Metroid Appreciation Thread - Come Inside and Talk About All Things Metroid

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Robbo-92
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PostRe: Metroid Appreciation Thread - Come Inside and Talk About All Things Metroid
by Robbo-92 » Fri Jan 25, 2019 9:06 pm

Probably for the best, at least it shows they care about Metroid and don’t want another Federation Force backlash (although I never actually played that game, was it any good?).

I wonder if Retro has the staffing levels to develop 2 games at once or if whatever they were working on has now been scrapped as well in place of Metroid Prime 4.

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PostRe: Metroid Appreciation Thread - Come Inside and Talk About All Things Metroid
by Green Gecko » Sat Jan 26, 2019 2:14 am

That's fine I can just keep saving for a switch lol.

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PostRe: Metroid Appreciation Thread - Come Inside and Talk About All Things Metroid
by deathofcows » Sat Jan 26, 2019 5:18 am

I'm semi-pleased that Retro are back at the helm, but semi-unsure after the much touted Tropical Freeze felt so woolly and bland to me.

Cautious Hype right here.

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PostRe: Metroid Appreciation Thread - Come Inside and Talk About All Things Metroid
by Alvin Flummux » Sat Jan 26, 2019 5:48 am

Retro being in charge again is good, but I do worry that the current team not resembling that which made the original trilogy will impact its quality.

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PostRe: Metroid Appreciation Thread - Come Inside and Talk About All Things Metroid
by Victor Mildew » Sat Jan 26, 2019 7:13 am

Botw style alien planet please

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PostRe: Metroid Appreciation Thread - Come Inside and Talk About All Things Metroid
by Alvin Flummux » Sat Jan 26, 2019 3:55 pm

It's going to be fascinating to see what Metroid Prime 4 was going to look like, when those assets eventually leak.

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PostRe: Metroid Appreciation Thread - Come Inside and Talk About All Things Metroid
by Green Gecko » Mon Jan 28, 2019 3:51 am

After 14 years I finally strawberry floating beat the alpha blogg in mp2. The main trouble with that is unless you follow your tracks right to save without closing off the save point after all the portal gooseberry fool to open the last lock/switch that opens that sub boss, you have to repeat about 15 minutes of gameplay each try, and you have a very narrow window to fire a super missile or charged dark beam and dash twice before it rams you, and not miss, over and over again. One hit from that ramming attack takes of almost an entire energy tank, which is ridiculous for a giant strawberry floating giant fish. I strawberry floating hated that thing so much.

This game is a massive dick for save locations and/or backtracking loops. Especially the way portals between light and dark are not constant (but sometimes are in a few locations) so you can end up retracing your steps so much to get the missile upgrades you need.

I beat the grapple guardian first try and now it looks like I'm meant to look for the light suit going by what the last luminoth projection said.

Game upsets and wigs me out for some reason a lot more than mp1 but should hopefully defeat it this year. The dark enemies are a bitch and just very fuck-offy for some reason. It still has the pull of the first game but there's no real nice locations so it feels more oppressive and more dreadful, to the extent it almost isn't fun. I think it's the closest Metroid has come to a horror aesthetic.

It's basically prime 2: harder, with Extra Backtracking. You know that dread you felt fighting Metroid Prime? Yeah let's take that final section and make a whole game. I've heard a lot about some of the bosses being absolutely murderous in this so that I was stuck on one sub boss for so long was not encouraging, yet I was missing out on not one but two of my favourite franchise next to Zelda probably for such a ridiculous length of time. I want to finish mp2 before I get further into MP3. I've completed Other M for god's sake (as well as Super Metroid) in the meantime. They really should have tweaked the difficulty a bit better with less emphasis on enemies ramming and jumping at you, filling the screen with electricity and blocking movement with animation frames etc. Samus's tank controls and the slowness of movement do age the game a bit, gooseberry fool feels right up in your face but that's part of the design, it's just such an aggressive game.

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PostRe: Metroid Appreciation Thread - Come Inside and Talk About All Things Metroid
by Drumstick » Mon Jan 28, 2019 8:19 am

Green Gecko wrote:standard GG epic post

Hate to break it to you but you've got a harder boss fight coming in the very near future. And I don't mean an end of game one.

Green Gecko wrote:This game is a massive dick for save locations and/or backtracking loops. Especially the way portals between light and dark are not constant (but sometimes are in a few locations) so you can end up retracing your steps so much to get the missile upgrades you need.

It still has the pull of the first game but there's no real nice locations so it feels more oppressive and more dreadful, to the extent it almost isn't fun. I think it's the closest Metroid has come to a horror aesthetic.

It's basically prime 2: harder, with Extra Backtracking. You know that dread you felt fighting Metroid Prime? Yeah let's take that final section and make a whole game. I've heard a lot about some of the bosses being absolutely murderous in this so that I was stuck on one sub boss for so long was not encouraging, yet I was missing out on not one but two of my favourite franchise next to Zelda probably for such a ridiculous length of time.

Can't really disagree with any of that. One of the reasons Prime was such a treat was because its locations are so varied and distinguished. Locations in Echoes aren't and they all seem rather miserly. Doesn't help that half the game is submerged in a cloud of purple dread either.

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PostRe: Metroid Appreciation Thread - Come Inside and Talk About All Things Metroid
by Green Gecko » Mon Jan 28, 2019 8:06 pm

Yeah it's the purple dread, and many of the enemies disrupting your view - I'm playing on GC so the low colour depth is very noticeable too, there's a slight excess of fog in the underwater sections and just general gloom.

Hopefully a sequel will benefit from a wider FOV, HD should make visibility a bit better with a smaller HUD and with Nintendo's movements generally towards more finish-able games and less difficulty overall. I don't mind difficulty, I just get cheesed off with spammy enemies quickly, especially when you move reeeeally slowly (and they hop around all over the place). Mind you I think that was a thing in the first game. You always feel a bit magnetised to the ground.

Yeah, I remember way back with the NGC review of MP2, and some online comments throughout the years, about the bosses being almost game-breakingly hard, with much more Ridley-style difficulty spikes (I didn't actually find Meta Ridley that difficult). It has some interesting ideas and there is something legit about the spooky purple aesthetic.. it just reminds me of RE a bit where after a few hours you feel, "strawberry float this, this is grim". Music is great though. All the prime games do such a good job of nailing the claustrophobic alien world thing. I suppose MP3 with some of its opening vistas and wider context did something to combat moments of too much of that, although all I really saw was criticism of that. It's like Retro got stuck between a rock and a hard place with 3 games.. I really have no idea what MP4 is going to be like.

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PostRe: Metroid Appreciation Thread - Come Inside and Talk About All Things Metroid
by Alvin Flummux » Tue Feb 05, 2019 11:03 pm

A pretty decent Metroid song just released with a very well animated video:



:wub:

Green Gecko wrote:Yeah it's the purple dread, and many of the enemies disrupting your view - I'm playing on GC so the low colour depth is very noticeable too, there's a slight excess of fog in the underwater sections and just general gloom.


The general gloom and dark or otherwise dreary color palette of the game really left me cold, sadly - although I do think a complete visual overhaul with the Switch re-release could go a long way toward resolving this issue. I liked when things occasionally got a bit brighter and more colorful, but even then the gloom was often replaced by shades of grey, which wasn't much of a step up at all. However, the first MP was pretty gloomy too a lot of the time, but I felt like it was just handled much better, except in the Phazon Mines and parts of Magmoor, which I really wanted to be done with pretty much as soon as I first arrived.

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PostRe: Metroid Appreciation Thread - Come Inside and Talk About All Things Metroid
by Pedz » Tue Feb 05, 2019 11:14 pm

Can we ban Alvin posting music stuff?

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PostRe: Metroid Appreciation Thread - Come Inside and Talk About All Things Metroid
by Alvin Flummux » Tue Feb 05, 2019 11:22 pm

Pedz wrote:Can we ban Alvin posting music stuff?


You wound me, sir. :(

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PostRe: Metroid Appreciation Thread - Come Inside and Talk About All Things Metroid
by Green Gecko » Tue Feb 05, 2019 11:27 pm

The thing about MP was it had nice places like Phendrana, Chozo Ruins and Tallon Overworld (with the lovely rain), those places weren't gloomy. MP2 it's all the gloom, all the time. And then horrible turgid purple hellish versions of that.

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PostRe: Metroid Appreciation Thread - Come Inside and Talk About All Things Metroid
by Alvin Flummux » Tue Feb 05, 2019 11:38 pm

Green Gecko wrote:The thing about MP was it had nice places like Phendrana, Chozo Ruins and Tallon Overworld (with the lovely rain), those places weren't gloomy. MP2 it's all the gloom, all the time. And then horrible turgid purple hellish versions of that.


Phendrana was gloomy in that the sky was pretty much a uniform whitish grey color, without any detail to it, but this was more than made up for in the quality of the environments, the music, and so on. Tallon Overworld was gloomy in terms of the incessant cloudiness and dankness, which again was offset perfectly by the music, rain, and so on. The Chozo Ruins were gloomy in their overall tone, but there was still sunlight, brightness, it still felt alive in some respect.

Dark Aether was overwhelmingly oppressive, by design, but Light Aether didn't feel like very much of a relief from that, due to its overall gloominess and claustrophobia. The contrast needed to be starker, the light world more vibrant with better visual effects, and the light world music better. Dark Aether definitely could've used some more color variety, too.

Last edited by Alvin Flummux on Tue Feb 05, 2019 11:43 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Pedz
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PostRe: Metroid Appreciation Thread - Come Inside and Talk About All Things Metroid
by Pedz » Tue Feb 05, 2019 11:38 pm

In MP2, maybe they went with gloom for a specific reason? I don't know what, but doesn't the game start off with you finding loads of federation soldiers dead? Maybe it's meant to just be a more horrid atmosphere to err do something...


As you can likely tell, I have no actual point.

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PostRe: Metroid Appreciation Thread - Come Inside and Talk About All Things Metroid
by Green Gecko » Tue Feb 05, 2019 11:43 pm

The feeling I get is that while it's clear there's a tear between light and dark and a civilisation on the brink of extinction and all that.. the game doesn't really do much to make you give a gooseberry fool. The Ing don't really compare to the Metroids or Spice Pirates (which are around for... some reason) in numerous mutations and instead are variations on annoying spider ink bugs that jump around and generally spam you (although Metroids also do that and they are featured in the game pretty early - I think I only came up against them the first time 30 hours or so in because they have escaped from some containment for no apparent reason). Unlike in previous games where it's mainly been about eradicating a threat and then pissing off, in MP2 it's about saving a world that is basically already strawberry floated.. and your motivation to do is forgotten for almost all of this time, which is chasing down Dark Samus.

It's a strange game that lacks the focus of the first but it's by no means not worth playing, I just get the feeling I'd enjoy replaying MP1 more in the collection with better controls.

That or my patience has reduced a lot, ironically that's likely to do with having sped through Fusion, Zero Mission and Super Metroid since then, which are generally quicker moving games if you have developed an intuition for the series already.

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PostRe: Metroid Appreciation Thread - Come Inside and Talk About All Things Metroid
by Alvin Flummux » Wed Feb 06, 2019 12:00 am

The Prime games follow a particular order of events:

1 - Explore a nearly dead world, decades after a major impact event.
2 - Explore a dying world, just a few months/years after a major impact.
3 - Explore dying worlds that were recently impacted, or even impacted during the events of the game itself.

The second world, despite being a war zone in which an advanced planetary civilization is engaged in a bitter inter-dimensional conflict with a dark alternative version of itself, and not having been impacted that long ago, doesn't feel nearly as alive as the first world. That's kind of a problem for me. But then, active war zones are very different places to the empty ruins of dead civilizations, so I can't exactly call out MP2 for being drab as hell when its basic setting as a concept is going to be devoid of color - though this being an outlandish sc-fi series, I feel like the devs definitely could've added more color and even some weather effects in.

I don't know, I don't feel like it was handled as well as it should have been. The sky boxes could have been better, the Dark World a lot more feral and much more like a "nature gone nuts on Phazon steroids" scenario than it was, the color palette more varied, etc. Hopefully the upcoming re-release with rectify some of these issues.

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PostRe: Metroid Appreciation Thread - Come Inside and Talk About All Things Metroid
by Green Gecko » Wed Feb 06, 2019 3:01 am

Yeah I think it would have been great to see something like the depictions of red weed in war of the worlds in the dying/dark side of the world, so it's not just a purple nightmare but something truly otherly that you want to explore because it is intriguingly different. Instead we have pallete swaps and fog etc. This is why I've never really liked light/dark mechanics because it's not executed substantially. I'd much rather go from one place to another. It risks half the content being simply boring because of the mechanic, and without really asking whether that mechanic is actually fun. A game like Giana: Twisted Sisters handles this well by alloying you swap worlds on the fly even in the midst of complex movements, which creates a dynamic in itself and extra gameplay possibilities.

Also the interdimensional status of some objects doesn't make any sense. Here is this boost ball activated switch thingy, sorry it's in another dimension for some reason. Please backtrack to a portal, use it there and come back. Yawn.

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PostRe: Metroid Appreciation Thread - Come Inside and Talk About All Things Metroid
by KjGarly » Thu Feb 07, 2019 7:22 pm

Finished Metroid Samus Returns, 13 hours and 51 minutes. That was, errrr, tough towards the end :dread:

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PostRe: Metroid Appreciation Thread - Come Inside and Talk About All Things Metroid
by Dig Dug » Sun Apr 07, 2019 12:57 pm

Everyone drop what you're doing and watch this

first ever sub-41 minute speedrun of super metroid


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