davidn

Well shoot, I now know that you can kill the grabby frogs with a Super Missile XD I always rolled into a ball and hit them with a bomb, which... takes considerably longer...!

"My health going up ON AVERAGE" hahah, yep XD 'Okay, I'm nearly full, now I DAMMIT'

David, your editing is hilarious.<3

For the record -- your map was giving you a hint about the way forward in the ceiling of the Kamikaze Bats room ;) (How long did it take you to stumble onto it?)

"Ohhhhhh, this is going to be NICE." Correct XD

"You're telling me to STAY HERE and LEARN something." Hahah, yes XD

Oh, DAVID, you LOOKED at the way forward and you dismissed it! The game put something there to DEMONSTRATE the way forward, and you noticed THAT, and yet dismissed its significance! Watch the replay, I bet you'll think of it :)

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davidn

I can take some comfort from my own stupidity when I hear of my videos teaching someone something new about the game through my own... lack of knowledge of how to play it! Though I'm starting to understand the game's language - it's already very strange looking back at the first videos and seeing myself shooting walls instead of bombing them. And I still... yes, looked and commented on what I now think of as an incredibly obvious passage, thinking that it was just an outlet too small for me to enter - forgetting the abilities I had very quickly...

I see the map hint now, but that part came after cutting about twenty minutes of just going around shooting/bombing walls at random! I'm torn on whether this is a... well... well-designed game or not - I was becoming increasingly worried with its Hexen II-like tendency to hide things needed to progress behind secret unidentifiable walls, but... there are tiny clues. Again, it has a very specific language that you have to read and pick up on...

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Oh, and to answer our collective question, I finally went back -- the planet doesn't "wake up" (i.e. space pirates above the lift) until you've collected the morph ball AND the missile upgrade (and the door leading back into the tremendously tall platformy area stays gray until the pirates are awake). So yeah, you're locked in if you don't collect the first missile upgrade :)

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davidn

Ah, thanks for checking that - then that makes sense :) I didn't notice the grey doors until that little section under the plant boss.

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Oh, and one small note, as pointed out by a friend of mine -- the Varia Suit actually turns you from yellow to orange. (I was wondering why you thought it had to be equipped! I didn't realise how identical they would be until I checked DavidVision in photoshop... I definitely don't have the hang of this yet!)

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It does a little more than that, actually. It also gives the Power Suit the Giant Shoulders of Doom that were introduced in Metroid II, as well as some other bits of extra armor plating; compare the equipment menu images of the suit without the Varia active (http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100310023613/metroid/images/5/58/Power_suit_menu.jpg) and with it on (http://images.wikia.com/metroid/images/8/8e/Varia_suit_menu.jpg).

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Speaking of Metroid II it was the first Metroid game I played, and the only one I've played to completion. Very little love for that title, sadly, despite very creatively showing the Metroid life cycle.

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Metroid II is one of those games that's excellent and terrible, in ways that don't cancel each other out to be mediocre.... I miss it like crazy sometimes, but every time I open it up to play through it again, I don't even last an hour before going "uuuugh" at remembering how many confusing layouts and repeated rooms and terrible terrible songs (in between the amazing ones) I'm going to have to put up with...

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Hey now, Metroid (NES) only had one memorable song, and that was KRAID'S LAIR and it was AMAZING. You have to remember that what they were mostly going for is ambience, as opposed to the musical accompaniment that ended up as a staple of gaming early on.

Granted the maps were sort of confusing, but I did pretty well considering I was only 8 and didn't have any kind of player's guide. It really depends on how much you want to stick with it. I didn't have many other games as a kid, so... :P

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davidn

I've noticed that about this game, too - unusually for the time, it has a very atmospheric soundtrack rather than the bright tunes of Mario or the square wave metal soundtrack of Contra.

And I'm constantly amazed at how much patience and perseverance we had with games as children - we had the time to spend on them and there weren't a... flood of them constantly available, so we spent so much more time getting to know each one...

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What amazes me about the lack of acknowledgement it gets is how pivotal to the canon it is. Without playing it, only that little blurb at the start of this game keeps you from reading the storyline in Metroid Fusion and not knowing what it's talking about.

They revamped the original when they did Zero Mission; is it really too much to want to see an upgraded version of this?

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I'd love a new Metroid II. I never understood why people think it's NON canonical, despite being a straight sequel, probably because it's not on a main console. It... didn't really help that both Super Mario Land and the Zelda games took place in lands separate from the console games, as if they wanted to experiment with things but didn't want to mess up the established console canon too much. It really took the GBA to clear that mindset, because the tech finally advanced enough to turn people's heads and the games were more complex and robust on their own merits and ports became a common thing and... well, you know the rest.

I think it was just a bad time for a straight Metroid sequel to come out. Handhelds weren't taken seriously for a long time, so I'd totally believe it was dismissed, ignored and forgotten easily. I'd love to say it was overshadowed by Super Metroid, but it came out a full THREE YEARS LATER.

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davidn

I didn't even know of Metroid II for ages - I had assumed it was a Japan-only release or something, I was surprised when I found out it was on the Gameboy as I don't know of any other series with direct sequels spanning both handhelds and consoles.

I'm like that with Legend of Zelda, though - the first one I ever played was Link's Awakening. I loved it, and was surprised to learn that it was regarded as a weird and uncomfortable entry to the series.

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I mean in-game, and outside of the forward-facing pose which a newbie will have seen rarely enough to barely appreciate the difference :P

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Ah. Yeah, good point there...still, they do give you a heads-on look as it goes online for the first time; you can clearly see the transformation in the shoulders when it happens. (And, as I showed, there's also the equipment menu changes.)

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A menu which he had not opened until after he already had the upgrade. ;)

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True. I wonder if he's even aware of the fact that he can unequip stuff?

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Well there's never any reason to outside of glitches or speedruns, so I don't think it's crucial knowledge ;p

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Actually, there's one thing you can do involving unequipping certain things that can serve a practical purpose. I won't go into detail, but it involves 1 item David has (and apparently hates using) and 2 that he doesn't.

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Also, spoiler tags are 'revealed' in email notifications, so they're basically useless in comment threads ;p

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davidn

I was aware! I can't remember when I discovered it, but it was a while after thinking I was stuck in the pit with the three turtle enemies - it would have come in useful there, as doing the jump over the water with the hi-jump boots on is a difficult feat. I never tried unequipping the suit, I'd have noticed a difference on the equip screen but the differences on the sprite seem subtle to me at best.

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davidn

That's right, I think of yellow and orange as... different names for pretty much the same colour, almost, or just different shades of the same colour. I didn't notice a difference, I'd probably have to have the two sprites side by side for me to notice anything.

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crassadon.livejournal.com

This has been the best episode so far, in my opinion. My opinion being that I enjoy watching you mess up. Speaking of which, are you planning on releasing a "deleted scenes?" You make a lot of cuts to speed things along, and I think I'd actually enjoy seeing it uncut. Like when you're going towards Kraid's lair, and mini-Kraid is shooting spikes down the passage at you: you clearly took some damage traveling that passage, and I might have enjoyed watching it, since I like watching you mess up.

On much the same thought, watching tonight's video made me realize how much I've played this game, despite never actually owning it. That's why I enjoy watching your interactions with all the enemies in the game, since you don't know what to expect, it's neat seeing you get hit, or even avoid things, like how you've avoided all the breath weapons from those weird wall-head. . things. When I play, I'm basically fighting the enemies in the next room before I even enter it, because I have every enemy's position memorized, along with their attack patterns. Gosh, I've played a lot of this game! Actually, I remember getting stuck in the same place you are, for much the same reason, when I first played it. Though I don't think I quite explored as hard as to put bombs along the floor of the room filled with lava :P

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davidn

I'm glad you enjoy it :) Messing up and getting frustrated is definitely fun to watch, perhaps exasperating if you know what's meant to be done at every turn. The parts I cut out are basically just long streams of silence without any entertaining reactions or commentary, though I try to keep all scenes that are necessary to show the turns I'm taking and my route through the game. (And I'm trying to be better at deleting the cut scraps than I was during Hatoful, where I let them build up to about 40GB.)

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As someone who has never played this particular game but knows the lore, I am finding this both informative and entertaining. Entertaining editing job. :D

The "fish man statues" are actually birds, btw :D

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Also, I want to see you discover bomb-jumping.

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davidn

I thought I had...! I've been able to lift myself off the floor with bombs, it was the only way to get through the Caverns of Pink to the super missile door that led to the Garden of Pain.

I'm so glad this is turning out so well - it's the first time I've been enthusiastic about a new project for a while :) Thank you!

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You got the basics of bomb-jumping down; set an explosive under yourself, then do the most suicidal thing possible and sit on it. I think was Kay's referring to, however, is getting multiple bomb-jumps in a row; I'm talking ascending one of the numerous immense vertical shafts in Morph Ball mode using nothing but precisely-timed bomb placements.

It's sort of a rite of passage for hardcore Metroid fans, so......maybe some other time?

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crassadon.livejournal.com

I know it was just said that spoiler tags are useless, but. .

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Ah. Yes, you did, sorry. I'll have to rewatch, I may have missed that particular maneuver.

Like Xaq said, I was looking for the ones where you use the bombs to *essentially* bypass the need for hi-jump boots and generally break the game. I wouldn't really call it hardcore mode unless you're actually using it strategically, though. I figured it out pretty easy as a kid when I spammed bombs, though I never took the time to master the timing and thus never actually got to break anything.

If you're interested in harnessing the power of infinite bomb jumps, a good place to practice it would be the entrance (crateria??) where your ship is. There are even some secret passages in that area.

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