The format of these posts is simple: let’s discuss a specific game or series!
Let’s discuss the Metroid series. What are you’re favorite games in the series? What aspects do you like about it? What doesn’t work for you? Are there other games that gave you similar feelings? Feel free to share any thoughts that come up, or react to other peoples comments. Let’s get the conversation going!
If you have any recommendations for games or series for the next post(s), please feel free to DM me or add it in a comment here (no guarantees of course).
Previous entries: Journey, Resident Evil, Polybius, Tetris, Telltale Games, Kirby, LEGO Games, DOOM, Ori, Metal Gear, Slay the Spire
Out of the 2D metroids, I think Super Metroid still takes the cake. Dread and 2r are still pretty good but there is a reason why super metroid game design gets taught in college game design courses. One of the best games of all time probably, still trades blows even with good modern metroidvanias. I played it for the first on in the Wii back when I was in high school so this isn’t even nostalgia talking, I even played it after the Prime games.
For the 3d ones, both Prime and Prime 2 are classics imo. Just the sheer immersion is something you don’t find too often in video games. Prime 2 gets a lot of flak for the ammo system and dark world constant damage, but I think those were useful improvements to balance the game since Prime 1 is quite an easy game. They do add a decent amount of friction to traversing the world and makes the dark world feel actually dangerous to be in. Prime 3 was a bit more forgettable but still not a bad game.
Super and Echoes might be my favourites as well. Also shoutout to Fusion and Zero Mission. They were good too, although they owe so much to Super.
Here’s something totally bizarre that you might it might not care about.
The other day I brought up Metroid on the Nintendo Switch NES app (the one that lets you play some NES games with an online subscription.) After playing for a bit, I wanted to show him the Justin Bailey code. But I couldn’t remember it exactly at first. So I tried it in various cases, and when I enter the code with all lowercase letters, it crashed the game.
No idea if it’ll do that for everyone, or if it did that on the actual NES, but I tried it a few times and it crashed everything.
For reference, I entered in the code like this:
justin bailey ------ ------
But the actual code is:
JUSTIN BAILEY ------ ------