Blips: Needs More Metroid

Source: 'Troid Rage: Why Game Devs Should Watch Alien—and Play Metroid—Again
Author: Maddy Myers
Site: Paste

It's rare that I can side so wholeheartedly with opinions about video games, but Maddy Myers' recent piece for Paste about the state of the metroidvania had me repeatedly exclaiming "yes, exactly this!" multiple times while reading it. Myers (an undisputed Metroid aficionado) lays out the reasons why so many so-called metroidvania games fall short of the titles that originally inspired the hideously titled sub-genre. Real quick note here, but I'm in the camp that thinks this genre should drop the "vania" addendum, as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was really just a Metroid-like that did some interesting, original things with the formula. OK, but still, there are game like Shadow Complex that rekindled interest in Metroid-like game design, yet miss the core of what made Metroid play the way that it does.

Myers argues this point as well as the way Metroid itself draws inspiration from the Alien films to frame its environments and protagonist in an extremely powerful way. In contrast, Shadow Complex feels positively soulless, full of bland characters, bland levels, bland weapons, and a bland plot. All that's left is the basic mechanical device of an open ended map that requires specific abilities be gained before passing through certain doorways to new areas. And that's a great game design framework to emulate, but it's not enough on its own. Everyone likes to taut Metroid's atmosphere as a defining feature, but for some reason atmosphere (a combination of many factors including character design, animation, difficulty, level design, music, sound, and more) isn't seen as a necessary component of a metroidvania. And that's a shame, because it seems like the knowledge of what made Metroid special is actually being deteriorated by modern metroidvanias. Still waiting for a proper Metroid Prime 2: EchoesVania over here.

Blips: Not From Nothing

Source: The isolation of Metroid Prime reflects its hero’s sense of loss
Author: Nick Wanserski
Site: Gameological

I can't pass up a good article about the Metroid Prime games, so here's another one from Nick Wanserski over at Gameological that ties into their "empty spaces" series. If you've played Metroid Prime or even the original Metroid, you'll already know that emptiness and isolation go hand in hand with those games. Metroid has mostly solid black voids for backgrounds, contains no dialogue, or map, and generally leaves you to fend for yourself. The first Prime game drew most heavily from its predecessors, adapting both environments and gameplay into polygonal spaces, with plenty of silent, contemplative voids to boot.

What Wanserski brings to light that I hadn't really considered in depth is Samus' relationship to her surrogate parents, the Chozo, told through discovered texts and glyphs, as illustrative of Samus attempting to fill in an empty space in her personal history. In a sense, Metroid Prime is the story of an adopted daughter, twice orphaned, seeking to learn about those that raised and took care of her. Of course Samus is also an incredible warrior, so she's on an important space business mission too, but the narrative arc of Samus' relationship with the bizarre planet of her surrogate caretakers always stood out to me as the most memorable aspect of that game.

Blips: Resonant Echoes

Source: Feel The Pain
Author: Peter Malamud Smith
Site: The Gameological Society

I'm just going to come out and say it: the original Metroid and Metroid Prime 2 are the best games in the franchise, and in turn, two of my all-time favorite games. Now, most Metroid games are quite good, so this isn't meant as a slam on the rest of the pack, but the majority of folks seem to put Super Metroid and the first Prime game on a pedestal above all others. So, I was quite pleased to read Peter Malamud Smith's piece where he seems to hold a similar outlier stance to my own. Super Metroid and Prime are perfect games in a way, with the rough edges sanded off and explicit, unwavering purpose in level design and pacing (Prime's late-game fetch quest notwithstanding). These games are designed with fluidly scaffolded player experience at their core. Prime 2 and Metroid however, often keep the player in the dark, sometimes quite literally, and that's part of what I like so much about them.

Sure, Metroid could have used a map, and Prime 2's Dark Samus is a dumb, lazy antagonist, but everything else about those games creates the foreboding, otherworldly atmosphere that has always seemed like the brass ring of the franchise –one which none of the other entries manage to grasp. Metroid's background is solid black, which may have been a technical limitation, but nonetheless evokes both the empty vacuum of space and the dark void of an uncharted cavern. Prime 2 has a "dark world" that is essentially poison, forcing you to dart between clean air safe-spots to survive. In fact, survival is as much a part of Prime 2 and Metroid as adventure, which makes exploration a rather tense affair.

This is not to say that Super Metroid and Prime were devoid of these atmospheric qualities, but neither game puts the player in a downright oppressive world or fosters feelings of dread quite like Metroid and specifically Prime 2. Maybe it's just a matter of personal preference as to which tone you find more appealing or memorable. While I'll always remember Super Metroid and Prime as amazing games, I'll never forget my actual experience trudging through the darkness in Metroid and Prime 2.

Review: Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (Wii)

The appeal of the Metroid series has long been the isolated adventure through uncharted worlds. It's surprising then in the final chapter of the Metroid Prime trilogy that Samus Aran spends so much time listening to other people tell her what to do and where to go. This is the case in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption because Samus is basically a federal contractor; a one-woman cleaning crew assigned to rid the universe of the glowing, corrosive element, Phazon.

The game opens strongly with an intense Ridley set-piece, but quickly turns chatty with the introduction of military commander types, sentient computer brains, and a butt-ugly cast of tag-along bounty hunters. Samus, like fellow Nintendo mascot Link, remains quiet through all this, coming off increasingly like a silent film actress who's just been cast in a talkie. I could relate to Samus' stoicism though, as it seemed the less said, the sooner conversation would end and exploration could begin.

While Retro Studios may have taken some of the implicit appeal of a Metroid game off the table with the tone of their third go-around, they have made additions in other places, most notably their informed integration of motion controls. One could look at the way MP3 asks you to interact with switches and levers by rotating and pushing the Wiimote as a concession to some kind of mandatory waggle clause, but I found these movements almost universally satisfying; none moreso than the Grapple Beam which is implanted in the Nunchuk controller. You can grasp onto labeled grapple points by locking onto them and them whipping the Nunchuk forward to unleash your electrified lasso. Then you can throw your wrist back to pull shields away from enemies, rip loose panels off of walls, or remove any other such precarious object from its perch. It's hard to call this motion a novelty when it comes in handy so frequently and feels like a natural part of the game.

The impressiveness of the motion controls actually comes through pretty wholesale, which leaves me dumbfounded as to why there weren't more FPS-type games on the Wii. MP3 decoded a fluid way to use the Wiimote/Nunchuk combo to turn a Prime series entry, traditionally referred to as "first-person-platformers," into a legit shooter. MP3 is still a shooter in a different class than modern military fare or even closer-in-setting Halo mechanics, but an action oriented game nonetheless. This is especially prevalent during the Leviathan boss encounters, which require you to use most of the tools at your disposal and, most importantly, to actually aim. When fighting tougher enemies you can lock your sight onto a particular weakpoint, but you still must free-aim Samus' arm cannon, which makes for some welcome wrist-cramping difficulty spikes in an otherwise breezy title.

I'm not one to berate games for being too easy if it still does a good enough job of incentivising me to keep playing. Corruption keeps pace on its main quest line pretty well (a little too narrowly perhaps), leaving the trickiest puzzle solving to missile pack and energy cell upgrade retrievals. While the additional life bars came in handy on a couple occasions, there is absolutely no functional need to have a stock of 200+ missiles since I never had an encounter where I used even 50. There's nothing inherently wrong with having collectibles, but when those items serve a purpose in the game world, it's a shame that their usefulness caps off so early.

The worlds of MP3 are in the same vein that you've come to expect from this series: lush organic environments juxtaposed with bio-mechanical factory garb, but the linear pacing of the plot and the ability to fast-travel with your dropship often leave you feeling like you're following orders instead of exploring the worlds to figure things out for yourself. One could lodge a complaint against the previous Prime games for the amount of time spent backtracking and walking through already-cleared rooms to get where you want to go. Prime 3 admirably solves this problem by allowing you to secure dropship landing sites to quickly move across the map. What this adds in ease-of-movement it loses in isolated immersion, a franchise keystone. Samus is never really stranded anywhere, she's just a tourist, popping in to have a bit of fun before taking off to do the same somewhere else. Mission objectives are boilerplate space marine droll too (power down the enemy defense shield! again!) leaving the moment-to-moment gameplay to hold your interest. Only the wrecked Valhalla space barge left me actually asking questions instead of simply pressing a button and moving on (though you do just that at the end of the Valhalla too).

Thankfully, shooting and double jumping through MP3's admittedly narrow corridors hits its Prime series high point here. There aren't much in the way of alternative weapons (your beam upgrades stack), which gives combat tactics precedent over pre-engagement strategy. Retro Studios must have known the Wii's weaknesses well enough to make sure their AI did not exploit them. The most prominent systemic hindrance is Samus' sluggish turn speed. For most traversal your stiff neck actually helps keep your trajectory steady, but when confronted with speedier foes, there's a delay in how quickly you can rotate to face them. Rarely in these cases will you be blindsided though, resulting in skirmishes that always seem fair.

MP3 is extremely balanced and well-polished, so much so that it can feel like Samus is toying with some kind of virtual training simulator instead of actually going out and being a hero. The action is tightly executed, but in an attempt that appears aimed at easing more casual players into the series, the dialogue-heavy mission assignments negate some of Samus' independent spirit. I'm not saying I think games need to be self-congratulatory, but Samus is supposed to be a rogue bounty hunter, right? Where's the grand reward?

Review: Metroid (NES)

Some of these older videogame reviews will be for games I'm somewhat embarrassed to have never played. Metroid is one of those games. I feel I can't justify this omission without noting that my first full playthrough of a game in this series was Metroid Prime for Gamecube. Some would call that heresy, but I came away from Prime and its sequel having had some incredibly profound and affecting (in a good way) gaming experiences. As a result, I've been pining to go back and check out where this all started.

Two of the more amazing things about playing Metroid now are how many well-executed similarities it has to the Prime series and how much of a sense of adventure this old game could convey despite my mind being spoiled by the visually immersive gaming experiences on modern systems. The player controls Samus Aran, then-secretly female bounty hunter, equipped with an arm cannon, as she explores the planet Zebes. At the beginning of the game, Samus' abilities are limited, making the locations she can access restrained. By locating ancient relics she will learn new techniques which allow her to research new areas and progress through the game. This formula is still the core of contemporary Metroid gameplay.

Even knowing this, I remain surprised by just how non-linearly Metroid allows you to play. There are three boss characters in the game, the final of which cannot be fought until the other two have been defeated, but you can approach either of those two first. The non-final boss characters can also be faced at any point once the required abilities have been found to conduct the platforming needed to reach them. In other words, they can be faced with a bare bones set of skills for the player looking to speed through things, or by the well-prepared player who has found all of the helpful abilities that will make the battles easier.

Another key aspect of "adventure" as a genre is exploration, which Metroid offers, but not without one caveat that my Prime sympathies can't help but mention: the lack of a map. To be clear, I would have liked a map that only kept track of where I had been, not where there was still to go. Having that sense of discovery and not knowing what's through the next door is what adventure games are all about and I wouldn't want to disrupt the up-and-running system already in place. However, when I finally reached the point where I was ready to descend to the final boss confrontation, I discovered that I had to go back and reacquire the ice beam to continue further. Without a map to assist in retraversing the entire maze, this fetch quest became unnecessarily frustrating. Alternatively, Samus could have been given the ability to switch between different beams on the fly. Sadly, I remember Metroid Prime pulling a similarly unfun backtracking stunt on me at the end of that game. Some traits shouldn't be passed on through generations.

The lack of a map is truly a shame though, as it's the only aspect that mars the otherwise stupendous game. Metroid is a game that knows how to set an eerie, enveloping mood. Zebes is a harsh and alienating place, without any lines of dialogue or townsfolk to offer hints or friendly confidence. The music is bizarre and not always conventionally melodic or rhythmic, but still impressively memorable. The titular Metroid creatures are legitimately terrifying monsters. The story begins when Samus is simply dropped onto the planet and given little in the way of further direction. Granted Metroid was produced during a time when instruction manuals were actually used as a reference, so it was assumed that the player would be able to look up things like power-ups and know what they do. In an ironic twist, since the game itself doesn't tell the player anything, the world becomes even more authentic than the developers may have intended. I was consistently having to figure out what I just picked up and truly get acclimated with the item rather than the screen telling me what I could now do differently. This makes for an even more pure adventure experience without adding frustration.

Metroid is the total package when it comes to game design, so much so that the franchise isn't much different in modern iterations (though improvements have been made). It offers a legitimate challenge, one that actually forces the player to think strategically during combat while presenting puzzles and hidden secrets that test one's wits and encourage (and reward) discovery. I have come away from the game extremely eager to jump into Super Metroid in the near future.

:screenshots from VGMuseum: