Revisionism revisited

Man, doing my little Metroidvania blitz thingee has been a depressingly eye-opening experience. OK, so Circle of the Moon falls apart in the second half thanks to some seriously terrible balancing and design issues. Fine. But Metroid Fusion? I liked Metroid Fusion, but now that I’m playing it again I’m horrified by its deep, grievous flaws. So I decided to play through my own copy of New Super Mario Bros. as a break from the free-form exploration (such as it is — in the case of Fusion, not much)… and it seems more like a chore than a relief.

Maybe, I started to think, maybe I don’t like videogames anymore.

But, nah, turns out Wario Land 4 is still good clean fun, and Cave Story is making my shrivelled little heart sing. So I guess I just don’t like sloppily-designed GBA games. As for NSMB, I think maybe I’ve played Super Mario 3 a little too much over the past 15 years — polygons and crappy power-ups don’t make it any fresher. Still! Close call there.

Also, while clearing out some personal effects at my parents’ house, I stumbled across some CD-Rs of files I had thought long lost, including a cheerfully sarcastic guide to Evangelion which I think I never posted because I was afraid of oversaturation (given the Thumbnail Theatres and all). But now I’m older and lazier wiser and realize there’s no such thing as oversaturation. So hopefully I can post that stuff soon, and maybe start beating some other dead horses. Hey guys I hear that Xenogears game sure is bad!

47 thoughts on “Revisionism revisited”

  1. I really had a difficult time going through Metroid Fusion a second time as well. Honestly, I think this stems from the fact that it holds your hand a bit more than the average Metroid game, practically forcing you into specific areas of the space station while locking off the others.

  2. I think playing SMB 3 too much could be the cuase. I haven’t played a Mario platformer (2D) in over 10 years, and NSMB has been a lot of fun. It’s not the best ever, but when you haven’t had anything else in years, it’s refreshing.

  3. A brave new world!

    I do think Fusion was better for stop and go gaming, but was a slog if you really hunkered down to play it for long periods of time.

  4. Maybe you can’t enjoy videogames as much as you could in the past because they’re your full-time job. I have this theory that once something becomes work, people get jaded about it, no matter what it is.
    –
    Or maybe you’re just a hater! :-)

  6. Yeah, Metroid Fusion, upon a second playthrough, pales in comparison to Zer–
    Adam: “Tomm, you should write something positive.”
    I don’t hate the Fusion Suit as much as most people do.
    Adam: “Now make a predictable joke.”
    The reason you hate these games is cause they’re not on the SuXBox, Parish! Go marry Bill Gates!

  7. Wait a second.
    I think I recall seeing (at least part) of that “Guide to Evangelion” thing before, on one of the old versions of this site.
    Assuming it’s your memory malfuctioning, as opposed to mine, this could give you a bit more ammunition for your snarky, self-depreciacting humor we’ve all grown familiar of.

  9. “I liked Metroid Fusion, but now that I’m playing it again I’m horrified by its deep, grievous flaws.”

    Everybody was complaining about it when it first came out,but once I resigned myself to its linear paths and the fact that it isn’t nearly as good as Super Metroid, I was able to enjoy it much more.

    Zero Mission though…never really liked it much.

  11. God will soon be playing the GBA version of Cave Story that Pixel Studios is allowing a fan to homebrew (and even contributed the source code for).

  12. That’s news to me. Last I checked, God wears a backpack with a NES in it hooked up to a TV in a harness he wears around his neck. I don’t know why, but he sure likes to play Taboo. Never seems to give me a straight answer when I ask him why. My guess is because someone has to because that game freakin’ sucks so bad nobody in their right mind would ever play it.

  13. I’m with Andrew. I found Metroid Fusion much more enjoyable on a second play-through than I did Zero Mission.

  14. Huh, Metriod Fusion? Oh yeah, I got about halfway into it and never finished it. Cool game, hopefully I’ll finish it when my DS Lite arrives next month.
    –
    *goes back to playing Star Ocean: The Second Story*

  16. Cave story is nothing short of amazing, even more so when you consider that it was made by one man over the course of five years without any sort of compensation.

  20. If you feel like making Sony feel all warm and fuzzy inside by paying unreasonable sums for their hardware, that is.
    …
    I mean, Loco Roco is intriguing, but I really don’t much feel like giving Sony any more business on video game hardware. They need to take some measure: No one gives a crap about Blu-Ray, UMDs, Memory Sticks, or any of their other technology they horde for themselves, particularly on their video game systems.
    –
    Of course, this has all been discussed ad naseum the past weeks as is. Forgive the tangent.

  21. I’m actually still surprised you got that far in Circle of the Moon. Choppy sprites aside, I quit after I couldn’t take the camera going crazy everytime I jumped. Harmony of Dissonance was a big improvement but it seemed like they were trying to Syphony of the Night but realized they couldn’t and decided to make slight alterations. Still a great game. Aria and Dawn are great but more of the same. I really hope the new one delivers.

  22. Actual gameplay aside, Metroid Fusion rocked simply because Samus was now part metroid and gained new powers by absorbing aliens entities to change her DNA structure. That kind of thing isn’t used by nearly enough games, if you ask me.

  23. God plays Open Source games because open source is a way of thinking that actualy looks to benefit humanity if a great scale. So, go download Battle for Wesnoth: http;//www.wesnoth.org. Remember guys, Battle for Wesnoth is what Jesus plays.

  24. Wow, I’m more sleepy than I thought. My spelling sucks. It’s http://www.wesnoth.org, also, God plays Interactive Fiction because feelies are the most awesome thing ever in videogaming history and the official currency in heaven are said to be zorkmids!

  25. Totally awesome that you finally played Cave Story, now if only I can convince my friends to. I’m too busy playing other [inferior] games they say. And I’ve played through Fusion a dozen times, and I’ve found it absolutely brilliant, and less hand-holding than Zero was. I mean, Zero forces you to stand on a statue that puts a glowing orb where you’re supposed to go. Couldn’t be bothered for a 2nd runthrough even. On the other hand, Fusion was like 6 or so microcosms of free-roam exploration. Like someone else said, once you put aside your Super Metroid dreams, it’s still a good game, without copy-cating the previous game, and well oriented to portable gaming with contained areas of free-roam. The only complaint I have, is delegating Samus’s inate abilities, like triangle jumps and speed dashes, to contained sections for an item or two, instead of giving you more breakability. But again, this isn’t super metroid. But you just have to wonder why they left triangle jumping in.

  26. Oh yes, I love games where entire sections are blocked off to you and in order to buff up before the final battle you have to find the one arbitrary little secret that re-unlocks everything thats locked. Cause goodness knows they had to wait until that very moment to STOP holding your hands.

    Bad design decisions are bad decisions EVEN in fun games.

  27. I read that God gave The Bible Game a 1.5/10 and “Shame of the Month” guest review score in EGM a few weeks back. I can’t find my copy of that issue to validate this, though.

  28. I felt similar “couldn’t hold a candle to Mario 3” feelings about Super Mario World to your feelings about New Super Mario Bros., Jeremy. I guess the feeling’s mutual, sort of. Except of course that you earlier claimed that Mario 3 wasn’t your favorite game in the series.

    I should replay Fusion just to get 100%. Gave up the first time after the other passages were (apparently) locked off.

  29. The thing about Metroid Zero Mission is that although it told you exactly where to go, it gave you the freedom to go virtually anywhere else. It was immensely sequence breakable by design, especially by creative use of the shinespark.

  30. I’ve bought Warioland 4 three times, and they keep dissapearing. I should pick up another. The downside to the success of Warioware is the that I think the Warioland series is done.

  31. I should have seen it coming when Wario World’s unlockable content consisted almost entirely of GBA-link Warioware demos.

    Metroid Fusion’s largest flaw, in my opinion, is that it is impossible to reach 100% on a file’s initial playthrough. Going for fast times with 100% is a large part of Metroid’s replay value, even if you don’t sequence break. (Considering Fusion doesn’t let you do that last part much either, it’s a double whammy.)

  32. I picked up Metroid Fusion, last copy, along with Super Mario 64 at a 2-for-30 or -50 or something sale recently, haven’t popped it in yet. Still, I’ve been braced for years that it may not be as good as the rest. I did like Zero Mission a lot, however, except for the stealth part. Difficulty just seemed unbalanced there.

    Anyway, I’m eager to give it a try at some point.

    New SMB, I’m quite enjoying. I like the Power-ups in it, and it’s just like a simple return to gaming as I knew it so long ago, it’s kind of refreshing in a way. Almost like an expansion on what I already knew, but with new tunes and graphics to go with. Sort of like a jump from Street Fighter II to SFA3. Same basic stuff, but not.

    It hasn’t been terribly challenging, but then, Nintendo’s trying to get more people who haven’t played games in years to pick it up, so it’s understandable. Besides which, I’ve mastered damn near every Mario game I’ve played except Sunshine and some of the more out-of-the-way stars in 64(I’m not even sure those count the same way). So of course I’ll have an easier time.

    So for me, it’s just a fun play through. I admire the ingenuity in a lot of the stages, like the placement and timing of the spiked balls in that one castle. It’s just something I wouldn’t expect from other games; they’d probably have the balls roll around until you die or they just shatter mysteriously once you reach the top.

    It has other neat touches as well, like the “story” with Bowser, which brings Mario to a unique form of badass, IMO.

    Still, for me, most of the challenge is in finding all the exits and star coins and hidden levels. And even then, most of that’s not too hard, save for a few bits I just can’t seem to find. But I’m playing this for much the same reason I’ll replay any older Mario title, simply because I enjoy it, except this has the added bonus of not being a straight port, so there’s still a nice bit of unfamiliarity to balance it all out.

    I still die in parts, but I never get too frustrated by it. And as frustrated as I get by some things, I rather like that. I never feel like I can’t do something or that it’s unfairly stacked against me, like some other games tend to do, but that maybe there’s another way to do what I’m trying to do.

    It’s presently my favorite of the series, though, because of the newness of it. I’ve played the others plenty, so this is just what I needed.

    All the same, your score seems pretty well placed. 8/10? That works quite well.

    My biggest gripe, really, is that it seems a bit short, which I imagine corresponds to the challenge.

    All in all, a fun romp for us old-timers, I think, but I imagine the ones who will get the most out of it are those who’ve either never played Mario before(in 2-D, anyway), or those who’ve not played in a long time.

    LBD “Nytetrayn”

  33. metroid, for me, has always been a game i enjoy watching more than playing, because inevitably half way through the game just becomes harder than my gaming ability can compensate for. the only metroidvanias i’ve beaten are the original, SotN, and super metroid.

  34. DUDE. You missed the orginial Metroidvania game: PRIVATE EYE for the Atari 2600!

  35. Metroid Fusion stops you after every five minutes of gameplay so Samus’s CO can tell you exactly where to go and what to do next. And since the GBA’s screen resolution is so small, you have to press a button to advance the text window after about every sentence. Ever worse is that once you’re given your instructions, any region not pertaining to your objective is locked off entirely.
    .
    Meanwhile, Zero Mission has statues that point you to the next item by way of simply putting a flashing dot on your map–no plodding dialogue, no explicit explanation of how to get there. And if you want to bypass that item and go off somewhere else entirely, you’re free to do so. Furthermore, if you know what you’re doing, you only need to trigger the first statue’s guidance; all the rest are entirely skippable. There’s no disputing that ZM was much more free-form and had much less hand-holding than Fusion.

  36. Metroid Fusion was a great game until Zero Mission came along and put it to shame. It’s similar to how Super Metroid kinda made Metroid II look like crap. Fusion is a good game, don’t get me wrong, it’s just that it has shown its age.

  37. Thanks, fellow Zero-Mission-philes. I’m glad you came out of the woodwork so I didn’t look like a goof.

  39. “Metroid Fusion’s largest flaw, in my opinion, is that it is impossible to reach 100% on a file’s initial playthrough. Going for fast times with 100% is a large part of Metroid’s replay value, even if you don’t sequence break. (Considering Fusion doesn’t let you do that last part much either, it’s a double whammy.)”

    The hell are you talking about? I got 100% on my first playthrough, which I kind of regretted since it didn’t give me much incentive to play it again. I should have stopped at 99% so I could at least see a second ending pic without having to replay the whole thing.

  40. “The downside to the success of Warioware is the that I think the Warioland series is done.”
    –
    Thankfully not, seeing as we’re getting Wario the Thief, which looks to be another 2D game.

  41. Metroid Fusion locked doors so that you HAD to go towards your current objective. There were still oppurtunities to sequence break but when the game discourages it so furiously by barring contextual doorways, one wonders if it’s worth the effort.

  42. Personally, I think these are all good games here – all of them. To point out the obvious, “different strokes for different folks.” Being that each individual has his or her own expectations as to what a game *should* play like, it seems a little silly to me to call something a “bad design desicion” simply because it’s not what one in particular wanted.

    Take Metroid Fusion. The game tells you where to go right up until the Final Battle, but from that point on you’re free to explore and adquire items. I personally *loved* the idea (*ducks to avoid the tomatoes*). Having the game make it very clear to you *where* you have to go allowed for more elaborate level design. Everywhere I went I had to figure out how to get from A to B. The designers were free to construct more elaborate environmental puzzles because there was no question of the player being confused as to whether he should be trying to solve the puzzle or not.

    In Zero Mission/Super Metroid/all-the-rest, it has to be very clear when a certain door is *DEFINITELY* locked, or when you *DEFINITELY* can’t jump high enough, because there *IS* a pre-set path, and the player has to find it. The way they create the illusion of “free exploration” is by making it obvious when you can’t get through a certain obstacle, so that after trying all, say, three paths which become available at one point, you can figure out which one you’re supposed to follow.

    To me, it’s just holding your hand anyway – it only *looks* like your hand’s not being held.

    The real exploration always comes once you’ve acquired all your abilities – which is the point at which Metroid Fusion stops letting you know it’s been holding your hand.

    Frankly, I appreciated the honesty.

    There’s one thing, though: during your second play through, you’ll remember the answer to all the environmental puzzles. You’ll know when “Evil Samus” comes out. So it loses some value. If you’re expecting to enjoy acing your way through the game because “now you know where to go and where NOT to go”, guess what: the game doesn’t let you go where you don’t need to go.

    Basically, I enjoyed just figuring out a strategy to reduce the time it took to clear the game with 100%. It’s challenging enough, because you have to decide which items to get in what order before the final battle.

    I also loved Circle of the Moon. ;-)

  44. Well, at least Fusion had a reasonable, inner logic to it. The game was different because it featured a constricting area with some elements of free roaming. Near full maps and instructions are given freely because of the nature of the setting. In its context, Fusion provides you such help because the place you are sent to explore is owned by the same people who hired the main character in the first place. Shutting gates down would also be logical to prevent the X from spreading.

  45. In Zero Mission/Super Metroid/all-the-rest, it has to be very clear when a certain door is *DEFINITELY* locked, or when you *DEFINITELY* can’t jump high enough, because there *IS* a pre-set path, and the player has to find it. The way they create the illusion of “free exploration” is by making it obvious when you can’t get through a certain obstacle, so that after trying all, say, three paths which become available at one point, you can figure out which one you’re supposed to follow.

    Except if you sequence break, which in Zero Mission you’re more or less expected to do it (otherwise they wouldn’t have put that one missile block leading down to Ridley)

    Also, they had the guts to make one of the Energy Tanks an exeedingly long shinespark-transfer puzzle, but that’s neither here nor there.

    Sequence breaking is impossible in Fusion for reasons other than the locked doors – the game is coded to give you the items in a particular order (people who cheated to get them out of order found they still got the next item- from the wrong bosses). The one place in the game you can ‘break’ the sequence you get a humorous conversation congratulating you on it but to get back to work instead of goofing off.

  46. i liked fusion more with each playthrough, until i got 100% in less than 2 hours. once i did that, there was no point to continue playing.

    zero mission i liked less, since the thing i liked most about metroid 1 is how hard it kicks your ass. zero mission was way too easy for being a remake of metroid 1, imo.

    CotM is my favorite GBAvania. i liked the DSS system, and how magic is readily accessible without being gimmicky and necessary. if you wanted to whip the hell out of everything and never hit the L trigger, you could. if you wanted to use mercury+salamander on everything you ever saw, that was fine too.the music was also stellar, best i have yet heard on a portable, excluding cd audio tracks on PSP. cd audio on DS still sounds terrible.

    Harmony i hated, partly because i liked CotM so much better, partly because the music was god awful, and partly because i had to get a friggin item to make the whip spin in a damn circle, so i couldnt tape down the b button and play a fun game while farming for xp. i beat it eventually, but i never liked the bosses or magic nearly as much as circle.

    AoS i never played, DoS is FAR too difficult for me. i gave up 2 bosses in.

    – AL3x

    ps – super metroid is the best Metroidvania ever, beating the living piss out of SotN.

  47. Harmony i hated, partly because i liked CotM so much better, partly because the music was god awful

    More like disharmony, am I right folks?

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