i borrowed metroid when i was younger from a friend, about the age of 10-12 years of age when the snes and genesis were starting their popular rise. i don’t know anything about this game. i put the game in and he introduces me from the start several things to start on, such as getting the morphball first, but other then that he didn’t went far. he lent me this game along with some several titles of nes games. i played with metroid and it’s very hard as you’d end up in places where you’re blocked, either because you don’t have an item to destroy it or that you don’t have the proper equipment, such as stumbling into a red door or a cracked wall. you keep searching and then you find this thing. i don’t know what the hell it looks like because sometimes you just get something without realizing what it is and i don’t have the manual for the game. so you got this thing and then what exactly is it. you press start and there’s no subscreen like in zelda and then you press various different combo buttons and nothing. until you pressed select. i didn’t have many games that used the select button. then you start experimenting with this thing and you find out that it can open those red boors. so you go back to previous locations that had red doors to find out what’s behind them.
i played this game without any help at all. you’d end up going back and forth when something new came your way. you got the bomb, so that means you can destroy damaged blocks, those that are visible. you didn’t even realize that there were regular blocks that were breakable. i found that out accidentally when i shot the corner of a platform, realizing that if that thing is breakable with my weapon, then it’s also breakable with the bomb. so now we go the entire place bombing floors and anything that was conceiveable. guess what, that wasn’t the end. not only was it the floors but it was also the walls and ceiling. so everytime you enter a room, you’d end up performing the room inspection routine to see if there are any hidden passages, which one hopes that it leads to a very good reward, like a power-up. i figured out about the walls from obtaining the wave beam. i started shooting the walls and suddenly saw one of the blocks disappeared like when you bomb it and discovered about ceiling when you blew up a floor and fell to a room below. when you found these thing, you end up thining and seeing things differently in the game.
i like those fake floors and fake lava pits as well as those fake destroyable walls, ceilings and floors that leads to nowhere other then to trick the gamer. i like that walk way with the energy tank waiting at the end of the room and upon near it, you fall down a hole and as the player got tricked thinking it’s a floor while in fact there was no floor. the players responce would be, what the fuck! omg! as they not only got tricked but at the same time, will have landed someplace where they have never been before and that is very dangerous.
the only help i got from friends were from the bosses. but the strategy for beating the bosses sucks as i got better at the game. typically, people would get the wave beam and shoot ridley from the bottom pit while jumping with the varia suit. i find that ineffective. btw, the most powerful beam is the wave beam but the most efficient beam is the ice beam.
in metroid, you spend a lot of your time walking around the entire place figuring out if it was a secret or not that leads to either a reward or a step closer into fulfilling your goal/mission. it is correct to say that metroid is a very tough game. i don’t know if it’s as tough as cuntra because i didn’t like cuntra. but metroid for the nes is a tough game.
memorable moments in metroid.
this room where it was a trick to the player, 
there are two of them, one is a reward while the other is a god damn nightmare. i still forget from time to time when i play metroid.
one of the biggest, motherfucker moments in metroid is just when you thought it was over, after beating mother brain, it tells you that you need to get out before the timer runs out. when you just have beaten a game, you’d expect some sort of an ending or something to show up after beating the last boss. but not metroid. metroid tells you that you got one thorn before you can relax. my god it was nerve recking as you’re trying to not fall from those small ledges while at the same time you’re conscious of the timer ticking away and the damn thing feels like forever.
but when all is done, the reward is very very pleasurably rewarding.
i only played metroid 2 when metroid 3 was released. it caused me to revisit metroid and it’s series. knowing that a single metroid existed in metroid 2 stirred my interest as to explore what happened in the previous metroid when i played metroid 3. it was only during the release of the gameboy color that i manage to play metroid 2. and just like metroid 1, metroid 2 is just as nuts as metroid 1 except it was also confusing. what was worse in metroid 2 was when you’re casualy exploring and suddenly encounter a metroid. you’re like, “oh shit, run for your life!” rofl!
i love these moments from playing these games. but it sucks that there aren’t any other games as good as metroid 1 and metroid 2. metroid 3 is very very easy. every other metroid game ever since metroid 3 feels different. i can’t comment on prime as i’m not a big fan of fps games [i get headaches]. metroid prime 2 felt very cliched with the dark and light concept and metroid prime 3, when i first played, stopped after 30 minutes when it tried to be like a regular fps. in prime 3, what was up with having to deal with the officers?! awkward! very awkward!
My experiences were very similar to yours. What you are responding to in these early Metroid games is the amazing precision of the clockwork mechanics of the gameplay. It is similar to how Super Mario Brothers is about the ‘jump’ and ‘bounce’ and even how Mario’s momentum changes even when hitting a block with his head. The mechanics are so well there. Like gears, they are nicely interlocked and is a joy to play the game.
Unfortunately for us, Nintendo developers no longer look at games this way. They see all this stuff and think it is ‘boring’ (because it is hard for the developer). They then only choose to see stuff like ‘story’ and ‘cutscenes’ and ‘emotions’ and ‘puzzles’ and ‘surprises’ (because it is easy for the developer).
Thinking about NES Metroid, I recalled how I initially thought something in the game was broken because of the spin jump. Samus had two jumps. She had the normal jump that you would see in platformers and then that spin jump. The spin jump was very difficult to control and resulted in me falling into lava, filled with dangerous enemies, resulting in my death multiple times. When I played, I tried to use the spin jump as less as possible. And then I got the Screw Attack where I suddenly realized how awesome the spin jump was. I then used the spin jump as much as possible. A complete reversal than how I started!
It is said that a feature of Metroid is ‘backtracking’. Well, backtracking is actually boring. What I think is really going on is ‘Chekov’s Gun’. Chekov’s Gun is the principle that if a gun is hanging on the mantle in Act 1, the gun should be firing in Act 3. People confuse this with foreshadowing which it isn’t at all. Chekov’s Gun is not cheating the audience. A gun doesn’t magically appear on the stage. The gun was always on the stage! So the audience doesn’t feel cheated when the gun is used. In fact, it feels proper that the gun to be used.
Remember passing through the area that leads to Kraid’s Lair at the start of the game? You didn’t have bombs. You didn’t even know what bombs were. But you could see creatures crawling around underneath you. You assumed that was there for decoration purposes or there was another way to get in there like an adjacent door through another corridor. It didn’t occur to you that you could break open the floor.
So when you got the bomb and realized you could bomb those blocks, you backtracked to that location to go through the floor. Instead of being a ‘useless prop’, the creatures and the area below actually became integral to the game. Or another example was my experience with the spinning jump. That had no purpose. It seemed like a silly prop that kept getting me killed. But once I got the screw attack, Chekov’s gun was firing.
Metroid is the first console game I know that uses Chekov’s Gun and remains the only platformer to do so. It is a great contrast to the Find X item to pass X obstacle. You know the yellow key opens the yellow door. But Chekov’s Gun is taking a prop of the game and turning it into an essential element. In Metroid II, the caverns all had ceilings. Everyone knew this. But you didn’t think anything of it. Who cares about the ceilings? And then you got the Spider Ball that allowed you to roll across ceilings. Suddenly, the ceilings became VERY IMPORTANT. You went back to previous ceilings to see if there was any hidden items. The Space Jump is another example. There were HUGE areas in Metroid II. You didn’t think much of them. Once you got the Space Jump, those huge areas became very accessible as you were flying through them.
Chekov’s Gun is behind much of the ‘magical moments’ of Super Metroid. Remember the metal corridor in Brinstar that you ran through early in the game but shattered with a power bomb to get to Maridia? Chekov’s gun is at work. In Act 1, it was just a prop of a glass corridor. In Act 4, it was shattered by a powerbomb to lead to a new area. No one knew at the time it could shatter. It wasn’t the Power-Bomb-opens-Yellow-Doors. That corridor was re-used in one of the GBA Metroids since it made such an impression.
Another example of Chekov’s Gun, of taking a seemingly innocent prop and turning it into an important part, is the open area around the ship. At the beginning, you don’t think about the mountains. However, once you get the space jump, the sly player will think, “Hey, if I can jump infinitely through the air, what if I space jump in the open atmosphere?” The result is that you get to explore the tops of those mountains and there are items up there. Chekov’s Gun is at work.
The Super Missile was not using Chekov’s Gun. It just opened green doors. Ooohhh. But if you recall, the Super Missile also rattled the world and made things fall. A proper use of Chekov’s Gun would have to hang something innocently from the ceilings that looks like a prop. But when you super missiled the wall, the prop would fall down and become integral to the game. Perhaps it was an item or a monster or something. But this is far more thrilling than the Find X item to pass X obstacle which is the equivalent of finding keys to pass locked doors.
(I can understand your frustration with the Prime games. They were well made, but very inaccessible due to being first person and being full 3d.)
in zelda, why does link look normal, while the enemies look like caricatures or they look weird?!
This is a good question. I played Ocarina of Time well after the fact and recall how much more fun the enemies were because they didn’t look weird. In later Zelda games, the enemies look really atrociously bad. In Skyward Sword,, they look worse than ever before. I don’t feel comfortable with these enemies. Enemies should look badass, not like something I cringe when looking at.
samus aran with big boobs?! i don’t want to see that because it feminizes her and i feel that after going through the adventures of metroid 1 and metroid 2, we can say that she isn’t a normal female. i’m still waiting for that next mission and nintendo hasn’t delivered that next mission. also, bounty hunter?! how the hell did that happened?! i thought she was what you’d label as those special guys you’d use when the regular guys couldn’t get the job done.
Cold and efficient. This is what people thought of her. Sakamoto has turned her into a bimbo who can’t shut up, who has big boobs with skin tight clothing, and needs authorization of everything from her ‘superior’.
Sakamoto Cultists gasp and say, “How can you say that? Even in NES Metroid, Samus was shown in a bikini.” How to explain it to them? It is a subject of fundamental Human Nature.
If men like boobies, why do they not ogle breast cancer brochures or medical anatomy charts? It is because it is not about the boobies. It is about women showing them. If a woman was known to show her boobies to everyone, the man will dramatically lose interest and move on. Boobies do not have value unless they are shown exclusively to him.
Metroid did something very slick with its ending. The better job you do, the more skin you got to see at the end. Women deploy this trick on men in real life as well.
By using the Zero Suit as a normal occurrence, of the skin tight Samus as a normal thing, it takes away the reward of her ‘showing us’ herself and turns her into a generic bimbo. Sexiness requires class. Sakamoto’s Samus, despite prancing around in a skin tight outfit more than any previous Metroid game before, comes across as less sexy than in previous Metroids.
Of course that explanation wasn't correct so I can't give you a quote for it.
