Sometimes it seems a little hard to believe that Nintendo created Super Metroid. It’s such an un-Nintendo-like game — so somber and moody, so straight-faced, so rich with narrative innovation that feels nothing at all like what we’ve come to expect from Nintendo. And yet, it’s quintessentially classic Nintendo in many ways: It leads you […]
As you move to hunt and destroy the final metroid and complete your dark plan of galactic genocide, the nature of the game changes. You enter a series of caverns devoid of all life, filled with rocky pools of a viscous liquid that does a bang-up job of giving the impression of alien slime with […]
As the metroid counter winds down, Samus Aran enters the final areas of the game. SR-388 offers one last cavern super-structure followed by a couple of smaller tunnel networks that house the climactic encounters. Now that Samus has every piece of gear in hand, the game doesn’t feel particularly compelled to play nice… Including this […]
Note to folks coming over from Giant Bomb: Hi! Thanks for visiting. You have been linked to the middle of this Metroid II series. You can start here at part one, or better yet, just go to the Anatomy of a Game page for the full rundown on this entire project, which also includes the […]
Besides grabbing the Spider Ball and Bomb, all there really is to do in the first little pocket of SR-388 is kill some alpha metroids and snag a few missile expansions. This first area gives you a pretty good sense of how the entirety of Metroid II‘s structure works. Generally speaking, each separate breakout area consists […]
It doesn’t take long for Metroid II to differentiate itself from its predecessor. About… five minutes, I’d guess? That’s about how long it takes, 10 at the outside, for you to encounter your first metroid. Despite its name, Metroid for NES wasn’t really about metroids. Those creatures only showed up at the very end as […]
Well, I guess I lied. I said I’d be shrugging off the shackles of 8-bit oppression with this entry, but here we are looking at a game on an 8-bit system with 2-bit color. I was going to dig into The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past in honor of A Link Between […]
Having escaped the Underworld, traversed the Overworld, and ascended through the Skyworld, Pit at last arrives at Palutena’s palace. And once again, the game changes formats… though this time it’s a far more radical transformation. The three treasures you’ve wrested away from the fortress bosses (the mirror shield, the wings of Pegasus, and the arrow […]
The general consensus seems to be “I like Anatomy of a Game, but Kid Icarus is dumb.” So let’s just power on through the rest of this bad boy today and tomorrow and move along to more fertile territory, shall we? Really, there’s not too much to break down about most of the second half […]
I guess I should wrap up The Anatomy of Kid Icarus and get it over and done with. I’m a little disappointed that people have lost interest in the Anatomy series, since it’s been a lot of fun to write. Is it that the games I’ve been covering are less interesting than the first few […]
Note: The code BEAUTIFULBOOK will apparently save you a good chunk of the cost of this book. Shipping, at least! Well, that happened faster than I expected. GameSpite Presents: The Anatomy of Super Mario Vol. 1 is available for purchase as a print-on-demand book on the GameSpite Blurb store. You can acquire the books as: A large-format color […]
…but the next GameSpite Journal is nearly ready to go to press and will probably be in the bookstore next week. Be excited, I guess?