Metroid

"Founding father of Action Adventure...."

In the long-standing tradition of Nintendo games, there are none that get much better than the epic title Metroid. Taking control of a space age bounty hunter, Samus Aran, you run and explore through several stages of adventure and action in an attempt to bring down the evil forces of Mother Brain and her vast army of biological super weapons called Metroids which suck the life out of anything they latch onto! What this game started, was something of a legend in the action and adventure genre in which you were offered several different stages, weapons and upgrades that could be used for different situations. Spanning across three systems with several sequels and an upcoming appearance on the Nintendo Game Cube {hopefully}, Metroid is a classic example of gaming excellence that is only surpassed by that of Legend of Zelda!

Metroid was one of the firsts to offer platform action on a grand scale. Pitting you against an alien enemy that just keeps coming back for more, the game is centered around run and gun action with a bit of RPG quality rolled into one. Finding items and weapons, along with energy packs to increase your life span, you ‘re fighting against a myriad of enemies that range from the easily dispatched, to the most difficult in any NES game out there. Exploration is key here, in which you have to find your way through each area, and you need to find the special weapon hidden throughout the game to access other areas in order to proceed!

Different stages of the game require you to use a certain amount of strategy and if you don’t have the right weapons and items in order to pass these stages, you’ll spend some time looking for them. Backtracking is a must in Metroid, in which you may need to go back a few locations in order to find something that you need for a later stage. With the amount of enemies that you run into, as well as places that you need to traverse through, you may spend hours in just one section of the planet trying to get through! The total replay time of the game is nearly impossible to gauge, as you’ll probably spend a couple of days just trying to find everything, and then another couple of days trying to beat the game. The computer bosses are nothing to shake a stick at, and it’ll challenge you just to get to these bosses. Thankfully, with a password option, you can stop, and pick up where you left off at any given time. Don’t be too surprised if you’re killed right off the bat!

A little stiff and tight, the control revolves around the two-button configuration, one for jumping, and one to fire your weapon. It’s not all that hard to use, but the directional pad when trying to make length specific jumps can be just a little off, as was the case with most games of the NES era. Outside of that, the in-game control is near perfect in every way! With different weapons and situations, you’ll find that the game takes on another meaning to the word control, in which you’ll need to have some precise timing and jumping skills in order to get through the more difficult parts of the game. If you get lost in some places, you’ll need to find your way through and jump around a lot while firing just to find the hidden items that are scattered throughout the game! Something that does come up is the double jumping, which again requires precision timing of the jump button in order to complete correctly.

Being a first generation game, Metroid offers up a ton of eye candy to look at, with it being either the special weapons that you find, or the areas that you visit and explore through, this game delivers the goods in just about every category. Explosions look relatively bright, and the enemies themselves move fast and furious without a lot of slow down, save for when the screen has a lot of action going on. When you look through the game itself, you’ll find that detail was added even in places where you’d think it wasn’t worth the time. With this being said, each area has it’s own properties that set them all apart from one another, either by the character designs, or just by the level layout! Certain enemies that you take on, all have a life of their own and in some cases they are really based on whatever environment that you have to travel through. This adds a little bit of variety to what you have to look at and really lets you know where you are once you’ve been through the game a couple of times!

Classic MIDI type music that sounds pretty good. From the start, you’re greeted with something that is upbeat enough to leave you listening to just what the game has to offer, and the sound effects match the music and stages flawlessly. When you listen, you can hear the bubbling of the lava in some stages, and the serene music of the special weapons room. When you find a new weapon, there is a music that can’t be described except that you’ll know when you find something new. For it’s time, this was the best that NES had to offer!

A great game that is a piece of video game history, Metroid delivers the goods for any NES owner in terms of gameplay, visuals, audio and control. You can’t find a better game for the NES that is a platform action game other than Metroid; save for some of the later NES games that offered you the same type of gameplay. Regardless of this, you’ll have one hell of a time playing Metroid, and it’s definitely a collector’s item any way you look at it. With the amount of play and just the simple fact that it started a weird sort of phenomenon that hasn’t really been touched in the action adventure department, you’ll find that this is a founding brick in the genre wall.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 12/21/00, Updated 11/23/01