With the Mother Brain defeated, Metroid ends up back again where it began. The final sequence of the game doesn’t involve combat or exploration but rather a tense escape sequence up a seemingly endless shaft — an echo of the game’s first sprawling vertical area, the one that definitively set Metroid apart from a legion […]
Tourian is as close as Metroid comes to having “levels” in the traditional video game sense. You make it through the gauntlet of Rinkas and Metroids a screen at a time and arrive at last at the boss. Even the doors in Tourian say “serious business” — they’re orange instead of red, soaking up ten […]
The player’s arrival in Tourian (the final zone where the Mother Brain awaits) is accompanied by a shift in tone. The visuals are stark and mechanical, a contrast to the natural formations and ancient constructs of the rest of Zebes’ underground. Even more strikingly, the background music ceases to be musical and instead adopts the […]
Most of Metroid centers on the process of exploration, eschewing the arcade-borne concept of difficulty (death and restarting as a penalty) in favor of something more esoteric. Samus certainly blasts her fair share of enemies en route to the end, but Metroid lacks bottomless pits or instant death traps, and the more gear you acquire […]
As I mentioned yesterday, Metroid looks and plays like an action game, a superficial child of the arcades. But the core challenge of the game rests not in sheer combat difficulty, as it provides players with a huge arsenal, a considerable amount of life energy, and no (overt) timer to force you not to farm […]
Metroid did a lot of really innovative and interesting things for a game of its genre and period, but perhaps the most important idea it brought to the table was the concept of power-up permanence. Samus didn’t simply collect items that made her more powerful; once she acquired them, she kept them. The only impermanent […]
I’m back in America, on the Internet, and at a computer. As such, I’ve updated the past two entries with images! Read them again… for the first time. Hope you’ll forgive the way Samus flips back and forth between armored/unarmored, and the occasional emulator cruft — these screens are generously provided by Rey at VG […]
The road to acquiring Metroid’s all-important Bomb has proved to be a surprisingly well-designed one, not quite guiding the player to Samus’ objectives but rather placing limitations on the game’s free-roaming spaces that allow some degree of exploration that eventually comes to an end until you stumble upon the next tool to help Samus range […]
Please forgive the lack of images in this update. I’m at a resort with a terrible Internet connection and no computer. Use your imagination for now and I’ll follow up with visuals once I get home, OK? Once you collect your first Missile expansion in the lower right area of Brinstar, Metroid leaves you […]
Once you make your way beyond Metroid‘s very clever, very brilliantly designed introductory moments, the game wastes no time in becoming promptly, well, weird. Beyond the low-hanging wall that blocks the opening area from the remainder of the game, the first vertically oriented room of the game (or at least the first that you can […]
Metroid! I’ve written about Metroid‘s opening moments before. As a matter of fact, I wrote about them nearly seven years ago, making this the game that set me on the path of thinking about how level design works. (That article isn’t dated here, but the crossposted version on 1UP.com says “June 24, 2006” — […]
I won’t lie: Zelda II surprised me. Based on my vague memories of being stumped by its obscure clues and opaque design for weeks on end as a young teen, and given the fact that its successors have only connected with its design concepts on oblique tangents, along with its general deprecation among gamers… well, […]