Metroid II remake

[Volteccer_Jack]

I just spent a few minutes with the game in Retroarch / gambatte to see what I thought. I feel pretty much like I did at the turn of the millennium...it feels sprawling and aimless, and "jump to aim" is already far from being my favorite game mechanic. It also goes without saying the metroid fights are hardly the most spectacular confrontations ever seen on the good ol' brick. The huge sprite and relatively slow pace of everything - including most enemies and recovery from hit bounce - also isn't really getting me going.

A bit of cleverness on my part led me to quickly uncover bombs, an energy tank, and the Spider Ball in 15 minutes playing blind, but a few more minutes playing around with the spider ball only seems to be underlining my apathy for this particular game. It's a clever little thing but it basically incentivizes players to play in a slow and boring way.

With that in mind I'll check out the remake as soon as I'm able. It feels like a shame to pick up a third party remake without having played through the original but I've just never been able to bring myself to do it.

It's a fair description, I'll disagree with "aimless" though; there's an explicit goal located in a particular place, the game just (deliberately) makes no effort to help you get there. Which of course is not something everybody will enjoy.

And yeah, while Spider Ball is a cool idea on paper, it is pretty terrible in practice, and the good things it adds to exploration are all unnecessary because infinite bomb jump exists. It's not an accident that Super Metroid dropped the Spider Ball. If they really wanted to improve on Metroid II, then AM2R should've at least attempted to address these sorts of problems. Instead they've bafflingly kept the crawling pace of Spider Ball movement even though their only real claim to improvement in this remake was speeding things up. They're paying crappy lip service to the things they vaguely remember from Metroid II while openly ignoring the importance of those things.

Similarly, I think AM2R making Metroids completely invulnerable except for a tiny weak spot was supposed to make them more difficult, but all it does is cause every Metroid fight to drag on way too long as I jump up and down like an asshole luring the Metroid into the one spot where I can easily blast it, then repeat that half a dozen more times. Utter garbage. Maybe the last two Metroid types are easier to hit, or have attacks that actually have a chance at hitting an awake player, but I'll never fucking know because I won't wade through another dozen of the first two types.

[Leandro]

Finished the game at 7 hours with 74% items... Good game

The only part that eluded me for some time was how to get the Ice Beam...

[hien]

Game looks good with SweetFX btw.

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Mod Edit: Huge images

Edit: Whoops, sorry for the direct image linking. Was a bit late yesterday…

[szycag]

I like that both the Game Boy game and AM2R are both alive and well alongside each other on Twitch.

[Drachenherz]

Thanks to AMR2, I'm playing zero mission. And got metroid fusion on my radar... Wow, so much Metroid goodness before me: Zero Mission, AMR2, Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion... *glee*

[Drachenherz]

Game looks good with SweetFX btw.

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Mod Edit: Huge images

Edit: Whoops, sorry for the direct image linking. Was a bit late yesterday…

That looks absolutely lovely! Would you mind sharing a short how-to/settings?

Edit: never mind, found some settings that satisfy my retro-scanline hunger.

[Ikazu-san]

http://am2r.freeforums.org/post25265.html
1.1 is out. Grab it while you can.

[Ed Oscuro]

I've neglected to try this out until now, but I'll just say that having an ingame map would remove very much of that "aimless" feeling I spoke of earlier, which makes the large areas (even in the very early stages of the game) with few junctions into other sections feel like a poor use of the map. A map would eliminate a lot of that problem as it would be fairly more obvious when I was in a dead end.

Edit: Done 34 minutes, 5 dead Metroids, 2 energy tanks, 65 missiles, spider ball. Nice breakup of scenery. I liked the energy tank puzzles, though I don't want the game to start relying on them. Also, naturally, the map is worth it. A couple odd notes though - the intro seemed a bit out of place, and I've never been the greatest fan of the shade-changing idle animations for Samus, which always struck me as odd. Also, those aliasing artifacts on the ship as it rotates - ew.

[DMC]

I am three-four hours in, thinking of reviewing this one, as there is much to say about it.
I think there is a decent game underneath, but it doesn't capture the atmosphere of Metroid 2 at all, as some posters here have already noted (like ZacharyB and Voltaccer_Jack).

M2 is a horror game, similar in spirit to Ridley Scott's Alien. As a horror, M2 was very novel and surprisingly effective for a handheld black-and-white game at the time. Nothing handheld I had played before made me jump like the metroids did. Those three piano tunes you heard before the metroids served as conditioned stimuli to induce a burst of adrenaline and a deperate fight or flight response (running out of the "room" in panic or switching to missiles and shoot at it before it reaches you). The metroids were fast, unpredictable, and deadly. They went from 0 movement to 100 in a second, they were challenging, and the music was intense.

Then after a metroid was beaten you got slow pace to recover, with silence, ambience and suspense music. You were in a labyrinth with a dark feel that induced worry about what's around the next corner. After finding old Metroid skin (just as in Alien) you were alarmed that something bad was about to happen!

In summary, the old game provided excellent suspense and effective horror! It is not a coincidence that the boss Ridley (not featured in M2 though) was named after Ripley in Alien. This was a Horror inspired by Alien.

But this sad remake is just another colorful happy-go-lucky action game in which you are essentially invincible, it does not offer much challenge at all. The metroid battles are the worst part of the game. The battles are slow and take much longer time with the improved defense of the metroid and exaggerated amount of missiles at your disposal. The adrenaline steadily sinks as you play until you are entirely unconditioned and do not elicit a stress response at all. Even the lava barely hurts you. Nothing is scary or suspenseful here. The remake just does what super metroid, zero mission and fusion have already done gameplay-wise (in addition to other metroidvanaia-like games).

[BIL]

Wasn't Ridley named after Alien (and later Prometheus ) director Ridley Scott? Just curious, it'd be funny if they'd actually meant it to reference Ripley and still landed in the same ballpark.

[DMC]

Haha, that seems much more reasonable.

[Obiwanshinobi]

I got stuck in it soon enough [in my days of GB(C/A) carts hoarding, no less] to not play it ever sice, but the Game Boy Alien 3 does the graphics well, at least (and I couldn't care less about Alien 3 the movie).

[ChuChu Flamingo]

Pretty cool remake, a shame that Nintendo couldn't have done this themselves. It really speaks a lot about how out of touch Nintendo is with the Metroid series.

[M.Knight]

I am playing through it at the moment, with around 2/3 hours of playtime in my save file, and I defintely have to put this game way below Super/Fusion/Zero Mission. (the 2D Metroid games I have completed)
While the controls mimic the GBA Metroid games pretty well and the HUD/interface tweaks are clearly welcome compared to Metroid 2's lack of map, there is one thing that just bothers me to no end : all the boss fights so far have been utter shit.

The Metroid fights are really annoying. Who the hell thought giving them such a tiny hitbox instead of the full-body one from the original game was a good idea, especially when all they want is to vertically align with you, thus making them vulnerable only if you endlessly jump like a retard? Besides, they love groping your own hitbox hentai-style and never letting go, so if you get hit by them, you'll defintely get hit again. Some of them are fought in arenas with microscopic platforms over lava or harmful vines, to add to the frustration. The later ones also have billions of HP, it's crazy.

As of now, I met a few other bosses that (AFAIK) weren't in the original game, and they are mostly even worse :

Spoiler

-The armadillo thingy is not that bad in theory and the way to defeat it is interesting, but the damn boss sometimes fires purple bullets that take a huge part of the screen's width while rolling on you, making neither morph-ball nor jumps reliable ways to dodge.

-The golden bird-like boss is terribly frustrating : it's a thousand kilometers tall so you are supposed to use your space jump to dodge it when it wants to dash towards you and fondle you like its Metroid pals, but the item is finnicky at best so you end up taking damage anyway. The wave attack is dodgeable if you are at the right distance, but otherwise, it seems just terribly designed. Moreover, the room is larger than a single screen so the boss sometimes moves away from you, but shooting at it from afar doesn't work. You have to approach it and have its goddamn face displayed on the screen for the game to register your hits. Oh, but on the other hand, it can still fire those weirdass waves and damage you even from offscreen. WTF?

And when you thought you were done with that shit, a second (also terribly designed) aerial phase appears where you have to almost constantly use the Space Jump. Even in the air, the boss just loves penetrating your hitbox with its own, and the few platforms on which you could shoot at it are tiny, so you spend most of the time running away from it or the minions it sometimes spawn that behave exactly the same. The attack where it dashes from off-screen in a straight line to your vertical position seems terribly unsuited to the Space Jump's jumping arc.

To top it all, the save point is dozens of kilometers away from it.

-The boss that is currently testing my patience is apparently called "The Tester", fittingly, and is some sort of circular thing with turrets and shield parts around it. The boss fight takes place in a vertical room which height is around 4 screens but that doesn't have reliable platforms around the walls. Yay, more endless Space Jumping (and no Spider ball instead because its speed is just godawful)! Yay, the boss can't be hit if you are at the bottom of the room but it can still hit you! The boss has a green laser attack that can be undodgeable if you are at the bottom of the screen instead of being close to it to rotate around it as you are supposed to, but you can't guess in advance whether you are supposed to stay near the boss because it will fire this attack or if it will instead use one its danmaku attacks where you should stay at the bottom. Dying to this damn laser feels like you were robbed that life by the game. It seems the dev realized his boss fight was unfair shit and the boss often fires destructible missiles that restore tons of life. Even those are annoying to dodge and destroy.

To top it all, the save point is dozens of kilometers away from it. [bis]

Metroid Fusion had great bosses and I never felt frustrated when they kicked my ass. Learning how to deal with them has always been interesting and the challenge was pretty cool. Here, losing to a boss pisses me off in a way video games rarely do. I even wonder why I keep playing the game and I quite frankly don't get why there is so much praise for this fan-made remake. Had this been an official Nintendo game in a timeline where Metroid fans have more than their fill of 2D games, its flaws would have been much more apparent I think. When you are starving to death, you care less about how the food tastes.