Stalking corridors, armed to the teeth... (Super Metroid)

[Geoff D]

I may well be preaching to the converted here, but SM needs a thread of it's own.

From the eerie title screen, it's clear that Super Metroid is going to be a treat - even stripped down to minimal equipment, Samus feels weighty & as if she means business. You couldn't call her a weakling, regardless of the initial scrap with Ridley - it's a great primer for what's to come, immediately handing the player a vendetta that they can't wait to carry out.

I adore the use of sound & music in the game, never intrusive, always adding to the atmosphere - brooding, threatening, rolling onwards - it's a beautiful piece of sound design (is there an OST?) & a template for why music should never be an afterthought in a game, but an organic element.



With every missile expansion, energy cell or weapon discovered, Samus becomes more & more bad ass - tentatively feeling your way through new areas gives way to swarming in with an attitude & a grin; she is, quite literally, a one woman army & woe betide any organism that decides to stand up to her.

What's incredible is how natural searching for new items becomes - bombimg floors, shooting ceilings & so on very quickly becomes second nature; it never feels forced or deceptive - rather, it's an accepted principle of the universe the player inhabits.



The marriage of exploration & guns blazing is a deftly balanced feat - one never seems to give weight to the other for too long, & they're equally enjoyable parts. Backtracking is never laborious, because there are new toys to play with & new areas that can now be explored - you don't have to find those hidden items, you absolutely, positively want to.



SM has been well-documented over the last 12 years or so - to this day it remains a truly stunning game, with no rose-tinting necessary; it's well-paced, controls beautifully, is great to look at & listen to, & perhaps most importantly, fun. It's worth every superlative that's ever been levelled at it, & is one of a short list of games that can genuinely be called a masterpiece.

[Brats]

One of my favourite games of all time. The feeling of desolation makes the game imo, plus I love the idea of the game map gradually unwrapping itself.

Note that people must avoid the PAL version. Not only does it suffer from the usual PAL slowdoen and borders, but you have to suffer eitehr French or German sub-titles across the bottom of the screen .

[Rep]

How i love this game, shocking it has never recieved the re-make treatment. It took me so long to find everything, because of course the map didn't point out where the items and upgrades were. The good thing about the music is has been implemented into the Prime games, also there is a fan remix out there covering all the music in the game completly redone and mixed into one another, it's called Relics of the Chozo and it's definatly worth a listen. The best game of all time, Nuff said.

[112]

well in a way it has been remade if yah think about it as prime shares a lot with its past incarnations.

hafta agree SM is a classic, what i really luved about it was the hidden stuff that you find or accidentally find. Also them bosses! oh so exciting! When you recieve new equipments an then find out you could get to an area previously unavailbe because you could not jump high enough of did not have this or that.

Good thread to pay homage!

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[Rep]

well in a way it has been remade if yah think about it as prime shares a lot with its past incarnations.

A fully fledged hi-res DS or Cube remake would rawk, the latter zero chance though.

What i really luved about it was the hidden stuff that you find or accidentally find.

I still remember finding those missiles under Mother Brains "Metroid" tank by accident .

[Kubrick]

Great game and nice write-up. Definitely looking forward to getting this again. That title screen is one of my favourites ever. Probably just edges out Zero Mission on the GBA for me.

There is indeed a soundtrack Geoff - Ouch

[babs]

I would love to be as enthused about this game as everyone else, but it has the single greatest bugbear I have with games - backtracking.

You can dress it up how you like, but backtracking in a game is the thing most likely to make me turn a game off. It happened in SM, Resident evil (forever walking half a mile to find a box and take out some more ammo/herbs) and lots of others, and it drives me mental. I'm not sure why, I just find it so boring.

I will make the effort with SM one day when I have the time, but previous efforts have fallen short

[dataDave]

There is indeed a soundtrack Geoff - Ouch

Yep. I have that.

[Klatrymadon]

Good thread. I still hold Super Metroid as the best videogame ever made, despite my slavish hori/vertical shooter fixation!

If there's one thing I appreciate about Super Metroid all the more in the modern context (disregarding the phenomal, matchless strength of its atmosphere, music, gameplay and art direction for a moment), it's the unobtrusive and benign methods it uses to stir emotion in the player. No clunky dialogue, no cutscenes; the cutscenes liberally tossed around in the Primes frankly insult our intelligence.

"Look, some nasties jumping out from behind some crates! We thought you might **** your pants if it happened right in front of you, so we've de-fanged the viper by allowing you pre-empt the whole situation with a nice pulled-back wide-shot."

The beauty of Super Metroid's narrative is that it's all told through visual cues and in-game setpieces that don't take Samus out of your control at all. A common suggestion is that this is more to do with technical limitations (i.e.: not being able to use cutscenes) than artistic choice, but I find this view flippant and, again, insulting. Certainly, it may have been handled differently if SM were made in 2004, but that's surely more a sign of our rubbish times than of any outmoding of SM's presentation...?

Indeed, as pretentious as it may sound, Super Metroid has such strong, emotive and self-contained art direction that it doesn't need any obtuse dialogue to get across its story and its profound, underlying maternal themes.

I really wish the guys at Retro would go and play the Half-Life games, as those games more or less took the baton and ran with it in terms of using clever, unintrusive setpieces.

Also, absolutely everything in Super Metroid is, undeniably, as it was intended. You may have your own niggles with it, but they're never mistakes or examples of laziness. Its controls are more fluent and intuitive than anything you're likely to pick up this year, its rooms are all meticulously designed and interlinked, its musical score is at once so fitting and transcendental it makes me think its full splendour is beyond the ken of men... I could go on all day. There's just a simple truth about this game and an astonishingly admirable work ethic behind it all. It was inevitable that my post would be more a criticism of modern games than a lauding of Super Met, but it is completely free of any of those little cynicisms, intelligence-insulters, hackneyed "seen it all before" puzzles or setpieces, or unimaginative gameplay-undermining inventory screens that plague so much of what's on offer today. In this sense, anyone who overlooks it because it appears 'old' really doesn't know what they're missing. It's still one of the most forward-thinking games around. The fact that it takes time out of its schedule to delight you with so many 'little touches' (bugs on the walls that scatter as you draw near, the dead fellow at Kraid's lair, the orange Geemer, etc) further puts a lot of modern, bare-bones, "let's just get it shipped out" games to shame.

The only recent title I can think of that exhibits a similar completeness of vision is Shadow of the Colossus, and while the two games have little in common, I think this shows the extent to which Super Metroid was ahead of its time. It feels more like a modern, intelligent, relevant work of art than absolutely everything on store shelves today, 12 years later.

well in a way it has been remade if yah think about it as prime shares a lot with its past incarnations.

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I can't agree with that, matey. There are an absolute slew of things that Prime did well in terms of the Metroid formula, but also a shocking amount of things it nonchalantly forgot about. Where is the emphasis on oppressive, subterranean, biological environments? Where is the appropriately haunting, avant-garde soundtrack to complement these environments, that never draws attention to itself but still has you listening to it every single day? Does a cheery whistle-based piece of music in any way enhance the experience of exploring a dilapidated ancient temple? Why are there crates all over the place? These belong in lesser games with less grandiose ideas. Where is Samus' agility and speed? She feels like she's wearing one of those old diving suits. Where are the combinable weapons and balanced upgrades that give you the now-traditional feeling of being more powerful than any of your enemies, and of being able to bolt through any previous area unharmed? Combat-oriented difficulty isn't really what Metroid's about. I could waffle all day about that stuff, though. The Primes are undoubtedly some of the best games of this generation, but to say that the first one even comes close to being like Super Metroid is hard to swallow, for me...

Super Metroid just got everything right, and I'll never fathom why the newer titles (2D and 3D) have deviated so far from its example. There are good reasons for its guaranteed place in any kind of 'top 10' list.

All hail Super Metroid!

[Geoff D]

There is indeed a soundtrack Geoff - Ouch

Woah. That's just a little out of my price range... :/

[112]

Why the bloody hell is that soundtrack so expensive? Stupid Ebay!

Oh and Klatrymadon, if yah put it that way then i guess you have a point, you have to bare in mind that the move to 1st person and 3D was a big task in itself, to completley replicate everything about SM would have been even harder. But the way you put yah point across has jus made me wanna go home and play this beast! Damn you and your way with words!

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[Big Seany]

Has to be in my top five in rotation with Symphony of The Night. Even the little jingle when you restart a saved game gives me the goosebumps treatment. The title screen is, as everyone agrees with, awesome. And the backtracking is part of the appeal as you gain new abilities it is just soooo satisfying. Fans not happy with Prime's 3d take on the series should try The Divide: Enemies Within on the US PS1. A 3d Metroid clone that myself and Jon Szczepaniak have been known to rave about.

[Kubrick]

Why the bloody hell is that soundtrack so expensive? Stupid Ebay!

Because the seller is a scumbag. AVOID!

[Klatrymadon]

you have to bare in mind that the move to 1st person and 3D was a big task in itself

Oh aye, the amount of stuff they did manage to faithfully bring into the 3D world is admirable, and there are a few things that just wouldn't work well anyway, but I think my main problem with Prime was that it didn't give newcomers a good idea of what to expect from the series, which is probably why so many people hated Echoes even though it was far more Metroidy.

[112]

heh, all this talk of metroid has got me listening to the couple of tracks i have on me ipod at the mo...........

Seany you right, i can feel them goose bumps! Ahh bliss................. i feel 13 all over again........... How bloody good was the snes at churning that level of sound through them chips? bloody brillaint!

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