Super Metroid

"It fixes the small flaws Metroid had, and gives us much more of the good stuff."

Metroid always felt a little more serious than many of Nintendo's other series. Most of the other series are full of cute creatures and the game looks like it takes place in fairytale land. The plot is usually about a guy who has to defeat the a big villain and save his world from destruction, he also usually saves a girl who starts to love him. In Metroid there have as far as I know never existed such a thing. This is all about Samus Aran, the galaxy's greatest bounty hunter doing her job, and nothing else.

Even if you don't play this game for the plot, there actually is a little plot in it. The game takes places directly after Metroid II: Return of Samus. I haven't played much of that game but if I've got it right Samus found a small Metroid egg on the Metroid's home planet SR388. She took it over to a research center so they could study the Metroid, but as soon as Samus left the center, it was attacked by the Space Pirates.

Samus returns to the center, only to find that all the scientists are dead (at least it seems like it to me) and when she finally finds the Metroid, the villain Ridley appears and challenges her to a battle, but just like what you would expect from a villain he grabs the Metroid and escapes to the Space Pirate's new base, the planet known as Zebes. I'm not really sure why, but this is really bad so Samus drives to Zebes and lands there with her space ship. Her mission is to find this Metroid, and she's all alone in this new planet.

A simple way to describe the game play in the Metroid games is that they are just like the Mega Man games, except that instead of going from one stage to another you always instead have one big world to discover. Just like in Mega Man the Metroid games is all about dodge the enemies just like in many other platform games, and then fire back at the with your weapons just like in the action games. But to call Metroid an action game would be totally wrong, because just the key here is not to reach a goal, it's more of doing one big mission and make sure that you survive.

The most important thing in this game is to explore every area and almost search under every rock, because there are a lot of helpful power ups to be found. The most common one is the missile power ups, which allows you to fire missles instead of regular bullets. The missiles do a lot more damage to most of the enemies, and they can also be used to open doors with the color of pink. The more of these power ups you find the more your maximum ammo is for it. Two other similar power ups are the Super Missiles, which are pretty much the same thing as regular missiles except that they are much stronger, and with them you can open doors that are green. You can also find Power Bombs, which are bombs that covers the whole screen and can blew up a lot of things, for example doors that are yellow.

But there are a lot of other items to find, most of them allows Samus to do different things. There are many that makes her regular bullets stronger, or freeze the enemies which will be one of the most important things you will find. Another important and perhaps Samus most well known add on is the one that allows her to turn into a small ball, which allows her to get through many small holes that leads to new paths. She can also learn how to drop bombs while she's a ball. Of course there are many other cool gadgets she can find, but I stop here.

Two of the biggest improvements from the two previous games is first of all the control. I'm not saying it was bad in the Nes and Gameboy game but both these systems only had 4 buttons, but the SNES controller got 8. You use one button to jump, one to shoot with, you press select to choose one of your special weapons and start to pause the game. But since there are more buttons here you also have one run button and one to quickly change back to regular bullets when you are equipped with one of the special weapons. L and R are used to aim in other directions. The joypad is used to max.

The second is that when you pause the game you see a map. This is the biggest improvement because if you get stuck (and trust me you will sometimes) you figure that you must have missed something, and since the map shows where you have been and where you haven't maybe you should try to see if you can reach the previously unreachable places with one of your new power ups, or maybe you've missed to bomb and found some hidden path to an important place, because there are a lot of those in this game. Most of them aren't that hard to find, but some can be tricky if you don't expect the hidden places to be important.

Did I also mention that you can save in this game? Instead of having to write down way to long passwords that would never work anyway when you tried them you can just walk into a save capsule, turn of your system and return anytime you want. The only flaw I can think of in this game is that if you save and then don't play it for say 6 months, then I guess it is hell to try to get back on track instead of just starting a new game. But this is all I have to say about this game when it comes to flaws. If you can't get stuck, then you obviously have missed something and you have to explore Zebes to find what you've missed.

To increase the replay value even more, you can always try to find new quicker paths since when you've finished the game it tells you how long your took to finish your quest. There are three different endings that changes depending on how fast you beat the game, and to get the best ending you have to beat the game under 3 hours so good luck with that. It also tells you how many % of all the items you found in this game, so you could also try to find every Missile power up in this game if you want to, beileve me without using a FAQ that will take a while.

One amazing thing in this game is that it's actually one of the few games I've played that actually managed to scare me. I found what I thought was a secret path and saw that there were a few monsters guarding an entrance so I thought there was something good here, like an energy tank or something. However when I entered the door I got a really creepy feeling (the atmosphere and the music in this game is a great mix) and all of a sudden without any warning a boss came out of nowhere and attacked me. Not many games have made me panic (I've beat Eternal Darkness with low sanity) but Super Metroid managed to make me panic and of course I died.

Super Metroid is a game that you usually see on top games ever made lists, and that's because the game is so good. It took everything that made the original Metroid an outstanding game, somehow managed to improve it and also gave us a lot more. I'm not going as far as to call this game the best ever made, but every time I play it's blast! And since you are reading this review I'm sure that you agree with me.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 07/02/09

Game Release: Super Metroid (EU, 07/28/94)