General gaming discussion
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Join Date:Posts: 50409
Honestly think Super Metroid is one of the best designed games of all time. There's a a lot in there that developers should learn about organic ways to teach the player how to play the game. There's really nothing in there that needs a walkthrough, although saying that the noob tube did catch me out the first time I played it. I can't really think of a metroidvania that comes close to it other than Castlevania Symphony of the Night or maybe Axiom Verge although I've yet to complete that one.
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Join Date:Posts: 50409
What was so obtuse about it that you didn't get on with it? Honestly I'm a bit baffled by the response to the game. It would be up in my top 10 games of all time.
I mean yes, Simon's quest is a load of old nonsense that definitely requires external advice on how to beat it. Super Metroid is nothing like that game. Unless you are mistaking the first NES game which can be an ordeal unless you get the graph paper out and make a map.
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I felt the same when it comes to Roguelikes for a different reason. On the very first PC we had (MS-DOS), there was a game on it that I could never get the hang of playing. It confused the hell out of me. Any time I thought of it years later, I could never remember the name of it, and just thought of it as "The Kestral Game", because enemies on-screen would just be represented by a letter; E was an Emu, O was an Orc, K was a Kestral etc. For some reason that stuck with me because I didn't know what a Kestrel was.
A few years ago when all these "Rogue-likes" started appearing, I wondered "What the hell is Rogue?" So I looked it up. It was the f*cking Kestral Game!
Not only am I old enough to have played the original Rogue, I'm so old that I forgot I played Rogue.
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Join Date:Posts: 50409
Yep I played super Metroid well after it came out. Probably early 2000s through emulation as I never had a SNES when I was younger. It blew me away how good it was.
I still think there's stuff that SM does better than any other Metroid. It teaches you relatively quickly to bomb any interesting features to uncover hidden paths. There's also the fact that it hides from the player that you actually have a very extensive Moveset from the start so when you replay you can really break the game with some of those abilities and the game actively encourages that. It's flow and how it organically teaches the player to explore and try stuff out is what sets it a part from other metroidvania's which kind of just gate stuff behind abilities.
The only games I think come close to that flow are La Mulana (which is a whole different type of metroidvania) and axiom verge with its glitch gun.
I really couldn't call it a proto metroidvania, there's lots of NES exploratory platformers and games like Wonderboy 3 that fit that. Super Metroid is kind of the first modern metroidvania but it also managed to perfect the genre on its first go.
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Join Date:Posts: 50409
Rogue likes are a very strange genre. There were hundreds of them on PC as they are quite simple to code. You might not have even played the original rogue as there's tonnes of games based off of it. You could well have played Nethack which is the most popular iteration.
The genre kind of disappeared in the west other than Nethack but in Japan the mystery dungeon games by chunsoft kept the genre in the public eye as the first was based on dragon quest and so was massively popular. Its kind of funny looking back on the reviews of the handful of rogue likes that came to the west and how they just couldn't grasp how they worked. They all get annoyed at lose progress and exp on death.
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