Stumbling through Super Metroid - Part 4

[davidn]

First of all, I want to sing the praises of VirtualDubMod for rescuing my night yesterday - I played for an hour and found out in the most frighteningly direct way that CamStudio 2, being a 32-bit application, just stops saving a video file once it reaches above 2GB and leaves it unreadable. But VirtualDub could just reindex and rekey the AVI file automatically, save it out again and it was perfect - I didn't even lose any footage! So thank you to open source software once again.

Thankfully, then, you can now see the adventures and mischief that took place on my third night (fourth part) under Zebes. In this episode I defeat a big lizard, acquire some new goodies, descend to some volcanic depths, resurrect an old ghost in managing to tempt the game... and then get stuck. So on this occasion, if you want to help me get out of the situation I've landed in, feel free to give me a small hint, perhaps just a general place I should be looking or ability that I haven't considered using... because I certainly can't see a way out.

http://youtu.be/AIADeyrh2EQ

Comments

[budgiebin.livejournal.com]

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.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

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...

[budgiebin.livejournal.com]

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

[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...

[xaq.livejournal.com]

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?

[budgiebin.livejournal.com]

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.

[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.