Can we talk about the 2D Metroid games...

Can we talk about the 2D Metroid games? I've played Super Metroid two years ago and recently finished Zero Mission and Fusion for the first time.

Super Metroid is really impressive and far ahead of its time. I found the scripted sequences to be especially noteworthy, they're not something you'd expect from a SNES game. Crocomire's skeleton emerging from the lava right after you beat him managed to scare me.
I probably like Super Metroid the most out of the three, it's the most polished one and has the biggest map if I remember correctly. Best bosses, too.

Zero Mission is surprisingly good, I expected less. At first I was bugged by the waypoints that show you where you have to go, but as the game progressed I was glad to have them because I'd have probably spent hours wandering around aimlessly.

Fusion was a pretty big disappointment for me. I hate how the story is constantly being shoved in your face, a bit subtlety would've done wonders. Briefing rooms that tell you exactly what to do and where to go are a horrible idea and make the game feel extremely linear and railroaded. Just stop bothering me and let me play the damn game.
Speaking of linearity, the world design sucks. There's a hub that leads you to six different areas that aren't interconnected which makes the game feel way less open than Super Metroid and Zero Mission. The areas are terribly uninspired, too. Water World, Fire World, Night World… what is this, a fucking Mario game?
Bosses aren't noteworthy either. Nightmare is pretty decent, I guess.

I've probably been a bit harsh on Fusion, it sounds like I hated it. It was alright, I bothered finishing it after all, but I expected it to be on par with the other two.
Opinions on the series?

I'm going to play through the Prime series next. Only played the original Prime on the GCN when it came out, looking forward to see how the games compare to the 2D Metroids. Also looking forward to finally play it with M+KB instead of awkwardly fiddling around with gamepad FPS controls.

X-Fusion is going to be good.

First time hearing about it, looks interesting. I remember reading about a Super Metroid hack years ago, is the modding scene lively? Any mods worth playing?

Fusion reimagined in Super Metroid. Still ongoing as well if thread on metroidconstruction is anything to go by.

Got Super Metroid Zero Mission (or something named similar) and Hyper Metroid as well for ROMhacks.

AM2R for Metroid 2 remake.

That is going to be a horrible fucking experience, do not do that.

Metroid 1 is meh, ok for its time and platform, but it won't be fun today.

Metroid 2 I didn't play. What the fuck was even the platform it was on?

Super Metroid is good. It's overrated, for some reason people turn a blind eye on its faults, but overall it's a good game.

Metroid Zero Mission is exceptional, it fixed whatever problems Super had - unmarked points of no return, inconsistencies in breakable/passable walls, awkward controls, all of it. That being said difficulty is a bit low. Or rather too low.

Metroid Fusion is dog shit. I don't even want to talk about it. Only highlight were bosses, but that's about it.

I'm interested in Another Metroid Remake or whatever it was called, basically Metroid 2 on Zero-like engine or some shit. How is it going?

Wtf, you can't play prime 1 or 2 with standard FPS mouse controls, all of the combat is designed around lock-on dodge-jumping.
They're like first-person legend of zelda games, and that's how they're supposed to be.

How can you be honestly trying to form a genuine opinion of these games and not play them vanilla?
I wouldn't even go with the Wii rerelease for my first playthroughs of Prime 1 & 2.

Prime 3 was designed with standard fps controls, you actually NEED a mouse for that one.

Fusion wasn't a bad game, but it was incredibly linear. It did have good moments of tension throughout.

I also like Zero Mission the most, I think, because of how tight everything feels. Unfortunately, my chief complaint is that the ideal speedrunning route was more or less preplanned (speed booster, early super missiles, get screw attack, and ice beam, fuck up ridley then kraid, you've pretty much won by this point). There's also very specific passages that are well-hidden for this purpose.

Super Metroid is possibly my most favorite game, there's very very few design flaws or mistakes, everything is executed perfectly.
Zero Mission is also a great game, and has a lot more in store for sequence breaking and high level strategies (pic related)
Fusion threw away linearity and picked up on story, which sounds bad but wasn't as bad as it could have been cough cough, given the story was pretty great
You should definitely play 1 and 2, both are good games despite the hardware flaws that make them feel unplayable in CURRENT_YEAR

How the fuck are you going to do that? Play it the way it's meant to be played, or go with the Trilogy with the wii controller
Anyways, as far as Prime goes, 2 > 1 > 3
Generally everyone agrees that P3 is shit, but some like 1 more than 2. Still play them all


Game Boy. Not color. Shitty screen resolution means Samus takes up 40% of it. That doesn't make it a bad game, but it is much harder to get into

Also OP, if you know where to go, you can ignore the statues.

And I don't mean "where they point you". There are ways to completely bypass everything, past the first statue.

You unlock it in Zero Mission after you beat it. Played a few minutes and it's nearly impossible to "go back" to it after playing the remake, the controls are so much better.


Gameboy. Read up on it and it was the worst received out of the whole series so I decided to skip it. Not terribly excited to emulate a GB game anyway.


Difficulty is a problem in every Metroid game I've played, they're piss-easy. You don't even have to learn the boss patterns because they can't kill you anyway. I think there's a special Hard difficulty setting in Zero Mission that changes enemy placement and reduces the max health you gain from power-ups, so that might force you to pay a little bit attention.


I always thought many people considered Fusion to be the high point of the series. Wouldn't even say the bosses are exceptionally great, Nightmare and possibly Ridley are the only decent ones.

Easy there, I already played the first Prime game vanilla when it came out, thought I'd try something new for a second playthrough.
So it's better to go with the original GCN releases of Prime 1 and 2? Never touched the Wii remakes.

Skipping 1 and 2 is a pretty bitch move, OP, especially if you're also complaining the games are too easy.

No.
Literally no one has said that.
The approval of Fusion ranges from "it's shit" to "it's disgraceful to Super Metroid, but good as it's own action/adventure game."

Come on now, everyone knows that's not true
it's not about beating it in the first place, it's about beating it as fast as possible. why the fuck else does the ending change based off your time?

The light gun controls aren't even traditional light gun controls, so there's no way to emulate them with traditional mouse look anyway. Have you played Arx Fatalis or any early dungeon-crawler? It's like that. Camera movement isn't 1:1 with the remote, the camera pans as soon as you approach the edge of the screen, and there are several settings for how large the deadzone is. If you need to pan the camera in the other direction, once the cursor starts moving, the camera won't pan in the other direction until the mouse passes the halfway point on the screen and enters the other zone where it affects the camera. I have absolutely no idea why so many people prefer the Trilogy controls, they are objectively inferior to the original controls and nowhere near a good emulation of typical FPS controls.

Knock yourself out and try something new if you'd like, but they're bad.

I thought Zero Mission was a remake of the original Metroid. Should I still play the original?
I'll give Metroid 2 a shot. At least I've got some nostalgia for the system, the original GB was the first videogame platform I got.


I'm downloading the trilogy right now, I planned on playing through the whole series with M+KB because I read somewhere that it supposedly works really well for the games.

Amazing gif, by the way.


Are those alternative paths intended to be used by experienced players or are those weird sequence breaks?


Hey, I'm not complaining, just stating a fact. I'm gonna start playing 2 right now.

If you change the settings to Advanced it seriously tightens up the deadzone on camera movement.
I had read somewherw at launch that "advanced" was the best way to play, but you had to train your hand to know where the center was quickly and naturally and not stray off target.
I played it that way and it made me really like controls, it was almost as good as mouse.

Look there, having story in a game like this is fine.
Zero mission has story, plenty of Metroid copycat exploration platformers have stories, and dialogues and all that.

Except Fusion, a metroid game of all things, won't shut the fuck up about its story. It won't fucking let go back and explore areas you want. It will keep shoving cut-scenes and walls of texts up your ass until you choke.
I dropped not because of some boss, not because of some hard platforming sequence, I fucking dropped it when some shitty ass cut-scene interrupted right where I was doing something and forced me down next area and didn't let me fucking go back, because guess what nigger story time.

I was extremely annoyed by the point of no return in Super, when I hit it the first time, but ok, it's fine, it's an old game, it's on SNES, it was a pioneer of the entire fucking genre, and the first one that didn't suck and wasn't overtly simplistic.

But shit Fusion pulled on me, especially after all this years of video games evolution, after being a Game Boy motherfucking Advance game, after being a fucking METROID game, triggered me so hard, so fucking hard, I guess you can guess just how fucking hard, even after all this years I'm buttmad about it.

Fusion is absolute fucking dog shit, disgrace to the genre and to the franchise, I don't care if Metroid died as an IP, in fact if that means the don't get any more garbage under Metroid name, I'm glad it died.

Oh wait.

Calling Zero Mission a "remake" is a pretty loose definition of the term, it doesn't have much to do with the original in any way. They roughly sort of share the same map design.


Advanced is even worse because then the camera drifts lazily unless the cursor is in the exact center of the screen, and changing the direction of the camera will always overshoot into the other movement zone. You can't possibly think that's just as good as a mouse in any other FPS.

Yes, it's a remake, but more like Tomb Raider 2013 than REmake. Play the original.

Did you not 100% them? I didn't like Zero Mssion at all until I 100%ed it, the hidden Items are nuts. That's also where all of Fusion's shortcuts are hiding.

I got pretty good with it.
And obviously it's not as good as a mouse, that wasn't what I said.

that one ending pic of Samus at the bar with the chozo bartender is my favorite of the zero mission ending pics. Zero Mission in general was comfy as hell but that ending pic is just super comfy for me.

Near the end of the game Samus wonders whether a real human bean would've been more emotional then the AI she's talking to. Really makes you think, huh? A true shame you missed this shakespearean moment.


No, I got ~55% item completion rate in Zero Mission and below 50% in Fusion. I thought all the items you could find were bomb, missile and energy power-ups. Are there hidden special items in the game? I'm probably gonna replay it soon and shoot for 100% completion rate.


Metroid 2 is decent, by the way. I'm sure it was great for its time, but I'm not enjoying myself a whole lot. I'll call it quits for now and try again tomorrow, my first impression is that I'd rather play something else.

Well sure, they're all just weapon expansions, but the way they're hidden are mostly platforming puzzles like that gif.

Fusion has a real metroid game beneath all the linearity and scripted sequences.


Hell yeah metroid is comfy


Every Metroid should be played at least 3 times: normally, for completion, and for speed.

Yeah, so fucking original, totally worth suffering through that shit show.

Try it out.

For example, there's a tunnel that you need the long beam to get past. There's actually shot-breakable blocks on the top right of it. You can also get the Varia Suit as soon as you get the Ice Beam, and all that needs is precise bomb jumping (or more easily, the high jump boots, ledge grip, and wall jumping)

If you havent found 100% by obsessively powerbombing everything, you'll never find some of these passages.

I think the X infiltrated Samus's new ship and got inside Adam's AI core - remember that she was away from the ship for a long time during the power outage, and that the X has been shown on 3 separate occasions interfacing with technology