davidn | Entries tagged with super metroid

After twelve videos, here is the end of Super Metroid! After a slightly inadvertent last round of item-hoovering, we head into the depths below the statue room to find out what lies there. And I was extremely surprised to find out what it was - after an entire game of forgetting the plot and running around finding items, what a masterpiece of silent storytelling and subtle dread that turned out to be! In contrast to the rest of these videos, most of those scenes have been left in unedited. And yes, there is screaming.

Thank you for sharing the ride with me, and also thanks to the Wii U players for inspiring me to finally try this myself in the first place. (But they're still all really stupid.)

http://youtu.be/4q8xYIP9oe0

So now the floor is free - tell me anything you like! Things I missed, things I did differently from you, recommendations for speedruns and sequence breaks to watch... this was an absolutely fascinating game, and as always, I'd love to hear other people's experiences with it.

You MUST also look at

lupineangel's tribute to Super Metroid in a personalized form of Scarborough Fair!

Thank you for making the last video about Super Metroid the most-discussed thing in the history of this journal (beating the previous record holder Symphony of the Night by some margin). I still have about a squillion comments to reply to, but for now, here is part 11!

I hesitate to say that things "heat up" in this part because as we all know that would be bloody stupid, but in the lower regions of Norfair, the action noticeably raises a tier - here, two very tough bosses get defeated and I acquire an extremely enjoyable new ability that I briefly thought I had in the last video. I know that I must be close to the end of the game now - will part 12 be the final one? We'll see...

http://youtu.be/wNqOyvnGEKQ

Celebrating ten parts! But this is, without a shadow of a doubt, the dullest video to produce that I've done in this entire project. After making what I thought was great progress for the last few videos, here I was reduced to running around the entire game in a very big circle for just shy of two hours, after which I asked Kjorteo to give me a pointer and through him I remembered about the giant scary face in the rock that had scared me off several videos ago.

This video is mostly me hoovering up secrets, messing about and getting frustrated. Once again, over two hours of gameplay have been compressed down into exactly fifteen minutes.

http://youtu.be/Fh2_50_qgFw

Here's another fifteen-minute episode, in which this time a whole lot more happens! The exploration continues, I end up a bit stuck, then remember something I ignored earlier and get right back on to the route again, including epic battles with two bosses, one manageably small and one intimidatingly large. And grabby.

http://youtu.be/1NSei4KciRA

This is a gentler part than most of the others! Instead of frustration and being stuck, the vast majority of it is just peaceful exploration through this new underwater world that I've just opened up. I attempt to read the game's language to discover some secrets, but do not do very well at it.

http://youtu.be/b41nw24t-ug

RavenWorks: OH MY GOD DAVID NewtonXDavid: YES RavenWorks: the firebug ice thing! RavenWorks: ARE YOU SOME KIND OF IDIOT SAVANT NewtonXDavid: YOU'RE HALF RIGHT
This is one of my favourite episodes in a while! Perhaps mostly because I don't start or end it completely stuck, in contrast to many of the other recent ones. This time, there's a lot of forward progress in an hour of gameplay mostly around the wrecked ship, and I also discover a lot of other things - mostly by accident. Namely, I defeat the third boss, acquire a new outfit and learn a new ability from a punk flamingo - it's interesting that as part of the game's completely silent narration, some skills are passed on through teaching by example like this rather than actually unlocking them.

And as a side note, look how buttery-silky-smooth the video is now! I've switched over to FRAPS as a screen recorder because I'm planning to do a couple of more demanding games soon and the performance difference is so large it's insane - most of that is due to the way that it doesn't attempt to compress on the fly, therefore producing 10GB-per-hour videos that you have to compress manually later, but I have the hard drive space to work with it. I also had some desynchronization issues at first and went back to making a simultaneous audio recording on the Pod X3, but in this video I'm using the audio that FRAPS recorded with the screen and it seems happy enough after all.

http://youtu.be/Mq1SJ4UESCc

If my Super Metroid playthrough were a video compression algorithm... then it would make no sense. But it would also be the best one in the world - I thought I would have to split last night's play into two episodes, but over two hours of play have boiled down to just over fifteen minutes of active content!

It's content in which I hoover up a load of items and generally make some significant progress, though - in this part, I fight the second big boss and gain a new ability, which will no doubt get me into some intriguing new areas as soon as I remember where they are.

There's an interesting point in this video where I think I did something wrongly but managed to advance anyway... I can't imagine what I did being the actual solution, but I spent a while trying every other avenue I could think of and this was the only thing I did that resulted in any success at all. Judge for yourself!

http://youtu.be/3Ww9oGW1jtQ
I'm actually trying to think of other places to promote playthroughs, because I think this is one that many people will be interested in just now for the same reason I started it! Any ideas?

Insomniacs' special!

Thanks to everyone for providing the clues that I needed to get out of my situation in the last part (or rather, shouldn't have needed because all it took was going down an incredibly obvious passage) - in this episode, we have a lecture on observation, a lot of progress without a lot of big events (but some big explosions), and a strange obsession with toasters (I missed a dose of thyroid medication today). It's incredible even to me that I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to say in these before I do them.

The episode ends with me stuck in completely the opposite way from how I started it, free and wandering all over the cave system trying to remember where I've seen yellow doors or things that look like they might need to be cooled down a bit. I've made a couple of laps of the game, but haven't yet found the one that'll actually allow me to progress.

http://youtu.be/sHNcPwi3RTw

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

Er, Part 2 is here and I sort of forgot to link it.

Thanks to everyone who volunteered information after watching my first night of Super Metroid, in which I think I made a surprising amount of progress for someone who didn't know all the controls (rather like Marble Madness before it, as much as marbles can "run"). Here's the second session of the journey, confusingly titled Part 3, which I hadn't realized would be so short - I aim for about twenty-minute episodes, but exploration-based games compress down amazingly when you edit them down to just the interesting or relevant bits (particularly with me at the controls).

This part involves... getting lost, mostly, and also a fair amount of screaming.

http://youtu.be/rShe2u67mPU

Having now just about reached a point where I'm no longer utterly sick of the sight of Powerdirector, I've decided to open a new semi-grand project in the form of an extended Stumbling Through of Super Metroid.

This was inspired by the game suddenly landing in the hands of a large number of stupid people via its release on the Virtual Console, which led to a load of posts on Twitter by idiots who can't get past the first obstacles. Or so it seemed - to prove or disprove this, I decided to play through the game myself to see if I could do any better. Wish me luck.

In this first episode, I learn the backstory, bumble around finding my feet, and then get eaten by a fishbeast.

http://youtu.be/bYskLMl1jS8
To disclose fully: I have played this game before, but it was in fifteen-minute bursts on a train on the way in and back from work, and consequently I could never remember what I was supposed to be doing or where I had been or where to go next at any time. Just about everything that I see this time around honestly seems new to me.