|
I bounced off of Hollow Knight, then came back to it during pandemic when I was bored and had nothing but time to kill and it was fine. The huge world with limited covenience/QoL features definitely help evoke a certain mood but the time investment is a real killer.
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2022 23:21
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 03:04 |
|
|
Bust Rodd posted:All of the big alien monster bosses are harder than Raven Beak, IMO I took more tries on Raven Beak than on all of the big alien monster fights combined (and I think the attempts on Raven Beak generally took longer, too.)
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2022 20:25
|
|
|
Zulily Zoetrope posted:The phantom cloak is actually really good for dealing with EMMIs, but you need to pop it and move, not hide. I think the game does a pretty good job of communicating that EMMIs are constantly homing in on your last known location, but from the way people describe them, I may be in the minority there. I just didn't find a lot of places where it seemed all that useful compared to just ducking around platforms. With the slow movement you couldn't really afford to be in their sight for very long anyhow, so all it was really good for was a tiny extra grace window that never seemed like it was worth the hassle.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2022 01:20
|
|
|
The moment where Samus instantly snaps from losing consciousness and powering down to I AM THE METROID GOD QUEEN did fall a bit flat for me tbh. I think it works in the big picture as the culmination of the entire game's story arc, but the cutscene doesn't really do a very good job selling it.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 1, 2022 18:51
|
|
|
No Dignity posted:The original still looks so good upressed to 4k that I'm actually not too bothered about picking up up straight away
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2023 00:03
|
|
|
I think Dread's bosses are largely meaner than most Metroid bosses but more forgiving than, say, Hollow Knight's bosses, and even Hollow Knight's bosses are very beatable without a bunch of practice runs. I am not bragging about how good I am, I ate poo poo plenty on Hollow Knight (and even a few of Dread's bosses) but there's nothing fundamentally unfair about either of them. Dread isn't even particularly mean with e.g. fake-out tells, although it does sprinkle some in.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2023 02:29
|
|
|
Yup, there was a discussion about Metroid development in the ROM hacking thread the other day and if you go reading interviews about the old Metroid team, part of the reason there was such a drought of Metroid games was that absolutely nobody was confident they could follow Super Metroid's act (including Sakamoto.)
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2023 20:13
|
|
|
CharlestheHammer posted:I would not call Samus afraid in dread, or any game outside Other M so I think that’s your weird issue there This is arguably part of the dissonance--things like the EMMI are designed to make the player feel helpless, vulnerable, and afraid, but Samus just plunges in with almost suicidal abandon.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2023 03:09
|
|
|
MokBa posted:Now that I'm okay with *monkey's paw curls* it's the spiritual successor to Other M and every time Samus sees her reflection there's a cutscene of her sobbing in panic
|
|
#
¿
Feb 15, 2023 01:46
|
|
|
The GBA control scheme feels a little smoother IMO but Super holds up extremely well and doesn't really need any facelifts unless you're super into the GBA games.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 21, 2023 16:54
|
|
|
icantfindaname posted:Almost done replaying Super Metroid for the first time in like 10 years. This game is much breezier than I remembered, and/or I must have some muscle memory left over from then. I'm playing it with a map of secrets, so that may be part of it. I feel like the initial dive down to Norfair then back to the Wrecked Ship is amazing, 10/10, but it turns into much more of a slog afterwards. Maridia wasn't that bad but again I'm using a map, I can't imagine what trying to play this blind would be like. Going back to Brinstar for item collection was sort of a slog too. I have killed Draygon and got the Plasma beam, I may just go kill Ridley and end the game now and not bother with any more item collection I kind of appreciate that the game throws in a big mazelike area to mix things up, and I like having it in a very cavernous mellow environment. Kind of sucks that there's gently caress all to collect other than ammo upgrades and basically everything left is gated by Draygon, so your reward for exploring is... Spring Ball? Yeah, lame. The grey door on plasma beam is a bullshit move.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 23, 2023 00:02
|
|
|
ExcessBLarg! posted:Fusion is the exact opposite of that. It has a scripted events system--the first title in the Metroid series to have one--that literally changes the map around you.  Technically that would be Metroid 2
|
|
#
¿
Mar 3, 2023 17:02
|
|
|
ExcessBLarg! posted:Err, fine, yes. I was getting at the Fusion system changes the actual structure of rooms, not just the presence of posion water/purple goo. Didn't the Omega Metroid reveal do that? It's been forever since I played it, so I might be misremembering.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 3, 2023 17:44
|
|
|
My bad too then, I remembered the looping bit but I was thinking it actually added some other sort of obstacle. Maybe I should replay it now that it's on Switch, it was never my favorite Metroid but at least it's short and straightforward.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 3, 2023 18:18
|
|
|
At least Brinstar has some juicy upgrades (and the relatively accessible power bomb sequence break), Maridia is just ammo upgrades for days.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 3, 2023 20:35
|
|
|
Velius posted:I absolutely love sequence breaking and super Metroid is awesome for it. Shine spark, hell runs and wall jumping let you do all sorts of crazy stuff. The biggest unrecoverable situation, I believe, is if you get to the Maridia boss without gravity suit, you can’t get out without weird glitches or preplanned glitching. But I think even that save room can be escaped without anything glitchy back to the rest of the game. The "easiest" way is to skip the charge beam and save past the point of no return in Tourian without enough ammo tanks to kill Mother Brain. (I say "easiest", because it requires no special skills, but it does require you to ignore the most obvious breakable block in the entire game.)
|
|
#
¿
Mar 4, 2023 18:30
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:I think a lot of early Nintendo games have the idea that players who had been playing the game forever would try literally anything and everything over time to wring all the secrets out of a game. Like the original Zelda kinda expects you to bomb every tile in the overworld to find all its secrets. Tower of Druaga cast a long shadow over the Japanese video game industry.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 4, 2023 19:08
|
|
|
My memories of Metroid II are mostly being very monotonous more than anything. The first two metroid forms aren't actually very threatening or exciting, but they're tucked away all over the place, so hunting them down is more of a chore than anything. When the zetas show up it briefly becomes very intense, but there are only a few of them and the omegas are kind of a dud despite a very clever introduction. Also, that final ice beam is easily accessible before you encounter the OG metroids and anyone who's played a Metroid before is going to understand the implications immediately. The gauntlet you ran wasn't intentional, you just picked left instead of right and didn't check out the road untaken. The ending was legitimately cool though, especially for games of that era. It probably does kind of get a bad rap, but I think every main line Metroid other than M is better. It's certainly a much more fully realized game than Metroid I but that's about all that I can give it.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 13, 2023 02:16
|
|
|
Nikumatic posted:i have not played other m but even so i think i like it better than samus returns Haha, no. I understand why you might think so but you're going to just have to trust me on this one.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 14, 2023 03:34
|
|
|
TaurusOxford posted:The whole authorization stuff and Samus' PTSD bit with Ridley would have actually worked had Other M been a prequel where she was still in the Galactic Federation. b-but THE BABY ...actually TBH even that could have worked, just have young Samus pining for a family of her own and lamenting that her path means she will never get to experience that kind of bond herself, bing bang boom you get poignant dramatic irony
|
|
#
¿
Mar 14, 2023 15:58
|
|
|
Kid Icarus: Uprising had a similar minimalistic control scheme (minus the motion controls) and while I wouldn't call it good by any stretch of the imagination I think it demonstrates how to pull it off and make it functional (mostly by having a dodge with a real cooldown and a finite number of invincibility frames.)
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2023 17:51
|
|
|
The spider was a pretty rude surprise since it came down pretty fast and did a couple energy tanks out of the blue if it caught you, but morphballing in the corner trivializes it. Nightmare was just a fucker though.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 19, 2023 16:54
|
|
|
Does Dread have a lot of that? Mostly I remember obstacles that are naturally set up to be one-way only, e.g. you grapple a big rock out of the way to unblock the way forward and it settles into a spot where it blocks the way backwards. Although in some respects that's even worse, because if you try backtracking there's no immediately obvious new obstacle in the way, it just looks like normal level geometry. Fusion does have some of the strongest environmental puzzle solving of the series, which I think did a great job of making the most of the linear nature. But Dread has the benefit both of built-in Zero Mission style sequence breaks, and physics tricks enabling genuinely unintended breaks. Fusion's exploration was probably stronger for the first play through but Dread has replayability, and that's what the hardcore fans are looking for.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2023 06:50
|
|
|
ExcessBLarg! posted:Ugh, I'm finding Other M a real slog to get through. Aside from the awful story and everything Adam, it doesn't play like any other Metroid game either. No drops from enemies? No way to restore health between save rooms? I guess the combat is interesting, but I prefer the gun play of every other Metroid title. Good news! The combat stops being interesting when you realize that you can smash the d-pad repeatedly to make yourself invincible.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 10, 2023 15:34
|
|
|
Shine posted:FIGMA BALLS No, unfortunately it does not have morph ball capability.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 24, 2023 18:20
|
|
|
Trying to figure out which branch of a metroid nest you haven't cleared out yet gets to be a real headache sometimes, the standard Metroid map would be a massive QoL improvement.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 1, 2024 23:22
|
|
|
ChaseSP posted:It's gonna turn out that Samus is both part Metroid AND part X in the next game to make the bloodwork even more absurd. Samus has two different suits with different sets of powerups and switches between them at specific event points, hire me nintendo
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2024 20:43
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:At the end of Metroid Fusion Samus has to fight an Omega Metroid, and SA-X either fuses with Samus to help her kill it (as I interpreted it) or it just gives its energy to Samus to help her beat it like the Baby Metroid did in Super Metroid. Either way, it gives her the ability to use the Ice Beam again. When Quiet Robe first gets absorbed by the X he can still talk and operate computers, so the X parasite is clearly able to access some of his memories and personality, but he immediately uses it to try to kill Samus so the X still seems to be in the driver's seat. I think the end sequence is supposed to reflect some level of gestalt intelligence rather than Quiet Beak wresting control back altogether; had the planet not been about to explode it presumably would have kept fighting, but like the SA-X at the end of Fusion when it realized it was hosed it became willing to throw in with Samus, so Quiet Beak got to show through more.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2024 00:03
|
|
|
Xenomrph posted:So in OG Metroid 2 the way you switch between beams is by going back and actually re-finding the beam you want to switch to, right? Slight spoilers: One of the last exploration areas has a bunch of beam rooms next to each other where you can pick whatever you want. Also, the one time in the endgame when you need a specific beam to progress it's available right before you need it, if you poke around a bit. So you can just grab the latest beam without having to worry about actually backtracking for beams.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2024 21:03
|
|
|
It depends on if you mean "exploration" as in "finding all the big things" or "exploration" as in "poking every goddamn nook and cranny." Hollow Knight is hugely rewarding for the former, not so much for the latter.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2024 02:03
|
|
|
Space jump and shinespark are pretty janky tbf but I'll still never understand people who don't "get" Metroid walljumping.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2024 14:44
|
|
|
Yeah, Super Metroid came out relatively late in the SNES era and most big titles had pivoted away from bullshit difficulty, Nintendo even more than most. SMB3 and SMW were vastly easier than SMB1 (let alone the original "Lost Levels" SMB2.) Nintendo can and did design games to be accessible and beatable (if not necessarily easily) for casual players. Super Metroid's design demonstrates very clear and deliberate difficulty tuning, probably best illustrated by the major boss battles. Every major boss is noticeably harder than the last one despite your growing powerup collection, until you get to Mother Brain, who is primarily a cinematic battle and is much easier than most of the rest. There's enough going on that you can't just sleepwalk through the fight and it feels much more fraught than it actually is, but the game is very obviously designed so that having made it this far it's not really going to try to stop you from seeing the end.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 12, 2024 07:20
|
|
|
Yeah, murdering the last one in a cutscene was nice but not quite the same. They always could have done both; have a real fight against the penultimate one to show how far you've come, then have one more that just gets deleted without a fight to show you've gone even further beyond.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 13, 2024 06:26
|
|
|
SettingSun posted:I can't really find a defense for the weapon switching. Everything else being adjustable saves the rest of the controls from criticism. 
|
|
#
¿
Feb 2, 2024 15:46
|
|
|
Bleck posted:^ If exploration is a game's entire purpose then the exploration should be fun, interesting, and rewarding, none of which describe navigating a monochromatic maze of corridors largely copy & pasted from the same repeating chunks.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 4, 2024 04:45
|
|
|
Wait, am I in the hallway that looks like this, or the identical hallway that looks like this next to that one, or the other identical hallway that looks like this a couple screens away? It's a good thing this game is optimized for mapless navigation or this might be irritating. EDIT: granted it only really gets bad a couple times in the game but it's still a noticeable flaw
|
|
#
¿
Feb 4, 2024 06:00
|
|
|
Most people intuitively grasp the basic logic of the main trunk and sub-zones--that's the whole point, if it really needed explaining it would not be very useful. The main source of navigation frustrations are within the larger metroid nest areas, which are much larger than 2-5 rooms and do in fact branch and loop back on themselves. Worse, unlike Metroid 1 room connections cannot always be mapped out 1:1 in literal space even within the same zone so keeping track of your location by reckoning distances will simply fail sometimes due to impossible room connections. There are some points in the game where you will walk into a room that you've been in before that you literally have no way of knowing that you've been in before, because it is identical to other rooms, and you arrived there via an impossible warp. I beat the game the first time without ever looking at a map and I assure you it was not one of the best parts of the game.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 4, 2024 06:35
|
|
|
It can simultaneously be true that old school game designers made careful, thoughtful decisions and also that their works are not flawlessly perfect beyond all criticism. Making Metroid 2 work at all is quite an achievement; a straight clone of Metroid 1 with the Gameboy's color limitations and screen size would have been pretty terrible and you can trace a lot of very clever adaptations they made. If you want to zoom out and look at the big picture, I think the broader issue is less about the map and more about the metroid hunting just not being interesting. The first two dozen metroids are the same two extremely mediocre boss fights, which you reach by slogging through very empty and repetitive areas. For the first two-thirds of the game the game's nominal raison d'etre is presented as a tedious collectathon that provides little in the way of challenge or rewards, not even so much as a random missile tank to discover in most of the metroid lairs. There's a reason most players wear out their patience trying to hunt them all down and want a map to get it over with faster. The ruins segments by contrast present delightful puzzles that reward your perseverance with huge, immediate (even excessive) payoffs and I agree that solving them without a map is a great experience.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2024 03:38
|
|
|
Even if it's "just" a quality of life feature it's still a pain point. "I can squeeze in an extra charm point, but only if I want to spend extra time squinting at the map trying to figure out if I'm reading the landmarks correctly" isn't a particularly interesting balance trade-off. You can design a game to evoke different feelings and they're not always meant to be entirely fun or pleasant, but just because you can create a specific experience does not mean that experience is worthwhile. A game being hard and having frustrating and time-consuming experiences is not itself a problem, but it needs to feel like it's worth it. If a common reaction is to an experience is "I wish I had spent less time doing that" then you've probably missed the mark.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2024 19:03
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 03:04 |
|
|
Consider the original Metroid, too. It was a top 20 seller for its console and outsold Metroid 2 despite having a smaller console base to work with. Lots of people did lose themselves for dozens of hours in it, but even most of the Metroid 2 defenders ITT agree that Metroid is not a good game, which seems to support ImpAtom's post. Once you acknowledge that point, it all comes down to matters of degree. Metroid 2 unquestionably made mapless navigation a lot more entertaining than Metroid 1, and I would go so far as to agree that most of the time it's actually a blast: the broadly linear nature makes most of the navigation pretty frictionless, and a lot of navigational obstacles are designed as fun puzzles so the frustration of being stymied by the occasional dead end are usually outweighed by the satisfaction of figuring out the way forward. But there are some sections that are just tedious, and while they're not a huge part of the play time they stand out in large part because the rest of the game does such a good job of making exploration either straightforward or interesting. The good parts of Metroid 2 demonstrate that it can work perfectly fine without a map, so you can argue that the flaw is a failing of level design rather than lacking an in-game map. But from a player's perspective the easiest way to compensate for that issue is to pull up a map when you need one.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2024 21:26
|
|