Hey everyone, I hope you are all well and safe.

As the title suggests, this is not a GOG-related thread but an appreciation thread for a great game.

So, in the past few years I got into the so called "metroidvania" genre and I had a great time with many games such as Ori and the Blind Forest, Axiom Verge and Guacamelee to name a few.

At some point it occurred to me that I actually had never played the game that started it all, Metroid. Back in the days I owned a NES and a SNES but never played Metroid / Super Metroid for more than a few minutes. It seems that back then, I just couldn't "get" what these games were about and how progression was made.

Fast forward to the present. Due to the pandemic and the more time we spend at home I found some extra time to play games (which usually does not happen very often). And one day I had an epiphany: I remembered that I had bought a mini SNES Classic a couple of years ago. And Super Metroid is in the preloaded games. Guess what happened next :)

After completing the game I stood in awe. I could not believe that I had just completed such a masterpiece.

At the beginning I was skeptical, due to the game being 26 years old and how it would live up to today's standards. I was quickly relieved of these thoughts as 30 minutes in I understood that this game was doing everything the right way. And to think that people managed to create this game with the limitations of such a console. Wow.

Gameplay? Perfect. Exploration of massive proportions, huge map, tons of secrets. Meaningful upgrades, all with extended use throughout the game.

Graphics? Perfect. Well, you know, for that era it was as great as you could get for a 2D game. Now that I think of it, the graphics are much better than those in many so called "2D retro" games of today.

Audio? Perfect. The music is so atmospheric and at many occasions I actually thought the game wanted me to be afraid. You have a permanent claustrophobic feeling and the music takes that feeling to a whole new level.

Controls? Tight. As all games should implement them to this day. Did I mention that you can rebind all the buttons?

Well, I could go on and on but I want to keep this short. I will just mention a few things about the map that could have made my life a tiny bit easier.

Doors. Each time I opened a new door it would be nice if I could see it on the map. This way I would instantly know how to get back to a previous area quickly. But doors are not marked on the map, meaning that a good amount of wandering around is probably mandatory.

Items/upgrades. The game does a great job in displaying a small dot in rooms where an item/upgrade is available. The thing is, even though you collect it it still appears on the map. This makes it hard to keep track of what you have not collected so that you can revisit specific rooms when you get a new ability.

All in all, I was really glad to play this game. Besides the whole history of the genre etc., it actually managed to become my favorite Nintendo game of all time.

To anyone who likes metroidvanias: if you haven't played Super Metroid yet, you owe it to yourselves to experience it at least once.

Excuse me for the long post, I just needed to share my excitement with fellow gamers. Please feel free to share your experiences with the game!

super metroid is a personal favorite of mine. and it's probably my 6-year-old's favorite game of his short life.

i love the spooky ambience , the feeling of isolation, and awesome echo-ey sound her blaster makes.

unfortunately i havent liked a metroid game since (except the AM2R fan game, that was really really good). they loaded them up with characters, story, and anime tropes. what i loved about the first three metroid games with the minimal story and lack of characterization. it really let one's imagination take off.

Thanks, is one game on my backlog for a while now.
I did download AM2R but never got in the mood to play it. Guess now is a good time.

Super Metroid is good. If you have a Game Boy Advance (or some other way to play GBA games), you might consider also checking out Metroid: Zero Mission.

Also, if you haven't played it yet, there's a PlayStation game called Castlevania: Symphony of the Night that's worth checking out. While it isn't without its issues (inverted difficulty curve, not enough invincibility after getting hit (leading to the player being stunlocked), random stat gains at level up, and it being way too easy to break the game later on), it is still a good game, with nice music (I particularly like the themes for the Alchemy Lab, the Outer wall, and even the overused (later in the game) Finale Toccata), fun gameplay (balance issues aside), and it is one of the games that defined the genre (the other being Super Metroid).

As for your issues:
* Every connection between rooms is a door, and they are shown on the map.
* Later Metroid games (including Zero Mission) distinguish between items you've collected and those you haven't.

By the way, Super Metroid has some advanced techniques that allow you to do things out-of-order, or that allow you to entirely skip things you'd expect to be necessary. For example, it's possible (with the help of a few little glitches) to do a Reverse Boss Order run of the game, and there's also Low% runs of the game, where you try to beat the game with as few items as possible (you don't need both the Ice Beam and the Speed Boost; one of them is sufficient to beat the game). If you want to see some of those advanced techniques, you can go watch some speedruns of the game. Remember that first mini-boss, the one that just spawned spores (it's called Spore Spawn, I believe)? It's not necessary to fight that boss. Have you tried Zero Mission?

Hey there, hope you are doing fine! OK, I have a GBA, where can I get Zero Mission? :) I had my eye on that for some time in the PS store (to get it on the PS4 since I see no way of obtaining it in physical format). Probably in the next PS sales. Are you absolutely sure of that? Just yesterday I was looking at the map again. Every room was pink (i.e. visited) but still I could not see doors marked between adjacent rooms. Hello Skyr... I mean mr p_dawg :) I totally agree with you, what were they thinking especially when they turned Metroid into first-person 3D games?

Do you happen to have a valid (i.e. not shady) link to AM2R?

admittedly i thought zero mission was okay. it's actually quite good really. probably the second best official metroid title in my opinion.

my issue with it was my expectation really. i wanted the grittier art and somber tunes of super metroid. i thought the comic book vibe betrayed my expectation a bit (i didn't really care much for mecha ridley either). my kid likes it well enough, though not as much as super.

something about super metroid's art, physics, and music & sound effects combine to create something that feels organic, pulsing, mucusy; like going into a damp, dark cave deep underground only to find the way you came in blocked, to find the rocks slicked with water and lichens.

the game to come closest to this vibe for me has been AM2R ( it is SO good).

i wanted to like prime. but ultimately i didn't like the music and i didn't like the way the areas felt themed (fire, ice, ruins, etc). i'm aware all other other metroid titles have themed areas, but metroid prime was the first time i became acutely aware of it. it was like "oh hey a fire area, oh hey an ice area, oh hey etc." plus the puzzles actually felt like puzzles rather than environmental impediments, which i didn't like. in metroid titles before prime you didn't always realize you were dealing with an environmental puzzle until after you solved it. in prime you know know when the game is in puzzle mode. the flow was just far less organic.

honestly, the link i got it from was probably a bit shady. i'm not a huge stickler for such things tho (however i understand why one might be).

Check your PM for a link.

I also highly recommend Fusion and Zero Mission.

I've beat Super Metroid lots of times. It's definitely not a masterpiece and it definitely doesn't have huge maps.

That game is only about 5 - 6 hours long or something like that, and that's including going everywhere possible.

It's a decent game, but other than good play control and some good music, there's nothing all that great about it.

The issues I had with Metroid Prime were as follows:
* The first person perspective, as first person shooters are a genre I have negative interest in.
* The slower pace of the game. In 2D Metroid, you would never go that long without finding at least a minor upgrade (like a missile pack), but in Metroid Prime I could play for upwards of a half hour and not get a single upgrade. Similarly, new areas and boss fights came much less frequently.
* First person jumping sequences, and (unlike in, say, Daggerfall or Morrowind) there's no way around them. First person jumping sequences just don't work (except for grid-based games, obviously).

I probably enjoyed the NES Metroid (unlockable by linking Prime to Fusion with a special cable, and also unlockable in Zero Mission without needing anything other than the means to play the game) more than Prime itself.

(By the way, the NES Metroid does have a passwerd that would cause the game to glitch badly; supposedly in the emulated 3DS version it would actually cause Nintendo's emulator to lock up before Nintendo changed it so it would gracefilly crash. Also, the Japanese version, which was released on the Famicom Disk System, didn't have passwords in the first place.)

The best classic Metroid and the best Super Nintendo game.




Yeah, as you can see from my nick, i'm a huge SM fan.

One of the two Metroid games I've played. I had fun with it but I'd say it wasn't something I was in love with and over time, as I realized how highly placed on a pedestal it was among friends and people I talked to in general, I started to wonder if I was maybe missing something crucial about it that made it better than what my impression of it was.

The Metroid game I still kinda want to take a crack at, even if just once, is Other M though. Over the years, seeing people who consider it a bad Metroid game and blame Team Ninja for all its flaws and not Nintendo/etc. have made me curious as to whether it truly is "that bad" or if it's more owed to people not wanting to accept a change in the formula.

Other M is a good game with several bad ideas and ridiculous moments.

Pretty sure I've got it on some Reddit post.

The reason why...