This sounds downright horrible. I haven't actually read anything about Other M's story before this, so this view on it caught me completely off guard.

This thread is incredibly interesting. I'm not sure whether it made me more interested in buying other M - to see if the story really is this bad - or if it made me lose all interest in ever playing it.

Go to youtube and watch Metroid Other M:  The Movie.  You'll see that the whole thing has been blown waaaaaaaaaay out of proportion.  The story isn't Spielberg or anything but it's pretty enjoyable.  People are scrutinizing this game like no other I've ever seen.

Hmm.... I will say it's definitely a different take on the plot, and makes a far more cohesive case for sexism, but rather i agreed with the whole "frayed writing" rationalization rather than any sort of mysoginist conspiracy. We have to recollect that the relation between storytelling and gameplay has always been ... loose even in the best Metroid games. Samus has always lost her powers in very peculiar ways, but the best times always ignored it (Metroid II, Super Metroid, Metroid Prime 3) rather than coming up with plot devices that should naturally have led to her getting killed, as in Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 2. Metroid Fusion actually deserves credit here, because the infection of her and her suit led to a very plausible reason for her to go back to square one.

In Other M they tried something different, and i imagine part of the utility of this was to minimize front-end exploration, though they could have conceived of other plot devices for this (for instance, Samus could have had to download her old powers at the save stations, a device introduced in Metroid Fusion as well), and they could have added in the idea that her use of the Hyper Beam at the end of Super drained her suit of all capability (though that would throw the escape run of Super into canonical hell)

As for the Hell Run, the author here gets it right the first time before attempting to piece it into his/her conspiracy: it's a gameplay challenge at its core, one that could have been better explained, as many things could have been better explained, but at its heart is no more incredulous than "The Ing assaulted me, stripped my suit powers, but for some reason left me alive"

As for the shot-in-the-back scene, i too was baffled at that entire turn of events initially, until i came to the understanding that he "had" to shoot her, knowing that she would try to stop him and was more than capable of stopping him. Adam correctly assessed Samus' cowboy tendencies, but knew this was one mission no-one could come back from alive. Again here's another scene which could have been done another, better way, but is understandable in context

Samus showed even in this game that she had an independent streak when authority crossed with morality, mostly near the end of the game in this case, and near the end of Fusion, but Adam was an authority figure she respected, and she wanted to show that she had grown out of her pointless-rebellion phase. Simple, but poorly portrayed to create something that looks kinda like a mysoginist conspiracy if you squint at it right

Good idea! Will do. 

Enjoyability and a deeply problematic message aren't mutually exclusive, though.

Do you remember the big moment of victory in Revenge of the Nerds?

You are using "conspiracy" incorrectly.

The author never claims that misogynist intent is at the root of this, and holds that bad writing is probably the sole source of it, but the cohesive whole is a deeply codependent and abusive relationship whether Sakamoto intended it that way or not.

Yes, if I'd read the article as merely "Sakamoto is a sexist pig!" I never would have bothered linking to it, since that discussion has been had repeatedly.  I was much more intrigued, or rather disturbed, by how the article set out a prima facie case that Other M reduces Samus into what amounts to a victim of Battered Wife Syndrome.* 

I mentioned earlier that I rather like Samus characterization up until now, so if the article is correct in its interpretation I personally would be somewhat offended by the change;  it'd be as if someone took Darth Vader and reduced him to a whiny emo-boy with mommy issues.

*I fully concede I am not completely familiar with the intricacies of BWS, so I may be mis-prognosing.

This game is a perfect example of why videogames should not aspire to be like cinema.  I'm not going to get into the accusations of what the story is about and such, but I will say that the writing is bad.  Really bad.  What I guess that I'm trying to say is that there is a shortage of quality writers in general.  Writing in most mediums; i.e. books, movies, television shows, and VGChartz threads stinks.  We don't need no talent hacks trying to write epic stories for games either.  

My wife has stripped it from her personal canon; it never happened.

This isn't the first time I read the article but I still don't really know what to say about it. "Drama queen" is what instantly pops up after having read it. If the debate wasn't blown out of proportions before, it sure as hell is now! While there are issues in the game (the fans admit it!) I think it has more to do with inexperience and Sakamoto's experimental nature. The way he is demonised is way worse than any flaw in Other M. But enough about that...

I thought the story was interesting, but it's execution was flawed. I think I slept through the "shot in the back" scene or something because I can't remember thinking that this was even close to being offensive. Maybe I was in total shock. I can see why Adam did it. It's damn rude but it makes some sense.

The Hell Run part is badly done. It's the worst part of the game; it just doesn't make any sense, but I guess the staff wanted a level like this a bit too bad. I view it as bad game design. It doesn't really have much to do with the story at all, it's just bad design.

The article stretches things way too much for my taste. It's like laying puzzles but you don't want the puzzle to end up like the picture on the box so you grab a hammer and smashes the poor pieces into place; and the result is a very strange picture indeed.