Game EXP: Metroid: Zero Mission (Wii U)

Metroid: Zero Mission

Systems: Game Boy Advance, Wii U

Release Date: February 9, 2004

Publisher: Nintendo

Developer: Nintendo R&D1

Play Time: 5 Hours 24 Minutes / 9 Hours 8 Minutes*

I am currently planning for this to be a shorter article, partly because it is a 17-year-old game, partly because it is a re-imagining of the 1986 NES game Metroid, but also because. 

Before starting, all I really knew about the game was that it was, as mentioned in the previous sentence, that it was a re-imagining of the original Metroid game using a similar engine and graphics to Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion (it is the same engine as Metroid Fusion).  I also knew that this was the introduction of Samus's Zero Suit (hence why it is called the Zero Suit and not just a Suit).  Lastly, I knew that the original NES Metroid was unlockable after beating the game.  I figured that there would be expanded areas or completely revamped based on how Zebes looked in Super Metroid compared to the original areas, so I did not go into Metroid: Zero Mission expecting a 1:1 remake with just a different coat of paint.  What I was not expecting was the introduction of new bosses, new and established abilities along with an entirely new section that finally allowed Samus to crawl.

There was quite a lot in Metroid: Zero Mission that I could talk about and only so much time I want to devote to this article, so I am going to ignore all of the cutscenes that appeared at various times of the game (which were great because 2D Metroid games have not always been heavy on story or exposition outside of the manual).  I am also going to only mention here the changes to the maps by not having the two column-tubes in Brinstar that divide Crateria and Norfair were welcome rather than their original straight up/down design from the original.  That goes the same for the rest of the game, that adding definition to various regions and maps to make them more interesting, although I did miss a lot of the translucent business in Norfair as the design went more for an opaque bubbliness (credit for the pictures from the Metroid.fandom.com page for Metroid: Zero Mission because I was not about to go back into the game to play for a combined two hours when I could just borrow two images to try to make my point).  Aside from here, I am also going to not bring into detail the inclusion of a lot more environmental puzzles, such as the giant grubs in Norfair and how to get around using enemies as frozen stepping stones after you gain the Screw Attack and just pulverize them while trying to jump out of the sludge.

So then what have I left myself to talk about?  Primarily the gameplay I think.  The gameplay felt 100% like I was playing the NES Metroid but with all of the quality of life improvements that came along with Metroid II: Return of Samus and Super Metroid, although some took a bit of time to get used to.  Oddly enough, kneeling/crouching was introduced in Metroid II on the Game Boy and thankfully was brought back here, which meant that some enemy designs had to be revamped to take into account Samus' two heights of firing; at times I had to remind myself that I could crouch and fire.  I was kind of surprised that Wall Jumping was kept in because it could have meant a lot of redesigning areas to prevent players from exploring out-of-reach areas too early. Although it still felt as difficult as ever, being similar mechanically to the Wall Jumps in both Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion; read: I find it pretty difficult to pull off.  I loved that could again cling to the sides of ledges but that was a skill that you learned along the way and did not start off with, introduced in Metroid Fusion and just saves so much time when climbing those vertical tubes and not having to bomb-jump your way into the tiny MorphBall-sized tubes; and especially so once you get the Space Jump and can jump in MorphBall form.

I was very much surprised that the game did not end after killing Mother Brain and exiting the escape tube/chamber behind Mother Brain leading back to the surface.  Let me move back for a second.  That Mother Brain fight was a lot more difficult than I remember it being on the NES.  Maybe I did not have enough Energy Tanks, but I found myself constantly getting knocked off the two small platforms by either the line-energy-shots, the freezable circular projectiles, or Mother Brain's eyeball blast.  After dying a few times (at least five), I realized I had forgotten about the Screw Attack, but once that kicked in, I still found it difficult to Screw jump my way out of the muck that causes Samus to move slower and jump less high even with the High Jump Boots.  There is a lot of on-screen noise here and that makes sense for the final boss fight, or at least that was how it was supposed to feel because Mother Brain is the final boss in the game, but the level of difficulty I felt in this fight felt significantly higher than any of the previous bosses, requiring not so much figuring out a puzzle-of sort to damage Mother Brain, but an all-out battle requiring the player to keep track of so many on-screen elements that it felt reminiscent of a boss fight from 1942 or other shmups; I am not great at those games because of all of the on-screen noise/elements.  This was that moment in the game where I questioned if I was going to be able to beat the game without spamming the Save State Respawning mechanic that is a part of Virtual Console games.  I did not resort to that tactic and instead took on Mother Brain's final chamber from the save room, aptly placed two rooms prior.  But that is somewhat beside the point.  The point is, after the battle with Mother Brain, the game is not over.

So Samus flees the self-destructing planet and is attacked by the chitinous Space Pirates that were first introduced in Super Metroid, and their inclusion here in the end-game, I was pretty excited by.  When used in Super Metroid, it felt like the player should have already been familiar with them three games in, but for whatever reason, it was not until game 3 that they were first introduced, now retconned to be included in Samus' first mission (or at least her first video game representation of this mission).  The majority of this epilogue mission, Samus' ship having crashed on Chozodia, the Chozo homeworld, is to again strip Samus of all of the upgrades you had grown accustomed to, take her out of her Power Suit, and introduce her Zero Suit and a weak stun gun.  This mission being all about speed and stealth was a drastic change of pace when normally the game is literally run and gun, and I was pretty excited about it.  Add in Samus crawling, being what the original Metroid developers could not do on the NES hence the origin of the Morph Ball, was pretty exciting too.  

This whole area, Samus working her way through the Pirate mothership and through Chozo ruins is broken up into sections bookended by save rooms, and there were a number of these areas that contained new elements meant to force Samus to not trip electronic sensors which would send a flurry of Space Pirates towards Samus' location with their clawed-plasma-canon's blasting.  Out of her Power Suit, Samus is soft and bleedy, often dying in only a few hits from the Space Pirates, so there was a lot of restarting for me, but each area functioned as a larger puzzle to work your way through without tripping any of the sensors.  There was one large open area that I could consistently make about 2/3rds of the way through before a higher-than-I-wanted jump was always made, setting off the alarm and starting the foot race to escape the Pirate pursuit.  Eventually, Samus regains her Power Suit through some backstory telling and it is genuinely satisfying being able to take out the Space Pirates with one shot after spending the last hour or two avoiding them.

Oddly enough, there was another final boss battle here fighting against a robotized-version of Ridley (Mecha-Ridley?) and I am now wondering about Ridley's return in Super Metroid if he/it/they were destroyed when ZR388 blew up (or when Samus killed them, or when Samus killed whatever robot Ridley's mind/consciousness was uploaded into).  But that fight took place (again) because it is written that following Metroid II: Return of Samus, every Metroid game must have a Ridley boss fight in it, and then you flee the exploding Space Pirate Mothership.  Overall, I have mixed feelings about the end of the game.  First off, this post Mother Brain ending felt a little anticlimactic, I think because you just destroyed Mother Brain and an entire planet, then you are attacked and have to survive without your Power Suit and then fight the second version of Ridley.  And while Ridley is a recurring boss in the franchise, this battle did not feel like the ultimate boss battle that the game was leading up towards.  And while I do enjoy the subverting of expectations, here it just felt like an excuse to have Ridley in the game again.  I honestly feel like it could have been a better ending if there had been something to activate that triggered the ship to self-destruct.  That being said, I loved the change of pace in this new section of the game.  I loved having Samus out of her Power Suit and going up against the Space Pirates with only a stun pistol and while feeling a little lost on the general geography of the stage, I loved the inclusion of Chozodia and the flashback to Samus' childhood.

So I guess that went on a bit longer than I had originally anticipated, but the whole gist is that I thought Metroid: Zero Mission was a great reimagining of the original Metroid to make it more accessible to then and now modern audiences and retconning some of the character and enemy designs from Super Metroid on.  If you can find it on the Game Boy Advance, great.  If you can only get it on the Wii U, I would say even better because the screen is bigger, it is backlit, and you have the save-state options, whether or not you decide to use them.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconain
Rapture of the Empty Spaces


*P.S.  The 9 Hours 8 minutes time is the time recorded by the Wii U that I spent on the game, so it appears that I spent nearly twice the amount of time either reloading previous saves that did not count towards the in-game time (probably some of that was from the Mother Brain fight), or some other combination of that and just messing around in the game.

P.P.S.  I should also mention that it was not until I beat the game that I realized that breaking hidden blocks, a lot of which is done with the Speed Boost ability and "shinesparking", counts towards collecting items, or at least I think it does; this is what I gathered while briefly watching a 100% walkthrough after finishing the game.  I also realized how many hidden areas I did not find because I did not use the Shinespark ability apparently as frequently as you could.  Ah well.

Game EXP: Call of Cthulhu (NS)

Call of Cthulhu

Systems: Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch

Original Release Date: October 30th, 2018

Publisher: Focus Home Interactive

Developer: Cyanide Studio 
Play Time: 

I was pleasantly surprised by Call of Cthulhu, not that I was expecting a bad game, just that the Metacritic reviews (which I only just looked up while writing this article) rated the game across all systems between a 63 and 68, with the Nintendo Switch port receiving the highest of the ratings and the general clamor that I seemed to hear online was that it was not a great game.

I loved this game.  

I almost feel that I could just leave that as the entire article, but I will delve a little bit deeper.

Call of Cthulhu is a game based on the Cthulhu mythos created by H.P. Lovecraft and expanded upon by some of his contemporaries and is an original story by Cyanide.  I feel that a lot of games based on Lovecraft's works pull mostly from his story, "The Shadow over Innsmouth" where a veteran of World War I and Private Investigator Edward Pierce is hired to look into a missing person case in the town of Innsmouth where he checks into a hotel, is attacked by locals, meets colorful locals who don't attack him, then witnesses a procession of Deep Ones emerging from the sea and eventually, more or less, goes insane.  Okay, I guess this Call of Cthulhu game does pull a bit from that formula, but unlike a lot of video games that are steeped in cosmic horror, there is predominantly no action.  There were a few context/dialogue choice sections that involved violence, and one area at the end of the game where you could shoot a gun.  The rest of the game was spent talking to people, running from creatures, trying to stealthily avoid orderlies, and making deductions using clues found at various locations.

Call of Cthulhu came out around the same time as a similarly themed game that I reviewed last year, The Sinking City from Frogwares Games.  And while The Sinking City was an open-world (within the confines of a city), Call of Cthulhu was a more contained experience, allowing the player to explore set pieces with loading screens acting as transitions between chapters and locations.  For the most part, it allowed me to feel that I could not get lost trying to locate the next area, although there were a couple of times when I felt confused as to what I needed to do, or even if there was more than one way to proceed to the next area.

The first thing that stuck out to me was how good the game looked on the Switch in handheld mode.  I know the Switch screen maxes out at 720p, but this might have actually made the game look a bit better than playing on a larger screen, although I did play one of the additional endings in docked mode and it still looked good.  Not that the game has to look good for the storytelling to be effective, but that was just one of my first impressions.  I did notice though that the Unreal Engine 4 had some animation snafus when it came to the lips of some of the characters, often with their lips pulling back pretty far to reveal a mouthful of pearly whites.  I just chalked it up to this being a Lovecraftian story and the effect was purposeful to make characters feel a bit off.

However, there were a number of cinematics where the facial animation was amazing, both in terms of running on the Switch and just in the accomplishments of Cyanide's team to capture minuscule facial animations.  This scene happens to lead into the third act (I think?) where Edward Pierce has witnessed something that would normally be something that would be considered impossible.  His reaction here, I feel, is the buildup from the first half of the game and he just is unable to contain a sense of normalcy.  The straw that broke the camel's back.  I love the way his eyes twitch back and forth.  

I love when he looks down in the briefest moment of disgust as if something is crawling up his chest.  I love the brief look into the figurative camera as if he is looking at the player themselves.  I love how he breaks down at the end as I am sure a lot of us would do in the exact situation, that he is not so macho that he is above the inability to accept everything that has happened to him.  I find it a brilliant performance from the animation team, the director, the voice actor, pretty much everyone involved in this scene.

Another thing that stuck out to me early on, was that the choices I was making, especially through dialogue options had immediate and seemingly long-lasting consequences.  In the bar on the island of Darkwater, there was a local who was giving Edward Pierce some guff while in a bar so I punched him when he came at me.  This apparently did not sit well with the bartender and he refused to serve Edward a drink because he was an outsider who had caused violence.  No amount of trying different dialogue options would get me a drink, so I moved on and continued talking to the rest of the patrons, a few even commenting about the scuffle at the bar.  There were a number of times during conversations, or interacting with objects that the game notified me that what I just said or did "will affect your destiny."  At the time I did not know if that meant something along the lines of The Walking Dead: A Telltale Series, and only after I beat the game did I discover that certain actions did affect which endings you were eligible to receive, but I will get to the end of the game later.

A mechanic that Cyanide implemented was a sanity meter of sorts, complete with a meter and a list of ways that your sanity has been affected and could possibly be in the future.  I was a little worried when I discovered that your sanity meter would never refill or repair itself and that witnessing potentially horrific events was the primary cause for the meter being depleted because exploring and examining weird phenomenon is one of the hallmarks of a Lovecraftian mystery.  So then the question is to examine something that could potentially decrease your sanity, or go without information that could change how you perceive current and future events.  Is it worth it to examine the body of a desecrated corpse on the operating table at an asylum to find out if the body was surgically mutilated or possibly from some otherwordly creature, leading your investigation towards either a human or a supernatural suspect?  By the end of the game, I did completely use up all of my sanity, which I was fine with and it made sense considering the events that happened, but there were a number of sanity effects that were left hidden making me wonder how I could replay the game and see if I could manage to have Edward Pierce go semi-insane in a different manner.

There was one book that I had Pierce read that affected his sanity, but the game had apparently not Autosaved before I turned the game off (I know this because there were other events that I ended up having to repeat).  This brings me to the saving mechanic, or auto-save mechanic as it were. There are only specific moments when the game saves as well as all scene and chapter transitions, which I did find frustrating at times.  I can understand not having access to specific save files or being able to save right before examining something hoping for a different outcome, but there were a few times when I wished I could just save the game manually and go to sleep (it being sometime after midnight and knowing that Goblino was likely to wake up in 4-5 hours).  Maybe it's just nitpicking at this point and I think I must be spoiled by being able to save whenever I want.

There was one section in the game that I felt pretty lost at, as you had to navigate a maze through darkened rooms with limited light.  It was definitely one of those moments in a game where you feel like this might be the place that you cannot get passed and you either have to stop playing or seek a walkthrough.  You might wonder how this section played during playtesting or if the game even went through playtesting because of how lost I felt.  Did the game even go through playtesting?  Eventually, after two nights of failed progress, I took a step back from the game, and because the chapter restarted from the beginning each time I started the game back up, it actually allowed me to approach the maze and notice clues directing you where you needed to go that I had bypassed the first two attempts.  It is still a semi-anxiety-inducing section of the game that does not bring back good feelings when I think about playing through again, but there were a number of well-placed jump scares and a well-established feeling of dread as you began to realize how you needed to solve the level to escape the maze.

Going into the final act was a bit of a departure from the rest of the game and I am not 100% sure how the decisions I made with various characters influenced how these events unfolded in the end-game.  This is where you are saddled with a gun and the game, kind of, becomes a first-person shooter.  It is only a handgun and you do have limited ammunition and you do not pick up additional rounds of ammunition from the people you kill.  Now that I think about it, I would not be surprised if there is an achievement or some story element that is revealed if you get through this area without killing anyone that you can avoid.  I, on the other hand, did actively kill people when their icon turned from passive white to murderous red.

The end of the game was interesting and I only fully understood what had been going on during the game after watching all three of my available endings and reading what a fourth possible ending could have been having I not drank any alcohol during the game.  I do not want to spoil any of the endings, but I will say that they felt very Lovecraftian, than no one ending felt like it was designed to be the "Good Ending."  What I mean is that all of the endings had some level of trauma involved, seemingly regardless of your sanity level at the end of the game, and while a character may have survived the whole endeavor, they were forever marred by the experience.  They may have stopped a cult attempting to resurrect or bring about a cosmic aberration but at the further cost of their own sanity or even their life.

I would love for Cyanide Studio to tackle another weird horror story, maybe not specifically Lovecraft as there are a lot of stories that could be well adapted, thinking specifically of Algernon Blackwood's novella "The Wendigo."  I would not want another Edward Pierce mystery nor would I want an Edward Pierce origin story as The Call of Cthulhu does a great job with his particular story.  These types of stories are difficult to do well in video game form and despite the low critic scores across all systems, I really think that Cyanide Studio did a great job with the material and the feeling that comes across in a lot of Lovecraft's stories.  They did The Call of Cthulhu justice, and that was really what I was hoping for from this game the whole time.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental

MIDI Week Singles: "Miracle!! Sukeru Toko (more starlight remix)" - Waku Waku Puyo Puyo Dungeon (SSat)

 

"Miracle!! Sukeru Toko (more starlight remix)" from Waku Waku Puyo Puyo Dungeon on the Sega Saturn (1998)

Composers: Ko Hayashi, Keita Haga, Osamu Ishikawa, Daisuke Nagata, & Shigeharu Imano

Album: Waku Puyo Dungeon Ketteiban Original Soundtrack*

Label: Kid's Dom, Program

Publisher: Compile

Developer: Compile

I have only previously played the Puyo Puyo Tetris demo on the Switch shortly after we got the Switch, and all I really know about the franchise is that it is a puzzle-Tetris-like game.  Waku Waku Puyo Puyo Dungeon (WWPPD from here on out) is actually a top-down dungeon crawling adventure game.  That is all I was really able to find out.  I have no idea what this miracle is, or who/what Sukeru Toko is, what more or less starlight is referring to, or why this music is a catchy as it is, and why it made me dance at my desk while performing some of my daily data entry duties.

That is really one of the things that I look for with video game music, especially when it is music from a game or franchise that I am unfamiliar with.  If I start paying attention to the music, or if I catch myself bobbing my knees like a 40-year-old white dad at a wedding, I will note the song then come back to it and upon relistening, if I have a similar reaction, that song is getting featured.  This is exactly what happened with "Miracle!! Sukeru Toko (starlight remix)"  Again, I have zero context for this song, where it appears in the game or why, but I'll be snookered if I did not enjoy listening to it a few times before and while writing today's article.

It may not have the same reaction to you, and I do not expect all our featured songs too, but I am going to listen to it again, just because I am sure that no one is going to be walking by my office in the next three minutes.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

*P.S. I bring this up in the footnote because I could not find a soundtrack specifically for the Sega Saturn release, but there was one for the 1999 PlayStation release that used that title too instead of the original Saturn release.  The music from the PlayStation release sounded a little different, but I did not find that track until after I had nearly completed this article, and I wanted to feature the song that interested me in the first place.

First Impressions: Fire Emblem (Wii U)

Fire Emblem / Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade
Systems: Game Boy Advance, Wii U Virtual Console
Original Release Date: April 25, 2003
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Intelligent Systems

As I have mentioned before, my experience with the Fire Emblem series is limited to, and in this order, Fire Emblem Heroes, Fire Emblem: Shadows of Valentia, and Fire Emblem: Three Houses.  I also briefly started the first game in the series, Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light, but upon realizing that the mechanics were more antiquated than any of the more recently released titles and because I felt that I needed a non-platforming game to play opposite New Super Mario Bros., I decided to jump into the turn-based tactics game that is Fire Emblem.  And while it may not be known outside of everyone else who has played these games, Fire Emblem on the Game Boy Advance was named as such for North American audiences because this was the first game in the franchise to be localized and introducing the subtitle to a prequel that was never released stateside, was probably the better option, even if it created some confusion (read confusion on my part) for when people would search for where this game fell in the Fire Emblem franchise history.

This game introduces the player as a player in the game, kind of similar to the role of the Summoner in Fire Emblem Heroes, this being the first time that the role of Tactician/Strategist was introduced in the series.  The Tactician does receive their own in-game avatar and I guess I will have to wait until my birthday to see if anything happens because the game does ask for your name, and birthday (and apparently in the original release in Japan, your blood type because why?  OH!  That would have been cool to introduce a story element 3/4 of the way through that required the Tactician to give a blood transfusion to one of three characters, two of which will die without the blood transfusion and you can only give blood to one character whose blood-type matches yours; yes, I know that is not exactly how blood-types and transfusions work in the real world, but play with me here) and we are some time off from my birthday and I will likely finish the game before I transition into the final year of my early 40s.  And while you do choose the gender of your Tactician, your avatar on-screen is the same regardless of gender and, at least at present, you do not engage in battle but instead are absorbed into the main character of Lyn (as is expected in a JRPG universe).

Currently, I believe that I am still in the prologue as I am still getting prompts about how best to strategize characters during battle and what icons do on the battle screen, and the infamous weapons triangle-quadrant; Sword > Axe, Axe > Lance, Lance> Sword, Arrows > Flying.  As hand-holding as these opening chapters are, I actually do not mind as I am learning a whole new set of mechanics that are different enough to previous tactics games I have played that if I A-button mashed my way through then I feel like I could be at a serious disadvantage when playing against a computer-controlled character who knows all of the rules.  There are things such as dialogue options with locations (Houses, NPCs) that can only happen with specific characters, some of which is just exposition while other conversations can help to recruit new characters to fight with you.  

I also accidentally found out about "Rescue," which allows a character to rescue another character preventing them from taking further damage (presumably unless the rescuing character dies and the rescued character returns to the battle; or unless you drop off the rescued character when they are out of harm's way.  What I love about this tactic, is that it introduces a whole new element that I have not seen in a tactics game that gives both flying units and cavalry units something else do to, because right now, Florina feels very weak compared to the rest of the characters and like all other Fire Emblem games, if the main character Lyn dies, that is game over after a 25-minute battle that was going well until the computer decided to spam-attack Lyn into oblivion.  I think I just like the idea of having the ability for a flying unit to soar over mountains to rescue someone who is on the verge of dying.  I am sure that Sain will be all about this tactic.

I am thinking that I will forgo playing Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light on the Switch and focus on this Fire Emblem as I am finding it a bit more user-friendly.  I am also debating if I want to pick up Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, which was the Game Boy Advance remake of that first game and looks fairly similar to this Fire Emblem, so it could be that it is more of an actual remake than a simple reskin.  Perhaps after becoming more familiar with some of the mechanics from older games in the franchise, I will move back and play the first game again.  Besides, it is not like the stories in each game are connected to the preceding game, although I know that there is some crossover between some of the titles.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

This is Such a Simple Place

My Previous Expectations with Metroid Games and Why I Might Have Been Wrong

Now, do not take the title of this article at first glance, or at least do not read it that I have a negative view of Metroid games.  I bought Metroid on the NES I have no memory of when, and I may have even gotten it for a Christmas present sometime between 1987 and 1990.  I never bought Metroid II: Return of Samus on the Game Boy because either Dr. Potts or one of my neighbors had it and I played it a little bit but never got too far.  I played Super Metroid on the SNES a lot although I did not buy it until some time in 1999 or 2000.  I then bought/played Metroid Prime, somewhat excited by a Metroid FPS, but I stopped maybe 1/3 of the way through after becoming lost and annoyed with the control scheme.  That was where my adventures with Metroid ended until these last 30 or so days.

When Metroid Fusion came out in 2002, I had read reviews, some of which I already discussed in my Game EXP article.  But the gist of it was that I heard negative things about the game railroading you and I did not like Ridley's design from the picture I saw in Nintendo Power.  When Metroid: Zero Mission came out in 2004, I thought, "Well, I already have Metroid on the NES, why do I need a revamped version of this game?"  When Metroid: Samus Returns was remade in 2017, I had recently purchased the Virtual Console port of the original Game Boy game on my 3DS and had a similar, "I'll just play this and not pay $40 for a revamped version of this game" thought; although I was very excited when the game was first announced at E3 2016. Regarding the rest of the games in the Metroid Prime series (Echoes, Corruption, Federation Force, Hunters), because I did not like the first Metroid Prime, I saw no reason in continuing with that storyline either.  Also the focus on multiplayer for Metroid Prime: Federation Force and the generic-looking character design was a huge turn-off.

So jump ahead now to 2021 and Metroid Dread, developed by Mercury Steam (Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, Metroid II: Samus Returns) announced that they were releasing a new 2D Metroid game on the Nintendo Switch, I felt like it was now time to get back into this franchise.  So I pre-ordered the game after only watching the announcement trailer and staying away from all subsequent trailers to keep the story as fresh as possible.  But then I got the hankering to play Metroid Fusion. . .although that desire had been around for a few years, occasionally looking at auctions on eBay, but never jumping on getting the game for the Game Boy Advance.  Then a month ago I began to hear rumblings that the Wii U and 3DS eShops were going to be no longer accepting payments in early 2022, that both Metroid: Zero Mission and Fusion were available on the Wii U Virtual Console and seemingly never coming to the 3DS and with time running out when Nintendo might announce a Game Boy Advance Nintendo Switch Online app akin to the NES, SNES, and now N64 versions, I decided to spring and buy a Wii U.

So my first purchases were for Metroid Fusion and Metroid: Zero Mission, knowing that I wanted to play through Fusion before I started Metroid Dread.  15ish hours later, I finished Metroid Fusion, wrote my Game EXP article then jumped into Metroid Dread, only slightly afraid that I might be Metroided out, but that was not the case.  I have only gotten a few hours into Dread as Conklederp has been reinvigorated by Animal Crossing's update and DLC, but I did not mind because I then started Zero Mission on the Wii U.  Having now beaten that game, I feel like my previous held expectations about Fusion and Zero Mission are leading me to try and jump back into Metroid Prime and buying the Metroid Prime Trilogy on the Wii U rather than trying to find Metroid Prime: Echoes and Metroid Prime: Corruption on either the GameCube or Wii.  Maybe even do a chronology run through the entire series?  I have read that in Metroid Prime: Federation Force that the game is primarily multiplayer with very little to enjoy about the single-player campaign (or playing a multiplayer game as a single-player, although the Left 4 Dead series comes to mind as an enjoyable single-player co-op game), but with the game still averaging its $39.99 price tag, I would rather give that money to play Metroid: Samus Returns.

One last thing that I wanted to touch on about the Metroid series is its passive emphasis on completion time and item completion rates.  I knew that the faster you beat the original Metroid, the more of Samus you see at the end (when it is first revealed that this character is a woman), and even in Super Metroid, I never sought to beat the game faster than I needed to; exploration was always more fun than speed for me.  So with both Fusion and Zero Mission getting between 57-65% Item Completion in six to eight hours, I struggle to find any kind of desire to beat the game in fewer than 2 hours with 100% Item Completion.  That just seems bonkers to me and I am sure that I could find a video on YouTube [https://youtu.be/EfLwuWe_Qdk?t=24], but I do not really want to watch someone else play a Metroid game just to see an end screen I can easily look up myself.  I guess I will just need to work on my wall jump.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
I'm Looking At Myself, Reflections of My Mind

MIDI Week Singles: "Area 5" - Super Bomberman 4 (SFC)

 

"Area 5" from Super Bomberman 4 on the Super Family Computer (1996)

Composer: Jun Chikuma & Yasuhiko Fukuda

Album: No Official Release

Publisher: Hudson Soft

Developer: Produce!

My first thought upon hearing this song was, "It's the 'Tunak Tunak Tun' song by Daler Mehndi!"  But this is not.  I obviously knew I was listening to the Super Bomberman 4 soundtrack but this song sounds so similar to "Tunak Tunak Tun" that it is uncanny, but it cannot be that.  SB4 was developed by Produce! in 1996 while "Tunak Tunak Tun" was released in 1998.  But on top of that, the "Area 5" theme from this game is a revamped version of the "Final Area" theme that was used in Bomberman '94 (aka Mega Bomberman), released in 1994.

I guess that is really all I have to say about this song and probably why it was the one stand-out track from Super Bomberman 4 for me because it sounded like another song that was released four years after the original version of this song was written.  All the while wondering if Daler Mehndi or one of his producers was an avid Bomberman fan, or if it is just a coincidence.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
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Game EXP: Missing Features: 2D (NS)

Missing Features 2D

Systems Released: PC, Nintendo Switch

Release Date: December 18, 2020

Publisher: QUByte Interactive

Developer: High Level

Play Time: 5-10 Hours

I really enjoyed playing Missing Features: 2D and I love the concept.  If you are familiar with Evoland then it was kind of like that but in a 2D platforming world rather than in the RPG/JRPG genre.  I would say that the first five or six levels were just straight up fun with a great mix of difficulty and the concept of putting together a game as you play through each of the stages.  These early levels are what exactly what I was hoping the game would be.  The next three levels really presented more of a challenge, which is not to say that they were not fun, but the difficulty factor was encroaching on the fun factor.  The last two levels I completed were an un-fun slog and I stopped playing during the twelfth level.

The concept behind Missing Features: 2D is that you are playing a game that is missing features.  Your character avatar is missing so you are an empty green box.  The landscape is missing so it is just a featureless black plain.  There is no music, there are no sound effects.  Essentially, you are playing Pong the platformer.  But without sound.  As you progress through each stage, you pick up computers which add features to the game and the visual loading process is what adds a lot of the charm to the game.  When you collect a computer, you do not know what feature you are going to be loading permanently into the game, although typically the computer unlocks a feature that will directly allow you to progress through the rest of the stage, be it the double-jump or dash ability.

Each stage is made up of stereotypical platforming elements.  Platforms, spikes, enemies, projectiles.  But not all of those elements start out implemented.  Even the background and the stage's music are non-existent when you start each stage.  And like a lot of well designed platformers, you are not expected to be able to perform all the abilities you have at the end of the game and gain the necessary skills to pull off complex maneuvers.

When you start out the game, you are a a filled-in box and eventually you become an unanimated character sprite with a blocked outline, which is essentially your hitbox, the specific area that is affected when you run into an environmental hazard or an enemy hits you.  As strange it is to have a non-moving avatar is for your character, I found it to be the most useful and practical, especially in a platforming game.  Knowing where your character's hit box starts and stops is significantly more important than having a sprite that looks amazing, especially if your character's animation is going to have their foot elevated mid-jump, but that they can still be hit where their foot is not.  The same goes for environmental hazards.  When you have a triangular spike but the hitbox for the spike is a rectangle, that presents a visual problem when making jumps over and around spikes.

In Level 10, I was able to capture enough screenshots showing my character dying without visually hitting anything, which is infuriating when you are expected to land on a small lip of a ledge before jumping across a gap while dashing mid-air over another row of spikes.  In another section (in the clip below, and ignoring the first spikes I het because I did not press the dash button at the absolute apex of my double jump), there were ceiling spikes that would hit your without physically coming into contact with you, being another problem with the hit boxes.  This made various areas of level 10 and absolute slog to play through because I felt that I was no longer trying to improve the way I played, but just make it through section by sheer luck, which in my opinion is no way to design a game.  Another issue I had with Level 10 was how late in the level you gained the music.  For a level this difficult, I feel like you would want to have the player gain the music early on to at least keep them interested, assuming that the music is good, and for the most part, the music was pretty good.

My biggest critique with Missing Features: 2D is the difficulty curve.  For the majority of the game, the levels felt fun and I would look forward to the new feature that I would unlock and how that would improve and modify the existing gameplay.  By the ninth stage, once levels started feeling like they were going to take a fair amount of playing to get the new mechanics and recently integrated features down, specifically the mid-air dash, I began to dread starting the game up.  By the 10th level, I genuinely felt that I hated the game, in part due to its difficulty, but also because of the lack of user-friendly options for the type of game that this felt like it was trying to be.  

On top of all of this was how the checkpoint system was implemented.  Sure, you could argue that the existence of checkpoints implies that they make the game easier because you no longer have to start back at the beginning forcing you to be better at the game, but in this game when the difficulty ramps up to the point that getting passed jumps/enemy placement feels more like luck that actual skill, I say bring on the checkpoints.  But the checkpoints are only good during your current playthrough, meaning if you turn off the game, you have to start over from the beginning and collect all of the missing features you had previously collected.  But more importantly, you have to luck your way through the level again.  This problem is alleviated somewhat by playing on the Switch in that you can just pause the game, and put the system to sleep, but this means that you are unable to play any other game until you either quit the game or beat the level.

You know what, I am going to end the article here because I feel that I could just go on for a couple of more paragraphs about how Missing Features: 2D let me down.  I will say that I love the concept, I enjoyed the early levels and even to a certain extent, the complete mismatched sprites for the characters, in-game elements, music, sound effects and enemies added a kind of charm to the game, like you were playing a game pulled from random bits of pixel art downloaded randomly from the internet.  But the difficulty of the game got the better of me and I no longer enjoyed playing the game and when that happens, I do not really feel the need to force myself to slog through any more levels.  Had the level 10 been the end, I might have forgiven the game a bit, but after Level 11 and onto Level 12, like this article, I just had to stop.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Sleepwalking to the Gallows

P.S.  On that last screenshot, the stalactite did in fact hit me, but my issue with it was that where it fell from was out of frame, so there was no indication that you could trigger one to fall by standing there, which is what happened.  I believe the was 

MIDI Week Singles: "Ending Theme" - Monster Max (GB)

 

"Track 1" from Monster Max on the Game Boy (1994)

Composer: David Wise

Album: No Official Release

Publisher: Titus France

Developer: Rare

Monster Max was a game that I had never heard of before Friday, when I came across the music on YouTube (essentially doing the same #AllTheNESMusic for Game Boy and a bunch of other systems, so it was semi-random).  Only released in Europe, Monster Max is an isometric adventure game where you have to prevent music from being eliminated from the world by way of Max, who appears to be a heavy metal loving demon and the music is fitting for that setting.  For Monster Max, David Wise has created a wonderfully varied soundtrack that is not all just chugging 8-bit Game Boy guitars and staticky drums and you may not even realize that this is coming from a Game Boy and not an NES.  Maybe?

As for when this song happens in the game, I had to do a bit of searching.  Because the song is only about 20 seconds long implies that it would not be played during one of the regular stages, although I did not realize how short it was until I was putting this article together.  The playlist I pulled it from has it as Track 1, which implies that it is the title track, but part of a playthrough I watched had Track 12 as the title track so I jumped to the end of the game and it being the music that Max plays after defeating Krond.  A fitting song for the end of the game, which looks like it would be fun to play, especially updated for modern systems, obviously with the option to keep the music in its original 8-bit format.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

I Just Couldn't Breathe With Your Throne On My Chest

Game EXP: Metroid Fusion (Wii U)

Metroid Fusion

Systems: Game Boy Advance, Wii U

Original Release Date: November 17, 2002

Publisher: Nintendo

Developer: Nintendo R&D 1

Play Time: 6h 37m / 14h 47m

I played Metroid Fusion on the Wii U using the Virtual Console version of the game, which is essentially the same game with all of the same mechanics, but the VC allows the player to create a single save-state that can be reloaded.  I mention this because I did reload save-states somewhat frequently although I did have some self-imposed rules that I frequently adhered to.  I also remapped the shoulder L/R buttons to the ZL/ZR triggers as my index fingers fell there more naturally on the Wii U's gamepad than the shoulder buttons; as well as making Y for attack and B for jump.  So for purists, I did not beat Metroid Fusion and for those who do not care, I did beat Metroid Fusion in 6 hours and 37ish minutes in-game time.  The 14 hours and 47 minutes is the amount of time the Wii U timed me as having played the game, so I spent nearly half of the game playing previously loaded save-states (more on that below).  Interesting to say the least.

Let us just jump to the conclusion.  I really liked this game.  Loved?  I might need to replay it or feel that I could replay it to feel that I love the game.   I am a little sad that I listened to whatever the negative reaction was that was so prevalent in my mind that convinced me not to buy the game when it came out in 2002. I also recall seeing promotional images of Ridley and apparently thought that because this iteration looked more cartoonist than previously depicted, that the game was designed for a younger audience.  And honestly, the only negative aspect that stuck with me before I started playing was that the story railroaded you into a linear game, devoid of exploration.  This critique throws me a bit.  The game takes place on a space station as opposed to a planet, so you are locked into one location, but you are also locked into a single planet in the previous games.  And the space station has six different biome-areas, so you are not exploring a space station environment the entire game.  The railroading in the story comes in because you are directed by the station's computer system to explore, repair, and investigate different areas of the space station.  But, you do not always have to listen to the computer either and there is a fair amount of backtracking to access previously closed-off areas as you unlock new abilities and access to previously locked doors.  I honestly did not mind how you were directed to different areas to a certain extent as it took a lot of the pressure of having to remember where to go once you unlocked a new ability and I still felt that there was plenty to be explored; although there still was a bit of that.

Story-wise, I enjoyed what was presented here.  The prologue I thought felt a little forced in that it could have been exciting to be playing a Metroid game that took a hard left turn, from playing a beefed up Samus to playing her with none of her equipment, similar to Metroid Prime, giving you a taste of your souped-up abilities as well as added fear for what you will be going up against.  The prologue starts out with Samus giving some general backstory from the Metroid series, then coming into the present with her being part of a scientific expedition on the Metroid home planet of SR388 when she was attacked by an unknown parasite.  Samus ends up crashing her ship during the mission due to the parasite taking over her central nervous system, is rescued and after some time, is administered a vaccine created from a Metroid culture (it was discovered that Metroids had been natural predators of the X-Parasite).  Post recovery, she goes to the scientific research station in orbit over SR388 where their samples from the initial expedition were taken where an explosion had just occurred.  As you progress through the game, more and more information comes to light regarding the X-Parasite, Metroids, and pulls even more influence from the Alien series that inspired the games in the first place.  There were a fair amount of callbacks and homages to previous Metroid games that felt pretty organic and not forced in the way that the entire Pirates of the Caribbean sequels felt.  

Jumping ahead a bit in the story, but because we are talking about the story here, this is where I am going to bring this up.  During the game, there were cutscenes with Samus talking/thinking to herself, and some of these monologues were about a member of the Federation that she had worked with in the past, a guy named Adam.  The way that Adam was first brought up seemed a little out of the blue, mainly because this was the first time I had heard of this character.  I thought maybe a flashback to this character was going to happen in the game, but that never occurred.  Then I thought that maybe it was a character in Metroid: Other M, but that game was released in 2010 so this was likely Adam's first occurrence in the game, but apparently was a significant person in Samus' life.  As you progress through the story, you do find out more about Adam, but for most of the game, I felt like I was missing out on information from a previous game, although this was not the case.

As for the gameplay, it did feel very much like the sequel to Super Metroid, all the way down to the wall-jump which was never featured like it was in Super Metroid and I still sucked at it; although I did manage to pull off a sequence of three or four consecutive wall-jumps to get an early Missile Upgrade.  One of the biggest Metroid-type mechanics that changed in this game was how you open doors.  You still shoot doors to open them, but in previous games that required either the standard arm cannon or a series of missiles (usually five I think) or a single Super Missile, the doors in this game were locked behind security access.  As you progressed through the game, you were granted access to increasing levels of security clearance, allowing you to open more and more doors.  Thankfully the game would mark on your map when there was a security door that you could not open so that once you gained that level of security clearance, you could return to an area and do some more exploring.  I do wish that you could have accessed the maps for different areas of the station regardless of where you were.  So for instance, once you gained Lock 3 access, you could look at the different maps for the station to find out where Lock 3 doors were and head there, without having to travel to each area independently.  Really it is just a complaint about time.

Speaking of time, as mentioned above, I did use the save-state and respawn feature as part of the Virtual Console, but I did not spam this mechanism.  Most of the time.  I had a few rules that I more-or-less abided by.  

1. I can create a save-state if I have to turn the system off and I am not near an in-game save spot.
2. I can create/load a save-state right outside a boss's lair, as long as getting to the boss is not a significant trudge and part of the boss battle experience.
1. For the battle against the fight against the spider boss Yakuza, but only after I died the first time.  More on that below.
3. I can create a save-state if there is a countdown timer immediately following a boss fight.

That was pretty much it.  But I did break the last rule during the battle against Yakuza.  That battle, in particular, was a pain in the ass; actually, from Yakuza onwards, the boss battles seemed out-of-sync with the difficulty of the rest of the game.  For the Yakuza battle, after dying the first time and making my way back to the boss's lair (because I did not realize I was going into a boss battle), I did spam the respawn feature.  This boss battle was brutal in that Yakuza would pick Samus up and continually deal damage to her and then body slam her doing more damage; I just discovered that you could wiggle your way out of its grip by just moving left/right on the control pad. . .oops.  I think I could survive, at most, four direct attacks before dying.  So what I ended up doing was I created a save-state upon being picked up the first time and reloaded from that point every time I died.  Once Yakuza took on its second form, I created a new save-state and would reload that one upon dying.  I finally created a third and final save-state when it reached the Core-X form.

For the penultimate boss battle in the game, I majorly broke this rule as I created multiple save-states as the fight progressed.  There was the first stage which required you to hit the boss around 10 times with a fully charged plasma/wave beam before it takes on its second form.  During this battle, I found that the boss would seemingly learn what you were trying to do, for example, I would hang out in a nook and shoot it when it jumped to get at you, and instead, it would hang out on the ground and take shots at you since its own ranged attack could pass through walls.  So I would load the game up outside the boss chamber, and once I had managed to damage the boss a few times without taking damage, I created a new save-state.  Then I would inevitably die a few times, reloading again and again, before finding a new tactic that worked for a couple of shots, then I would create a new save-state.  I would say that I would die no fewer than five times before finding out a new way to attack the boss.  The second stage of the boss's form I figured out purely by accident as I was on an elevated platform trying to stay away from it as I only had 32 hp left and found out that I could take pop shots at it as it was jumping at me.  The third form took on the familiar Core-X form but the attacks/counter attacks did take some time to figure out.

Lastly, I want to briefly touch on the music.  It was definitely not as interesting as either Metroid or Super Metroid.  There were no tracks as catchy as the Brinstar theme or the Norfair theme, but this game never felt as heroic in its exploration as those games.  To me, Metroid Fusion was not about exploration and possibly for the first time in the series, had some very real horror elements to it.  There are a number of sections in the game where Samus is actively hunted and all you can do is run away knowing that if you were to face your attacker you would be killed.  There were (at least) two sections when your hunter would appear on the same screen, but there was a wall separating you and them, an I did not move, out of fear that if I made a sound, that would attract attention and I could be killed.  I do not know if that was actually a possibility, but the fact that that was how I felt is a major kudos to Nintendo R&D1 for getting me to react that way.  The atmosphere in Metroid Fusion is one of frequent dread (eh!?) and worrying about what could be around the next corner and the music does a great job of representing that terror too.  One of the downsides of a lot of games that focus somewhat on fear and terror is that apart from a title theme, the in-game music tends to be subdued, more focused on adding to that feeling of fear than one of creating memorable melodies.

I very much enjoyed Metroid Fusion and it still makes me sad that there was a 19-year gap between the mainline Metroid games of Fusion and Metroid Dread, but I will be happy to be able to play Dread so close to having played and finished Fusion.  The last thing that somewhat surprised me, was that I had only a 56% item collection rate.  This could explain my trouble with some of the bosses, that I just did not collect enough Energy Tanks (I finished the game with, I think, 11?).  I know that there were breakable blocks that could only be broken by the Screw Attack that I did not go back for as there was a story-event that sounded urgent, but only urgent in the way that you are told that it was urgent, ie "You need to do this Samus."  So I could have diverged from what the computer system was telling me, and oftentimes I did to explore on my own, but towards the end of the game, and after picking up the Screw Attack, I mainly followed the story.  So maybe I will go back and see if I can pick up more items, or maybe I will go back through and see if I can actually be the game just to please the purists.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

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