according to many metrics, sexy, but it never felt exploitative because of the way it was presented - though of course some people would argue this point I guess. Even if you choose to see the presentation of Ripley as exploitative, though, there are ways to show sexy women that are not exploitative of the fact that they're sexy. Metroid has managed to do this all of once, and that was in Metroid Prime, not so much in the ending as in the concept art where they had a layered cutaway showing Samus under the Varia suit. In every other Metroid game, Samus's body is leveraged as a reward for performance, which is pretty much the perfect example of exploitative representations of sex.

Just so I won't need to reiterate this beyond this post: there is nothing wrong with sex, there is nothing wrong with liking to look at sexy ladies, and there's nothing wrong with actually liking the sex reward system in Metroid. It's just that it undermines the particular strengths of Samus's character, as the faceless voiceless unstoppable bad-ass hero.

@TheRepublic:

Thank you.

But that's no character at all.  I could throw a dart at any game from the SNES era and earlier and hit that character.  The guys from Contra, the guy from Super Turrican, the jet in Firepower 2000, the lady ninja from Shadow of the Ninja.  Being silent and kicking ass is what old video game characters did.  Samus is  just a chick that did the same thing as anybody else from that time.  I could argue that actually showing  a bit of skin is actually what gave Samus her character.  For all we know, Samus is actually a huge slut but she's just really good at killing aliens.  Take that, women's movement!