Crosswords

Wednesday: 13:39

Thursday: 17:30

Friday: 16:00

Saturday: 33:03 As an early April Fools, half the clues were entered backwards)

Sunday: 48:18 (1 Google)

Monday: 5:44 (crusht)

Love Letter to Metroid, Part 2

You might think that having certain areas locked until you get certain power-ups would lead to a linear game. You can play it that way, but some some people don't have to; some people are REALLY good. Places that are inaccessible due to not being able to jump high enough can be gotten around using bombs and wall jumps; with one technique, you can get Super Missiles without having to face the miniboss who guards them. Not that it's hard, but skipping it saves time.

The skill required to execute these tricks, and the number of times you need to use them, led to Super Metroid being one of the most popular games to speed-run. Watching serious speed-runners tackle this game is unreal. I can pull off a sequence break or two, but these guys are machines. There are 100% runs, but also low% runs, where the runner gets the absolute minimum number items needed to complete the game, which means skipping a number of things a casual run would consider non-optional.

Super Metroid's real innovation was something called the "shine spark." After acquiring the Speed Booster, Samus can run at super-high speed and start flashing. If you tap down while in this state, you will stop but remain flashing. You can then shoot yourself off in any direction, killing enemies or breaking blocks in the way. You "learn" this ability from an alien bird. It's a completely optional trick, and is only needed to get one missile expansion, but it's useful all over (it's a pretty fast way to beat the boss of Maridia). Wall jumping is another optional trick taught by aliens, and is also needed just for one thing, but is really handy.

Super Metroid became so iconic that its sequel, Metroid Fusion (for Game Boy Advance), had almost the exact same power-ups, and they remade the original game as Metroid: Zero Mission (also GBA), which greatly expanded and added Super Metroid's power-ups to the original game. Both games are larger than Super Metroid, with many more hidden items. In Super Metroid, you were almost certain to run into the animals who taught wall jumping and the shine spark while playing, but you always had the ability, even if you avoided them. But for Fusion and ZM, there are no mentions of either ability in the instruction manual, and no animals to teach it. Furthermore, neither ability is needed to win either game. Both ARE needed, however, to find all the items, and there are a LOT of items. I believe the first time I beat Metroid Fusion, I was shocked to find myself at under 50% completion. I had, like, 12 power bombs, but figured there were maybe 20 in all. There are 50. Zero Mission, in particular, has many items that require precise execution in holding a shine spark through multiple rooms. You can use a map and still not be able to get everything (In ZM, if you do manage to get everything, the final boss triples in power).

They recently remade Metroid 2 for the 3DS, but I don't have one of those. From what I've seen, it's very nicely done, with impressive graphics and all sorts of new stuff.

The only downsides to the GBA versions is that they are largely linear. There's a tricky break in Zero Mission, but in Fusion, a computer has a little too much control over the elevators that connect different sections, and you can't explore the whole game at will until the very end (and if you get one step too close to the very end, you'll reach a point of no return). It's especially annoying because you have no choice in this. It's impossible to get everything on your way. However, noticing the popularity of low% runs of Super Metroid, there's a special ending for sub-15% completion in Zero Mission.

I do like that in the 2-D games at least, there is a continuous plot. The lead-in to Super Metroid says that it is Metroid 3, and Metroid Fusion was Metroid 4. Unlike, say, Zelda. They released some book which did some backflips trying to put all the Zelda games into some sort of order, employing stuff like alternate timelines to fit them all together in the same reality, when it was clear Ocarina of Time was essentially trying to restart the whole story, which it accomplished splendidly. The Metroid Prime series has its own thing, and while there's some idea about where it lies in the story of the other games, they don't force the issue. Lots of things in 2D don't translate to the FPS world of Metroid Prime, and that's fine. The exploration aspect is still there. Metroid Prime 4 is due for the Switch sometime this year.