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.Ed Oscuro wrote: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.
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.