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[kjorteo]

Super Metroid Redesign is BULLSHIT.

Altering the physics to make you heavier and fall faster to be more like Metroid Prime than the significantly floatier Super Metroid? Sure, that's actually an interesting idea. Turning the wall jump into an actual part-of-the-main-game legitimate mechanic (you need a powerup to do it, and even then it doesn't work on some surfaces?) Fair enough. Wall jumping is a bitch now with the new physics, but it can be done, I guess. Making the player go up that ridiculously long a chasm to proceed, though? I would still have gotten the "you need to be cool enough to know how to wall jump to proceed" message in a shaft half that size. All this much overkill brings to the table is just making it more and more inevitable that you'll screw up one of the jumps, probably near the very top of the shaft, just so you can fall all the way back down thanks to hyper-gravity and have to try again from the beginning again and again and oh my God, I don't care if it's a ROM hack and therefore you're fully aware that everyone's playing it on an emulator; savestates should never be required to pass anything.

That's not the best part, though! Naturally, when I got to a room with an impassable gap full of killer acid (the kind the Gravity Suit gleefully ignores, which was integral to progressing in Ridley's Lair in the original Super Metroid, just for the record) and a diagonal glowing thing of some sort what the hell is that that's never been in a Metroid game before, I naturally assumed it was a dead end and I'd get something cool if I came back later, you know, with the Gravity Suit. But oh no, it turns out you actually shoot a missile (and it has to be a missile) at the thing, which reflects the missile which makes a drawbridge appear out of absolutely God damned nowhere. Of course. Why didn't I think of that. And literally five seconds after that (just keep watching :D) we're treated to a jump-while-rolling-into-Morph-Ball trick which, like the wall jump, was an optional thing you could do to show off or sequence break in Super Metroid but is apparently required now. Actually, like the wall jump, I honestly could have accepted that as legitimate if there had been some sort of warning (so I wouldn't just be stuck there wondering what to do and assuming the shaft was just a one-way passage on the way back out or something, because the game hadn't made it clear that it seriously expects you to be able to Morph Ball jump up into the shaft like that) and if the execution were better. Paired with everything else, though, it's just more damning examples of this game's nonsense.

This game seems to base puzzles around taking the extremely clear "you should not be here yet" signs that have been well-established by every other Metroid game ever and disregarding them, instead expecting you to suck it up and just be awesome somehow. Case in point:

Every other Metroid game ever: if you take extreme damage over time just from being in a room, it's because the room is too hot for you to be in without the Varia suit, you moron.
Super Metroid Redesign: Quit whining, go faster.

It might have worked better if the instructions were a bit more clear--doing something once I actually know what to do is the easy slightly-easier part (God damned wall jump shafts D:)--but I just can't handle the leaps of logic and disregard for clearly established Metroid tradition to figure out what the game wants me to do in all of these ridiculous moments.

Oh, also, event door abuse. I never liked event doors--there's just something incredibly heavy-handed about the magical grey doors that literally cannot be opened by any means at all until they are activated by the plot, at which point they can be opened with anything. I understand you want there to be a certain sequence in a game like this, but there are less blatant ways--I mean, make it a Power Bomb door or something if you really want me to not be able to go through it yet; it's not like you get Power Bombs before you're about 80% done with the game anyway. The real Super Metroid only used event doors for Zelda-style clear-the-room deals, where the doors would be locked until you killed every enemy in a room, at which point they would unlock. I've lost count of how many locked event doors I've seen in Super Metroid Redesign with no visible means of unlocking them--clearing the room did nothing, so I can only assume they're plot-related somehow. And really, if I wanted a game that pretended to be Metroid but actually just directly told you where to go by always locking every door but the one it wanted you to use, I'd go replay Metroid Fusion.

Hell with this, I think I'll go back to Metroid Prime. Although, if anyone knows of any Super Metroid hacks that aren't bullshit, let me know!

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure you're just complaining about this ROMhack being targeted at its target audience instead of at you. :P This is for the people who, upon learning these tricks, would instantly recognize a place that they could try them, and do so immediately.

Also you left the word 'make' out of your second sentence ;p

[kjorteo]

I totally did not, you saw nothing.

[kjorteo]

Anyway, like I said, I don't mind redesigning the game to require tricks that were just there for fun before (with the exception of Shinesparking or the Crystal Flash as those are just ridiculous,) it's the lack of warning that clearly-established "come back later" flags are to be ignored now making the required leaps in logic too much for me. I'm normally not one to try to blatantly sequence-break a Metroid game, which is what playing around in rooms you have no business being in (like superheated residual damage rooms before you have the Varia Suit) feels like to me. When I was playing through I Wanna Be the Guy, I actually glitched the game at several points (for example, successfully dodging a projectile that was supposed to be completely unavoidable, and since the game didn't expect that to not kill you, the object had no script beyond shooting it, so it just sort of randomly disappeared) because the game is so hard that, when I was repeatedly throwing myself against a particular idea I had that might see me through a section, I honestly couldn't tell when I was sequence breaking or cheating somehow and when that really and truly was what the game actually expected me to do. I mention this because I don't care if it's a ROM hack, I should not be getting that same feeling when playing Super Metroid. D:

Also, sometimes the execution is a bit cruel even after you know what you're supposed to do. Hell, I was fully ready to accept the new treatment of wall jumping, since I had plenty of warning (you know those green things that wall jump up the shaft just to show you how it's done in Super Metroid? This one puts them in the same room in which you get the Wall-Jump Boots, gee, I wonder what those could be about) but things like that super-shaft in the first clip go well beyond the line between "The game expects you to be able to wall jump now" and "now the game is just being a dick. :D"

By contrast, the jump morph ball trick to access high shafts like that isn't used to that cruel extremes (at least as far as I got, though knowing this game, it probably will be later,) but its implementation in the room in that second clip was just out of freaking nowhere. Speaking of the second clip, the missile reflection thing doesn't make a shred of sense even after watching it, and don't even pretend that it does.

[davidn]

The timing of this post is particularly fantastic, placed on my Friends page right below dr_dos's.

I still haven't completed any of the Metroid series - I do have a save about five minutes into Metroid Prime, but the one I've spent the most time with is Super Metroid. It could have been that I was playing it in one hour bursts on the train and forgetting what I was doing after every morning, but I could never really keep track of where I was meant to be going - I remember that most of my playing of it consisted of running about shooting at walls in the hope that a new weapon would uncover a barely visible passage. (Sort of like Hexen 2 in that regard, actually). I actually thought that this post was about a remake first - I'm going to be doing my own whining about one of those in the form of Twin Snakes tomorrow.

Note to self, cut back on wall-jumping bits in CT2.

[kjorteo]

Super Metroid is fantastic, though playing it with little enough time in between sessions that you actually remember your progress is recommended. Aside from that, the design is actually very nice, most of the truly out-of-the-way hidden stuff in the walls just being random missile expansions and such, with the sequence of important and necessary exploration-required items laid out fairly neatly. Plus, even though the ending is pretty much in ItWasHisSled territory by now, if by some miracle you actually somehow aren't familiar with it, there is a particularly memorable dramatic moment that is worth experiencing....

Really, what I'm trying to say here is that Super Metroid is a classic, enough so that the reason I'm experimenting with ROM hacks of it is that I'm basically in "I love this game so much I still randomly feel the craving to play it again, but there's the matter that I've already done so roughly fourteen times now and have almost everything memorized" territory.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, but finding Kraid's lair is bullshit ;) As is having a SAVE POINT in an area that can only be escaped by wall-jumping. Super Metroid has a lot going for it, but "laid out fairly neatly" is not one of them. I have plenty more examples in my head, but I can't name them as succinctly, unfortunately.

[kjorteo]

Are you referring to the chasm with the green hoppy things that are there specifically to teach you how to wall jump? The only way they could have made that one more obvious is if they had a powerup (like Redesign's Wall-Jump Boots) down there too, and not just "oh by the way you actually had the ability to wall jump this whole time, here's how." It's just like the chasm with the Shinespark ostrich, only that one didn't have a save point, I don't think. On the other hand, I will admit the point of no return chasm (the one filled with rippers that you can't get back out of without the Ice Beam) can be a bit intimidating.

I'll also admit that I got turned around looking for Kraid's lair once or twice, though the most hopelessly lost and out of leads I've ever been was actually in Maridia. Still, nothing insurmountable....

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Right, but it's not like seeing blue things wall jump actually makes it any easier. I almost started the save file over.

How did you get "turned around" looking for an invisible destructible block, in a room type that until then (and since then?) is completely innocuous, BEFORE the acquisition of the x-ray scope?

And yeah, maridia is another one of the places I was thinking of.... the purple icy room?

[kjorteo]

Wall jumping in the original Super is pretty easy to me...it's in Redesign with the newfound extreme gravity that it's suddenly a bitch. Maybe that's just me, though.

And I sort of had a "when in doubt, bomb everything" approach...actually, it was kind of hard to train myself to stop doing that even after I got the x-ray scope, like I'd scan a room and it turned out everything was solid and I dropped bombs anyway just because I didn't believe it or something. Especially because I never ever believed power-up rooms were clean (pff, yeah, like you have an entire room dedicated solely to giving me whatever fancy new beam is on the pedestal there and there isn't a secret tunnel if you bomb under the Chozo statue or something, you can't fool me,) again, even after the x-ray scope tried its best to convince me that they actually were.

And I honestly don't even remember what tripped me up in Maridia, just that I somehow ran out of leads and couldn't figure out where to go next. I think it might have been a Kraid's lair-type scenario where there was a destructible block I was missing, but I don't really remember. All I remember is that it wasn't the quicksand, since I spotted that trick pretty much instantly. (Come on, this is Super Metroid with a comprehensive map system and everything, not Mario. There's no such thing as a bottomless pit, that has to just take you to a secret room.)

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

There's at least one secret that doesn't show up in the x-ray scope, I'm pretty sure. And I think you've played too much Metroid II X3

But either way, you're saying that yes, you DO have to run around shooting all the walls with every weapon to find Kraid's lair. (Or run around bombing every wall, at least.)

And I'm pretty sure I've never made it all the way up that wall-jump tunnel without the Space Jump.

[kjorteo]

Pff, I have, easily. I mean, hell, the Space Jump is the same thing only you don't need there to actually be a wall and you don't have to change direction.

[dr-dos.livejournal.com]

The first time I beat Super Metroid I had to put on game genie cheats to get out of that shaft.

Granted now I've beaten the game with clear times of like 1 hour 20 minutes, but walljumping is really hard when you've never done it.

[davidn]

From my vague memories of it, I do recall getting stuck at the bottom of a shaft at one point and wandering around wondering what to do until I realized some sort of new technique... which might have been wall jumping. It's been long enough ago, and my state of confusion in the game so perpetual, that I can't remember. If the green things were there and demonstrating, I think that what that immediately told me was that they could wall jump.

[andreas hoffmann (from livejournal.com)]

Well, you are totally right about this game.
I generally don't like games that demonstrate how mean/unfair they can be. I just started playing SMR an hour ago and didn't like it from the start due to this. First of all, there are too many spikes around: when exploring things, you bump into the spikes all the time. What's the fun in jumping around and having spikes you cannot see before the jump everywhere? And there were several doors that exited directly into an enemy. Well, great! Then - while still having only five missiles, I needed to open a missile-door. Thus I went through having no missiles left - just to find a room full of missile-only enemies. Of course, you can go back and get some missiles, but it's not fun to play a game that way. A few minutes later, I found the ridiculously long shaft that tried to teach me how to wall-jump. The new physics make wall-jumping a horribly boring process, gaining a few pixels only per jump. And then, there are spikes at the shaft's bottom and no way to regain health. Now I was standing down there and remembered how many shafts I fell down before reaching this point. Does anyone really think, wall-jumping is so much fun that you need so much of it?
For me, this hack just sucks.

not a game

[sia oxi kosioni (from livejournal.com)]

you guys are right. I used codes for infinite energy and misslies to try to even things a little and the game was still boring. I believe that this hack had no map, no plan or plot whatsoever.