Crosswords
Sunday: 53:13 (1 Google)
Monday: 7:20
Tuesday: 10:35

Sunday was pretty brutal. I didn't really what was going on with the theme until I solved it, which it is too bad, because it's actually kinda neat.

Love Letter to Metroid, Part 1

I was watching some marathon speed-runners talking about their introduction to Super Metroid and at least two said they hadn't heard of Samus Aran until Super Smash Bros. I could barely suppress a sob. Born too late to explore the world, too early to explore the universe, born at just the right time to play Metroid games when they were new.

The first Metroid was first released for the NES in America in 1987. There was a sequel for the old Game Boy in 1991. Super Metroid came to the Super Nintendo in 1994. It was a straight sequel to the second game. It was the largest game, memory-wise for the SNES at the time. At 24 megs, it was 6 times as large as Super Mario World. It has frequently been called the best single-player game for the SNES, and it holds up so well, people are still trying to set world records 24 years later.

"I had hardly gone beyond the asteroid belt when I picked up a distress signal! Ceres Station was under attack!!"

So you start with a totally un-powered Samus. They never explain why she doesn't have all those missiles and abilities she acquired in the first two games (most of the sequels fix this plot hole). Ceres has a short linear path, you find dead scientists and the metroid baby missing. You meet up at the end with Ridley, a miniboss from the original game (the creature in Alien was a large influence on the designers of Metroid, and they named Ridley after the movie's director). Technically, if you shoot it enough times, it will run away, but if it almost kills you, it does the same thing, taking the baby metroid with it. You follow them to Zebes, the setting of the first game.

Shigeru Miyamoto, inventor of Donkey Kong, Mario, and Zelda, among many others, was the producer for Super Metroid. He likes to say "You must first show players something they cannot do." Super Metroid is a master class.

After your ship lands, you can try to go right, but will find yourself blocked by a wall. You might be able to get over it, but you can't quite jump high enough. So you go left, and then down. You pass several doors, but most are inaccessible because you can't get fit to get under a barrier, or require missiles to open. At the bottom, you come across a burned out area which leads to a familiar room - it's the same room that you fought the original end boss in the first game! Travelling further along, you come to an elevator. The elevator leads to a place which looks just like the place you started in the first game. Directly to your left, in the same place it was in the first game, is the morphing ball. You can't actually get out of the morphing ball area without using it, and if you had gone right without getting it, you would find yourself unable to proceed. A little further along, you find some missiles and another cute callback with a hidden item in the same location it was in the original game too. But it's too high to reach, as it was in the original. If only you could jump higher... Things you can't do are all over the place. Then you get items, and you can. Returning to the original corridor, lots of new areas are opened up. Yet every time you go somewhere new, you see more things you can't do yet. Someone had a video on YouTube with their unpopular negative opinion of Super Metroid. They complained about the back-tracking. Yes, that's kind of the idea. I wonder if he complains about that in Super Mario 64 because you have to enter the same level 6 times