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Played through some Super Metroid hacks recently because apparently I have nothing better to do.


Hyper Metroid - Recommendable. Expansive, yet still tolerable. It has issues in directing the player with regards of where to go next, though reportedly that's more of a problem if you're an idiot like me that likes to do insane walljump acrobatics the first time around. Highlights include high-jump boots that propel you nearly two whole screens up, entering Tourian early, and a stupidly flexible reworking of the speedbooster. Tourian acts as an welcome homage to some NES era favorites.

Play it, but ignore the fan-ficcy rewritten backstory.


Super Metroid Redesign: Axiel Edition - Dude realized that his hack kinda really sucked, so he naturally released an improved/overhauled version 8 years later. It's an improvement alright, but it's still hard to recommend. The ridiculous levels of polish and technical excellence are still there, but so is the stiflingly large scope (it's map is still the largest out there). As the game progressed it started feeling a bit burdensome to go from place to place (on the macro-scale). The additional of a hint system (optional), and the fact that I already knew where to go (having completed the original) only exacerbated this feeling.

Tourian was refreshing because it was completely new. The area is like a really big level from the original Duke Nukem (or something). There is some save-state requiring nonsense about halfway through, but I would hope that it gets patched out soon.

On the flip side of the new content, there are now some really asinine new puzzles, like the one guarding the Screw Attack (it literally requires a stopwatch).


Project Base - This is an ongoing aesthetic/mechanical overhaul of the original game (which apparently was the "base" for Hyper Metroid). It's like those FF1 hacks chock full of bugfixes and tweaks, except Super Metroid doesn't actually need any of that. Instead the author just added whatever he felt like, such as a bajillion different interconnecting passageways (what sequence?), dozens of room-consolidations, and a backflip move. (By golly backflipping around everywhere is stupidly fun.) It's very fast-paced, especially if you're at all familiar with the original game's layout. I liked it a lot.


Oxide - Don't play this stupid thing.

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I'm on another Metroid kick (how surprising), because it's been forever since I've played the GBAtroids.

Zero Mission: Still very iffy on this. The open-endedness is fine (if awkwardly shoehorned in), but I could do without some of the Chozo statues. The controls/physics were functional, but never really felt right. Walljumping in particular felt maddening (for the life of me I couldn't walljump off of single-tile platforms). The stealth segment and endgame are alright additions, but still feel too disconnected from the rest of the gameworld for my tastes. Also, nearly all of the bosses are dumb (both the worms, in particular).

The post-credits really should have just ended at this point.

My only deaths were in my attempts to get the Varia Suit right after the bombs, because I'm greedy.


Fusion: Right off the bat I was floored by how much better everything looked and sounded and felt compared to ZM. It feels so tight and well put together that I somehow really don't care about the forced linearity, or even the text dumps and objective markers. I still like how the game makes a point to never make the path to your objective a straight shot. It always finds a way to add a wrinkle to things or throw a curveball at you. My favorite part is right after you get the bombs: your route back to the nav room gets sealed off, and you're forced to find your way back going through massive amounts of uncharted territory.

It is kind of weird though. Fusion does a lot of the things that annoy me in Zero Mission, but somehow I don't mind as much.

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Old news: A Link Between Worlds is a really brisk, really well-made game.

It also has the distinction of being the only Zelda game I've played in the past decade to infuse me with the desire to even try 100%-ing it. Granted, I feel like a moron for not finding the bug catching net until after beating the game.

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All this talk of A Link Between Worlds got me to finally watch the SGDQ run from last year. Some of those sequence breaks are simply precious.