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- Thread starter IrishNinja
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IrishNinja
Member
y'all hate big phones like you hate big TVs, some people just aren't built for this big baller life
https://youtu.be/h6wNIPTXleM
also android >>>>>>>>>>>>
still the best portable library to date, though playing it again today, we should acknowledge metroid 2 as one of the lesser classic metroids
https://youtu.be/h6wNIPTXleM
also android >>>>>>>>>>>>
still the best portable library to date, though playing it again today, we should acknowledge metroid 2 as one of the lesser classic metroids
Danny Dudekisser
I paid good money for this Dynex!
Man, don't lump me in with those AV thread PVM cucks. I like my TVs like I like my women. Flat.
cyborgnumberblue
Member
Some nice gets at my local game shop. Probably gonna return Batman and Robin, as it's not my cup of tea. Beyond Oasis is great so far though! Never played it back in the day, so happy to be giving it a go now. I think there's a sequel on the Saturn, too, so I'll definitely be checking that one out, too!
Have you decided what video game to show her so she understand how far gaming has come since Mario?
davidwhangchoi
Member
LOL, that thread....
Danny Dudekisser
I paid good money for this Dynex!
Well, it sure as hell won't be Mario Odyssey because it's not a true platformer.
Laevateinn
Member
GAF was a mistake
D.Lo
Member
I dont get the 3DS hype?
Im loving Samus Returns. Link Between Worlds is great if kind of low rent. RE Revelations was impressive earlier on. Mario Land and Luigi. Otherwise, nah? I mean Pikmin and Chibi Robo were decent time wasters but not changing my life.
GBA SP and Micro were amazing hardware for the time, it had two Metroids, Warioware, two cool Castlevanias... DS had so many great interesting things, Nintendogs, Quendan, Metroid Hunters was great, two new Zeldas, NSMB before it was run into the ground... it was a freshness party heaps of new ideas. PSP was great too, I played so many hours of Ridge Racers and Burnout, Silent Hill, MGS, various PS1 games.
Is it because I dont really like RPGs?
Laevateinn
Member
Vita was better.
Vita might be my favourite handheld. Im flying to/from Toronto over the next few days for work and I plan on bringing my Vita, despite having a Switch/3DS/everything else. Ive got a couple Visual Novels, tons of indies, and some Dino Crisis to keep me occupied.
Real women have curves.
IrishNinja
Member
3DS + DS library is easily one of the finest in handheld, if not gaming - losing GBA is a damn shame though. still, where I didn't get into first party stuff last gen (NSMB, etc) I fell for Phoenix Wright and Trauma Center, Ghost Trick, Hotel Dusk type shit. yeah there's amazing RPGs like TWEWY and Radiant Historia but there's also Advance Wars, Castlevanias and so much quality
Vitas nice hardware with half of that to offer
preach
edit wait how is mario odyssey not a true platformer tho
Vitas nice hardware with half of that to offer
preach
edit wait how is mario odyssey not a true platformer tho
Real women have curves. Tvs too.
Danny Dudekisser
I paid good money for this Dynex!
I'm just going to let you wallow in the fact that you double posted that falsehood. I know you noticed it. You look like a fool.
davidwhangchoi
Member
hey retroGAF,
picked up a few titles today cause nothing to do tonight:
Dead Angle recommended by Irish, it was 24.99
and Hyperneptunia mk2 for 7.99
picked up a few titles today cause nothing to do tonight:
Dead Angle recommended by Irish, it was 24.99
and Hyperneptunia mk2 for 7.99
A Black Falcon
Member
That's too bad, because The Adventures of Batman & Robin really is one of the Genesis's best games! The graphics and sounds are overall perhaps the best on the system, first. The music is amazing and is the system's best for technical accomplishment. It's the Genesis soundtrack I listen to the most often. The visulas are really impressive too, and use a lot of nice effects.
As for the gameplay, it is a health-bar-based game and not Contra-style one hit deaths, but I am entirely fine with that; AoB&R plays fantastically and is very, very fun. It is a crushingly difficult game, but with practice you get better and when you finally get farther in it feels pretty good.
Beyond Oasis is pretty good, yes. It is a bit short, though.
Block Ball is a good but not amazing game. I got the game the year it released and at the time I liked it, but I didn't absolutely love it like Kirby 2 and Kirby's Pinball Land. It's a good Breakout/Arkanoid-style game with a few new ideas such as the paddles on all four sides of the screen, but I feel like they could have done more with it and it isn't an all-time classic like those two are. Still, it is good.
Star Stacker is a great game, no question! It's a great puzzle game, and even on a system with a lot of great puzzle games it stands out thanks to the nice graphics and somewhat original gameplay. Awesome game. (It's a lot of fun in two player, too.)
As for Air Ride, that one I have always had very mixed feelings on. On the one hand, the track designs are great, and I like all the variety -- the main racing mode is the best part, but the freeroam city mode can be fun to ride around in, but it ends with random nonsense that feels unfair. Topdown mode is pretty fun, though, I like that mode. However, the absence of any campaign, circuit, or what have you mode is a crippling flaw that pretty much ruins the game. The controls are a problem too; the one-button thing works, but I do not like that you have to slow down to use an item, it's not good.
But it's the absence of content that really crushes Air Ride the worst. Sure, it's a fine multiplayer game, but in single player what's the point of ever even playing this thing? This is a single-race-only game, period. There are no circuits and no progression. All you do in the game is try to achieve things on a giant board of objectives, but you can't view the board during a game so you either need to memorize ones you want to try to do, or just get lucky and randomly hope you accomplish some. As some optional Achievement-style thing that board would be fine, but as the one and only thing in the game with any kind of progression it's terrible and I don't like it at all. I think that HAL had been thinking far too much of Smash when they designed this game and forgot that in racing games people expect actual progression, which this game has none of outside of that stupid board I don't care about or want to pay any attention to. Filling in a challenge grid is NOT my idea of fun, I want to progress through a racing game through racing in races!
So yeah, Kirby Air Ride is a good game almost totally ruined by some terrible design decisions.
As much as I like Kirby, this might be true... though it's really close. I love the Kirby series and I do think the best Kirby games are really good, but the same is true for (Genesis) Sonic, so yeah, that's tough. Maybe the Genesis Sonic games are slightly better than the best Kirby games (Kirby 2 for GB is my favorite), but it's close enough to go either way. And as an overall franchise Kirby is far better no question, even the worst Kirby games are better than a whole lot of Sonic titles!
Ah. polygonal and sprite graphics both can be good though, it just depends on the game!
Like, on the one hand the N64 is my favorite console, but on the other hand it wasn't until Conquest: Frontier Wars (in '01) that I finally played a polygonal RTS that I actually liked, so yeah. Both sprites and polygons are good depending.
The Nintendo DS is my favorite handheld, followed by the original GB. After that it's harder to say, though, between the GBA and 3DS... and the PSP has a bunch of pretty good games too. But those top two are for sure. The original GB has a great library, but it has some weaknesses that later handhelds would do better; strategy and RPG games particularly are much better on the GBA and beyond than they were on the GB, I've always thought, while the GB's platformers are some of my favorites ever. (Wario Land: SML3 is my favorite handheld platformer.)
I don't either. If you don,t care for RPGs or visual novels, the 3DS has a distinctly underwhelming selection of games
Danny Dudekisser
I paid good money for this Dynex!
I have some thoughts on Metroid: Samus Returns.
The atmosphere is nonexistent
Which is weird as hell for a Metroid game. I honestly can't tell you what the difference is between any two areas in the game. They're all the goddamn same. The backgrounds look nigh identical, the enemies are mostly palette swaps, and there's no variety in the challenges any given environment presents. It'd be one thing if the areas at least looked cool, but can anyone honestly tell the difference between what we have here and what's in any given sci-fi-themed shovelware launched on Steam last month?
Super Metroid owed a huge amount of its success to the strength of its atmosphere. Remember when you were in Brinstar, and then entered the red soil area, and the creepy music kicked in? And then you got to the tubes that eventually lead to Maridia, and you realize that it's gotten super dark, and you start noticing all the subtle details like the glow of Samus' visor that's illuminating your way. It's moody, it's evocative, and this sort of feeling permeated the entire game. Reaching a new area was exciting, because you had no idea what was around the corner, but you knew it was going to be new and exciting. That is what gave Super Metroid such a satisfying sense of progression.
Samus Returns has precisely none of that.
The music is terrible
Which kind of goes hand-in-hand with the lackluster atmosphere. It's not aggressively bad; it's arguably worse -- just plain boring. It's generic, "atmospheric" schlock that adds precisely nothing to the proceedings. The lone exceptions are the the Norfair theme and the
later in the game, because they have some actual musical merit. Unfortunately, somebody else wrote those songs decades ago, so I'm not giving credit to whoever lead the charge here.
I was thinking back to that story about how that deaf guy at Capcom wrote the soundtrack for Resident Evil: Dual Shock, and that's why we had that basement theme that sounded like somebody farting in a circus. That was terrible music, too, but at least I remembered it.
The controls are clumsy as hell
I did not feel like I had adequate precision at any point in the game. There are a lot of things contributing to this. Being forced to use the circle pad in a 2D games is just nonsense, and the 3DS' uncomfortable form factor doesn't exactly make dealing with it any easier. But then, there's the myriad smaller problems like the delay between when you can shoot and use your counter attack, the clunky touch interface for swapping weapons, the spider ball randomly changing directions on you in tight spaces, the needlessly difficult-to-aim grapple beam, etc. Then you factor in the 30fps frame rate in what's otherwise a fast-paced action game. It adds up, and feels like a mess in those dicier segments where you really need to be in command.
The power-ups are lame
Really, this was just the worst batch of abilities I could imagine. The ice shot is annoying, because you'll end up freezing most enemies, rather than killing them, so they just become an obstacle. The Aeion lightning armor ability is a waste of everyone's fucking time -- you use it to move past those red plants, and that's uh... it. It has no practical use outside of that. The beam burst just makes me angry. It's a more powerful shot that can actually kill shielded enemies, but isn't that why I have missiles?
Wait, why are the missiles so useless, anyway? It looks like you're firing a pea shooter when you use them, and they don't hurt like... any of the armored enemies you would actually hope to kill with them. And they give you so damn many of them -- there's this wild imbalance when scavenging for new items where I would constantly find more missiles, but no energy tanks. But I actually wanted energy tanks, whereas if I had the stock 30 missiles or whatever it was that you start the game with, I would've been just fine. But now, I have more than 100, but no energy for the beam burst that actually hurts enemies. Mother. Fuck.
Anyway, pretty much all of the abilities you get in the game are basically just keycards for locked doors. You'll use them to get past one obstacle, but they rarely increase your ability to explore the world, and they generally don't do much to aid you in combat. It's woefully unsatisfying, and after a while, I lost any enthusiasm for finding new gear, because, well... who cares? That feeling was only amplified once I realized that...
The exploration is a scam
Samus Returns is an illusory Metroid game. It is, for all intents and purposes, a completely linear experience. You trudge through an area, kill the requisite number of Metroids, return to the statue, and move onto the next level... and that's kind of it. There's little to no incentive to return to previous areas once you've finished them, even after you've obtained a bevy of new abilities. You're not going to go back to a previous area and uncover a swath of new territory to explore or some nifty secrets. There are no tantalizing, just out of reach areas to pull you back, and you know in the back of your head that all you're really going to find is more goddamn missiles (which, fuck's sake, nobody really needed or wanted more of, ever.) Samus Returns' idea of exploration is backtracking to open a different colored door. Whoopty fucking doo.
Problem is, this is Metroid's fucking wheelhouse. That's why people have so much reverence for this franchise. It's because the more you play, the more freeing it is. You realize, "oh yeah, I can get through that earlier area now," so you head back. But on your way, you'll realize that the ledge you couldn't reach is now accessible, that the other power-up you got lets you break through that wall you totally forgot about, and then you get sidetracked by this totally different thing that you never expected to pop up. There's cool shit to find and meaningful new spaces to explore just by randomly going off the beaten path.
And hey, I get it -- that's tough to do. That's why so many have aspired to Super Metroid's level of design and fallen short. But you have to at least try, right? That's why the exploration in Samus Returns falls flat. There is no sense of discovery, and even if there was, there would be nothing interesting to find, given how the game doles out its power-ups.
The counter attack was a mistake
Okay, so the counter attack was kind of a cool idea, and the first time you do it in-game, it's pretty slick. By the 3rd or 4th time you do it, it's not. It's fine to give a Metroid game some sort of twist, but when the execution is just "enemies dive bomb you a lot, and you can't really do much about it," you should probably reevaluate. The melee attack shtick gets old in a hurry, and in a Metroid game, I really just want to shoot enemies. I'm a simple man.
I think the developers must've realized this at some point, too, so their solution was to give almost all the enemies armor, so that your guns are pretty much useless. So now, when you encounter an enemy, you should stop, wait for them to come to you, counter them, and then shoot them... like I wanted to do in the first fucking place. It's functional, but it comes at the expense of flow. And it doesn't even work very well, thanks to the clunky controls. You can't counter an enemy on the other side of you by simply hitting the button, but turning around and then countering can take too long. You can't cancel out of shooting to counter, so being logical and firing your weapons to weaken the enemy and countering to finish them off isn't really a viable tactic. The delay after performing a counter, and then using it again takes too long, making it impossible to dispatch two enemies who decide to dive bomb you at the same time. It's a lot of small problems that make the whole thing feel woefully unpolished. Past a certain point, I just wanted to run past enemies instead of getting caught up in their passive aggressive bullshit, but you kinda can't do that, either.
It's one thing to introduce a new combat mechanic into the game, but it's another thing entirely to force me to rely so heavily on it; particularly when it cuts against the the rest of the game's design.
The enemies are annoying and shitty
Which is I'm pretty sure, the direct result of wanting to put the counter mechanic front and center. Your weapons, particularly early on, are just not powerful enough, and then there's all the armored foes that you basically have to counter in order to kill. But did they have to be so goddamn obnoxious, even beyond that? There are slugs that leave behind some green goo that hurts you if you step in it, so they'll randomly block off areas you want to go until you kill them and wait for the green stuff to disappear. Oh, and they're armored, so... deal with that, too. The masses of mosquitoes take an eternity to kill, and damage you quite a bit. You're supposed to use the beam burst to kill them, but honestly... how does that make it any more fun or challenging? The jellyfish looking things that are basically just cannon fodder eventually electrify entire platforms at random, which makes getting from point A to point B in certain rooms a complete pain; again, without adding any fun or challenge.
And then, there are the Metroids. I know they based this on Metroid II, where you had to kill 40 Metroids, but holy shit, it did not have to be this repetitive. There's nowhere near enough variation on the Metroids' attack patterns to justify fighting 40 fucking Metroids. You'll fight one that has the power of electricity, and then you fight one with the power of fire, and... they're the same damn fight. Nothing changes, and there is nothing unique for you, the player, to experience. Eventually, you'll encounter more "sophisticated" Metroids that scurry away to a different room after you damage them, so you have to find them again and restart the fight. I'm guessing the developers played Monster Hunter, saw that they did that exact same thing, and were like "us, too -- we can do this!" Except, it makes no fucking sense here, and makes 40 Metroids feel like 400.
Holy hell are the graphics bad
I mean, just fugly. Art design is subjective, sure, but Jesus, it just looks like crap. Why all the bizarre color palettes? So many sections just seem to use a million different shades of brown and orange, which not only looks like garbage; it results in enemies getting lost in the background. That's just amateurish. The whole game looks painfully low-rez, too, probably because it is, and the gaudy bloom lighting only makes the game more of a hazy, blurry mess. And this runs at an unstable 30fps? Really? If that's the best they can do with the tech, they should've gone back to the (literal) drawing board.
Here's the thing. Super Metroid came out 23 years ago. It looked great at the time, and it looks great now. It runs at basically the same resolution. Samus Returns should've been sprite-based, particularly in light of the hardware constraints. There's always some goober that raises the point that, "well, 2D sprites are expensive, an indie studio like Nintendo can't afford that!" Fuck you. I don't care if it's expensive, I care about the end product... and frankly, that's Nintendo's problem to solve anyway. All I see is this:
You're telling me that more than 2 decades of tech and design advancement lead to that? And that's without factoring in how much more smoothly Super Metroid runs. We could do this same experiment with Metroid Fusion from 2002 or Zero Mission from 2004, and the result would be the same. It's shit.
So, uh...
Yeah. The game has some serious fucking problems. I think it's worth playing for Metroid fans, but I think the only 2D Metroid worse than it is... *shock* Metroid II. If you stripped away the Metroid veneer, you'd be left with another passable indie game where the developers were obviously inspired by Metroid, but clearly didn't get what made it good.
The atmosphere is nonexistent
Which is weird as hell for a Metroid game. I honestly can't tell you what the difference is between any two areas in the game. They're all the goddamn same. The backgrounds look nigh identical, the enemies are mostly palette swaps, and there's no variety in the challenges any given environment presents. It'd be one thing if the areas at least looked cool, but can anyone honestly tell the difference between what we have here and what's in any given sci-fi-themed shovelware launched on Steam last month?
Super Metroid owed a huge amount of its success to the strength of its atmosphere. Remember when you were in Brinstar, and then entered the red soil area, and the creepy music kicked in? And then you got to the tubes that eventually lead to Maridia, and you realize that it's gotten super dark, and you start noticing all the subtle details like the glow of Samus' visor that's illuminating your way. It's moody, it's evocative, and this sort of feeling permeated the entire game. Reaching a new area was exciting, because you had no idea what was around the corner, but you knew it was going to be new and exciting. That is what gave Super Metroid such a satisfying sense of progression.
Samus Returns has precisely none of that.
The music is terrible
Which kind of goes hand-in-hand with the lackluster atmosphere. It's not aggressively bad; it's arguably worse -- just plain boring. It's generic, "atmospheric" schlock that adds precisely nothing to the proceedings. The lone exceptions are the the Norfair theme and the
red soil theme
I was thinking back to that story about how that deaf guy at Capcom wrote the soundtrack for Resident Evil: Dual Shock, and that's why we had that basement theme that sounded like somebody farting in a circus. That was terrible music, too, but at least I remembered it.
The controls are clumsy as hell
I did not feel like I had adequate precision at any point in the game. There are a lot of things contributing to this. Being forced to use the circle pad in a 2D games is just nonsense, and the 3DS' uncomfortable form factor doesn't exactly make dealing with it any easier. But then, there's the myriad smaller problems like the delay between when you can shoot and use your counter attack, the clunky touch interface for swapping weapons, the spider ball randomly changing directions on you in tight spaces, the needlessly difficult-to-aim grapple beam, etc. Then you factor in the 30fps frame rate in what's otherwise a fast-paced action game. It adds up, and feels like a mess in those dicier segments where you really need to be in command.
The power-ups are lame
Really, this was just the worst batch of abilities I could imagine. The ice shot is annoying, because you'll end up freezing most enemies, rather than killing them, so they just become an obstacle. The Aeion lightning armor ability is a waste of everyone's fucking time -- you use it to move past those red plants, and that's uh... it. It has no practical use outside of that. The beam burst just makes me angry. It's a more powerful shot that can actually kill shielded enemies, but isn't that why I have missiles?
Wait, why are the missiles so useless, anyway? It looks like you're firing a pea shooter when you use them, and they don't hurt like... any of the armored enemies you would actually hope to kill with them. And they give you so damn many of them -- there's this wild imbalance when scavenging for new items where I would constantly find more missiles, but no energy tanks. But I actually wanted energy tanks, whereas if I had the stock 30 missiles or whatever it was that you start the game with, I would've been just fine. But now, I have more than 100, but no energy for the beam burst that actually hurts enemies. Mother. Fuck.
Anyway, pretty much all of the abilities you get in the game are basically just keycards for locked doors. You'll use them to get past one obstacle, but they rarely increase your ability to explore the world, and they generally don't do much to aid you in combat. It's woefully unsatisfying, and after a while, I lost any enthusiasm for finding new gear, because, well... who cares? That feeling was only amplified once I realized that...
The exploration is a scam
Samus Returns is an illusory Metroid game. It is, for all intents and purposes, a completely linear experience. You trudge through an area, kill the requisite number of Metroids, return to the statue, and move onto the next level... and that's kind of it. There's little to no incentive to return to previous areas once you've finished them, even after you've obtained a bevy of new abilities. You're not going to go back to a previous area and uncover a swath of new territory to explore or some nifty secrets. There are no tantalizing, just out of reach areas to pull you back, and you know in the back of your head that all you're really going to find is more goddamn missiles (which, fuck's sake, nobody really needed or wanted more of, ever.) Samus Returns' idea of exploration is backtracking to open a different colored door. Whoopty fucking doo.
Problem is, this is Metroid's fucking wheelhouse. That's why people have so much reverence for this franchise. It's because the more you play, the more freeing it is. You realize, "oh yeah, I can get through that earlier area now," so you head back. But on your way, you'll realize that the ledge you couldn't reach is now accessible, that the other power-up you got lets you break through that wall you totally forgot about, and then you get sidetracked by this totally different thing that you never expected to pop up. There's cool shit to find and meaningful new spaces to explore just by randomly going off the beaten path.
And hey, I get it -- that's tough to do. That's why so many have aspired to Super Metroid's level of design and fallen short. But you have to at least try, right? That's why the exploration in Samus Returns falls flat. There is no sense of discovery, and even if there was, there would be nothing interesting to find, given how the game doles out its power-ups.
The counter attack was a mistake
Okay, so the counter attack was kind of a cool idea, and the first time you do it in-game, it's pretty slick. By the 3rd or 4th time you do it, it's not. It's fine to give a Metroid game some sort of twist, but when the execution is just "enemies dive bomb you a lot, and you can't really do much about it," you should probably reevaluate. The melee attack shtick gets old in a hurry, and in a Metroid game, I really just want to shoot enemies. I'm a simple man.
I think the developers must've realized this at some point, too, so their solution was to give almost all the enemies armor, so that your guns are pretty much useless. So now, when you encounter an enemy, you should stop, wait for them to come to you, counter them, and then shoot them... like I wanted to do in the first fucking place. It's functional, but it comes at the expense of flow. And it doesn't even work very well, thanks to the clunky controls. You can't counter an enemy on the other side of you by simply hitting the button, but turning around and then countering can take too long. You can't cancel out of shooting to counter, so being logical and firing your weapons to weaken the enemy and countering to finish them off isn't really a viable tactic. The delay after performing a counter, and then using it again takes too long, making it impossible to dispatch two enemies who decide to dive bomb you at the same time. It's a lot of small problems that make the whole thing feel woefully unpolished. Past a certain point, I just wanted to run past enemies instead of getting caught up in their passive aggressive bullshit, but you kinda can't do that, either.
It's one thing to introduce a new combat mechanic into the game, but it's another thing entirely to force me to rely so heavily on it; particularly when it cuts against the the rest of the game's design.
The enemies are annoying and shitty
Which is I'm pretty sure, the direct result of wanting to put the counter mechanic front and center. Your weapons, particularly early on, are just not powerful enough, and then there's all the armored foes that you basically have to counter in order to kill. But did they have to be so goddamn obnoxious, even beyond that? There are slugs that leave behind some green goo that hurts you if you step in it, so they'll randomly block off areas you want to go until you kill them and wait for the green stuff to disappear. Oh, and they're armored, so... deal with that, too. The masses of mosquitoes take an eternity to kill, and damage you quite a bit. You're supposed to use the beam burst to kill them, but honestly... how does that make it any more fun or challenging? The jellyfish looking things that are basically just cannon fodder eventually electrify entire platforms at random, which makes getting from point A to point B in certain rooms a complete pain; again, without adding any fun or challenge.
And then, there are the Metroids. I know they based this on Metroid II, where you had to kill 40 Metroids, but holy shit, it did not have to be this repetitive. There's nowhere near enough variation on the Metroids' attack patterns to justify fighting 40 fucking Metroids. You'll fight one that has the power of electricity, and then you fight one with the power of fire, and... they're the same damn fight. Nothing changes, and there is nothing unique for you, the player, to experience. Eventually, you'll encounter more "sophisticated" Metroids that scurry away to a different room after you damage them, so you have to find them again and restart the fight. I'm guessing the developers played Monster Hunter, saw that they did that exact same thing, and were like "us, too -- we can do this!" Except, it makes no fucking sense here, and makes 40 Metroids feel like 400.
Holy hell are the graphics bad
I mean, just fugly. Art design is subjective, sure, but Jesus, it just looks like crap. Why all the bizarre color palettes? So many sections just seem to use a million different shades of brown and orange, which not only looks like garbage; it results in enemies getting lost in the background. That's just amateurish. The whole game looks painfully low-rez, too, probably because it is, and the gaudy bloom lighting only makes the game more of a hazy, blurry mess. And this runs at an unstable 30fps? Really? If that's the best they can do with the tech, they should've gone back to the (literal) drawing board.
Here's the thing. Super Metroid came out 23 years ago. It looked great at the time, and it looks great now. It runs at basically the same resolution. Samus Returns should've been sprite-based, particularly in light of the hardware constraints. There's always some goober that raises the point that, "well, 2D sprites are expensive, an indie studio like Nintendo can't afford that!" Fuck you. I don't care if it's expensive, I care about the end product... and frankly, that's Nintendo's problem to solve anyway. All I see is this:
You're telling me that more than 2 decades of tech and design advancement lead to that? And that's without factoring in how much more smoothly Super Metroid runs. We could do this same experiment with Metroid Fusion from 2002 or Zero Mission from 2004, and the result would be the same. It's shit.
So, uh...
Yeah. The game has some serious fucking problems. I think it's worth playing for Metroid fans, but I think the only 2D Metroid worse than it is... *shock* Metroid II. If you stripped away the Metroid veneer, you'd be left with another passable indie game where the developers were obviously inspired by Metroid, but clearly didn't get what made it good.
cyborgnumberblue
Member
game looks like straight doodoo
sixteen-bit
Member
cyborgnumberblue
Member
That's a hot blog for sure.
RadarScope1
Member
Damn that's a hell of a write up on Samus Returns. I haven't played it, but some of the basic criticisms come directly from Metroid 2. However, I'm with you on the look and art, which I can at least form an opinion about by looking at stills. Even if this were to come to Switch and get a bump in resolution, it would not save the general look of it all.
Danny Dudekisser
I paid good money for this Dynex!
Yeah, the Metroid 2 roots are what they are. I think they could've deviated from certain aspects of the original a little more than they did, but the source material was a huge limitation.
davidwhangchoi
Member
Did you show that crazy but cute girl Samus Returns?
Danny Dudekisser
I paid good money for this Dynex!
If it's making me this crazy, I think that's a recipe for disaster.
cyborgnumberblue
Member
We have SEGA letting Christian Whitehead and company make one of the best entries in its once flagship series, and on the other hand we have Nintendo pissing out this thing instead of making a similar effort with AM2R. Granted, these projects differ in their official capacity, but I just see a noble effort full of passion forcibly replaced with this pee pee looking game. That really salts me up, mainly.
Also, I can't really get behind 2.5D games at all unless it's done by ASW like they've done with Guilty Gear Xrd.
Danny Dudekisser
I paid good money for this Dynex!
Honestly, the thing that stings the most is the realization that they put MercurySteam at the helm, and it's exactly what you would fucking expect. I'll admit, they had me fooled at E3. It looked like dookie, but the gameplay seemed fun in the small dose they showed us.
NOPE. Trust your motherfucking instincts. It's literally my job to call bullshit on bad ideas like this, and here I am, making the mistake of trusting a studio I knew I fucking shouldn't.
Edit: Anyway, I'm basically at the end of the game, but I think I want to play something else tonight, maybe on PC. It's Saturday, I've been travelling all week, and I kinda want to play something... y'know. Fun?
davidwhangchoi
Member
i can't wait for Secret of Mana remaster to hit =P
that looks so bad but i want to be wrong.
that looks so bad but i want to be wrong.
Danny Dudekisser
I paid good money for this Dynex!
At least we know where we stand there, though.
It looks like a turd, and it's what we're getting in lieu of the compilation with Seiken Densetsu 3 they got on the Switch in Japan.
cyborgnumberblue
Member
I'm playing through Secret of Mana right now on SNES, and I'm certainly excited to see what they do with it. I think the graphics are OK, I'm more worried about the OST, though. Hiroki Kikuta's music is integral to that game for me.
Danny Dudekisser
I paid good money for this Dynex!
Is now a good time to admit I've never played Secret of Mana?
I bought it a few years back, but didn't have any way to play it at the time.
I dunno,
I'm playing Metroid and have not really touched the Sonic since it came out last month. Although I appreciate both. Definitely think it is cool a western devgot on Metroid. Even thought Federation Forcd was cool....but then I'm kinda old now so no real reason for me to hate anything really.
Overall very please with this late post-Switch 3DS lineup. Miitopia is just putting a huge smile on my face.
cyborgnumberblue
Member
I had never owned it, but always messed around with the local co-op at my friend's house when I was a kid, so it's got that legendary Squaresoft status to me. Found it at a local used game shop so I grabbed it up a few weeks ago. It's got some super weird parts
like when you reunite Santa Clause with Rudolph after subduing Santa's evil form
RadarScope1
Member
YES. It is iconic and awesome.
I played around with it a bit on emulators back in the day but other than that I haven't played it either.
I've actually been thinking about buying it on iOS recently...blasphemy!!
This weekend just playing some new releases. Grabbed Rayman for Switch (kinda sluggish to be honest), having a ton of fun with Super Hydorah which had an amazing CRT filter, and starting a new replay of Loco after so many years ago on the PSP. Fun little stuff until Mario releases in a month.
D.Lo
Member
Yep I'm loving it. Looks great, sounds great to me, it's a 2D Prime game. Can understand if some are not into it, it is basically held back by the premise and structure of Metroid II - go and kill a bunch of metroids in an ever deepening cavern.
Do we really need 'If it isn't 10/10 it's a complete piece of shit' hyperbole? Most of the Metroid thread likes the game. Reviews were good. Heck the guy who made AM2R likes it.
Christian Whitehead was hired after he ported a real Sonic game, and ported several other official games before he got to make a new one. Quite a bit different to a guy who hacked up a game in a Game Maker software.
Shin Johnpv
Member
I will 3rd really like the new Metroid game. I haven't been able to put it down really. Outside of some Destiny 2 with friends any of my gaming time this last week has gone towards it. There are some things that could be improved, like more enemy variety, and the one boss is a royal pain in the ass but other than that I have no complaints. Some of the backgrounds in areas, specially when you have the 3D slider on, look fantastic.
cyborgnumberblue
Member
I don't think I'm being hyperbolic, actually. I never called the game a piece of shit, in fact, all my peepee/poopoo comments have specifically been about the graphical style. Other posters have been much more elucidating in their descriptions, admittedly.
Like I had explained in my post, I just think SEGA took a much better path with regards to a pretty similar set of circumstances. Christian Whitehead was C&D'd by SEGA for his Sonic CD iOS thing, I believe, but he was also cranking out Sonic fan games.
Danny Dudekisser
I paid good money for this Dynex!
I felt the hyperbole was warranted. It's wasn't just not 10/10 game, or a disappointing Metroid game. It's a game I felt was poorly-designed from top to bottom that fails both as a Metroid game and on its own merits. I finished a boss fight that was just laughably bad and had to put it down. Blech.
As a palette cleanser, I fired up an Ys Seven on PC, and... yeah. Good controls, fun bosses, and great music. I'm happy again.
As a palette cleanser, I fired up an Ys Seven on PC, and... yeah. Good controls, fun bosses, and great music. I'm happy again.
D.Lo
Member
Yeah the temple type areas in giant caves have really created the epic feel. And I love all the broken artefacts strewn around various places. Really nicely done.
It's quite large too, bigger than any other 2D Metroid so far.
PumpkinSpice
Banned
I appreciate the negative feedback, but I felt like no matter what any new Metroid game was not going to please everyone. Metroid fans are a picky bunch.
I cancelled my preorder like 2 days before the game came out (I don't like preorders but in Canada it's the only way to get relatively new games at a sane price) cause I have way too many games I want to play right now, and also I had just finished Super Metroid and wasn't in the mood for that kind of game any time soon. I think I'll pick it up when it's on sale at some point.
I fully expect that to be a very faithful port, visuals aside. Adventures of Mana was spot on.
I cancelled my preorder like 2 days before the game came out (I don't like preorders but in Canada it's the only way to get relatively new games at a sane price) cause I have way too many games I want to play right now, and also I had just finished Super Metroid and wasn't in the mood for that kind of game any time soon. I think I'll pick it up when it's on sale at some point.
I fully expect that to be a very faithful port, visuals aside. Adventures of Mana was spot on.
A Black Falcon
Member
I wonder, is it actually possible to please Metroid fans? And since it seems to not be possible to do so, why does Nintendo keep trying?
Danny Dudekisser
I paid good money for this Dynex!
See, here's the thing:
People forget about Metroid Prime. Remember before that came out? They gave Metroid to some no-name studio in Texas, and had them make it a first-person shooter. Pretty much nobody believed in it. But the game came out, and people very quickly realized that they were mistaken. I was one of them -- Metroid Prime is probably my #3 game of all time, and I absolutely loved MP2 and 3. So yes, it's possible to please Metroid fans -- demonstrating that could scarcely be any easier.
Other M was an abject piece of shit, by any standard, so you can't expect people to like that. This game, while obviously better received by most, is a piece of shit by my standards... but I'm hardly impossible to please, keeping in mind what happened with Metroid Prime. There is a quality bar, and I'm not going to lap up MercurySteam's latest dump just because I like the franchise. That shit didn't fly with Castlevania, and it's not going to cut it here.
Laws00
Member
I don't like nor care for Metroid games.
I only own 2 games. That wii game other m everyone hates and this new one for 3DS because of reason I don't know lol. It's not opened and going to stay that way too.
I had prime for game cube I thought it was boring and I had this ds game where I had to use the stylish......hated it so much just like one of those Zelda games I had to use the stylish for
I think they're boring trash
I only own 2 games. That wii game other m everyone hates and this new one for 3DS because of reason I don't know lol. It's not opened and going to stay that way too.
I had prime for game cube I thought it was boring and I had this ds game where I had to use the stylish......hated it so much just like one of those Zelda games I had to use the stylish for