Just going to stop watching trailers; they don't need to sell or hype the game for me anymore so I'll just try to preserve as much surprise as possible.
That trailer is kinda dumb. It's one of those weird voiceover trailers designed for media outlets who have no idea who Metroid is. No new footage, I don't think. Certainly nothing spoiler-worthy.
+1
AbsoluteZeroThe new film by Quentin KoopantinoRegistered Userregular
There is some new footage in there.
An ice area we haven't seen yet.
Samus meeting a non-armored Chozo.
Samus finding the Varia Suit.
There's probably more, everything goes by so fast.
That trailer is kinda dumb. It's one of those weird voiceover trailers designed for media outlets who have no idea who Metroid is. No new footage, I don't think. Certainly nothing spoiler-worthy.
Well nothing that hasn't been spoiled by prior trailers at least.
AbsoluteZeroThe new film by Quentin KoopantinoRegistered Userregular
edited September 2021
Replaying Zero Mission. This would be great if the game wasn't constantly putting markers on my map of where to go next. Wish you could turn that off.
It's got more Super in its design than Fusion, in that it isn't totally linear. I don't think you can completely break Zero Mission in the same way you can break Super, though (e.g. reverse boss order probably isn't happening). But for example I got Varia before high jump, and I'm pretty sure I got super missiles early. There's some room to explore and forge your own path.
They do a good job of making it feel natural but the sequence breaks are actually designed in on purpose in Zero Mission, both to allow it and make sure you can't soft lock, though you might get trapped having to pass through some difficult area to continue and get stonewalled by difficulty. They set it up with otherwise useless hidden side passages and breakable blocks in a few places. It's possible to do Ridley before Kraid.
BahamutZERO on
+5
AbsoluteZeroThe new film by Quentin KoopantinoRegistered Userregular
Ok that's awesome. I got the feeling it was pretty locked down so far but good to know they designed for sequence breaking. Now if I could just turn off the chozo hints.
I was going to say "you can jump over or around all the Chozo statues if you don't want hints (as far as I remember)", but I suppose if you're hard up for a health and ammo refill there's no way to get that out of the statue and not the subsequent hint scene.
My favorite musical instrument is the air-raid siren.
I was going to say "you can jump over or around all the Chozo statues if you don't want hints (as far as I remember)", but I suppose if you're hard up for a health and ammo refill there's no way to get that out of the statue and not the subsequent hint scene.
I love Zero Mission. It's one of my top 3 Metroid games. However it did come out at a time when Nintendo was moving towards getting more hand holdy. I guess I kind of get it though. It has to be a tough balance to strike. A lot of people will just give up when they don't know what to do next. As much as I love Metroid, I don't remember Metroid Prime 2 quite as fondly because I got a little too lost in that maze of a world. But others enjoy that sense of discovery and long for an era when there were no auto maps.
But yeah, you should be able to turn off the hints.
I always turned off the hints in the prime games, in 1 and 2 it felt like that was the perfect way to experience those games but 3 it kind of felt more mandatory with the disconnected maps.
+1
AbsoluteZeroThe new film by Quentin KoopantinoRegistered Userregular
I didn't mind the maze-like layout of Prime 2, what turned me off was how bland and samey the environments were. Especially the dark world. The only unique environment I remember was that techno-city type place. Prime 1 had much more distinct environments with more personality. I don't remember much about Prime 3 having only played through it once. I should dig out my Wii U sometime and give it another go.
prime 3 had suitably distinct environments, they just were unfortunately not combined in an organic interconnected way, being separated planets you teleport between via spaceship ride loading screen.
I didn't mind the maze-like layout of Prime 2, what turned me off was how bland and samey the environments were. Especially the dark world. The only unique environment I remember was that techno-city type place. Prime 1 had much more distinct environments with more personality. I don't remember much about Prime 3 having only played through it once. I should dig out my Wii U sometime and give it another go.
That’s probably the big problem I had with it. A maze is considerably more confusing when you don’t have distinct landmarks as a point of reference. In my opinion Super Metroid, Metroid Prime and Zero Mission are the best games in the series because their worlds are interconnected yet feature distinct areas. The lesser (but still good) games have divided areas (Metroid Prime 3, Fusion) or samey environments (Metroid 1 & 2).
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Prime 2 is really rough to navigate. What it desperately needed was superimposing the maps of both worlds at once and color-coding them, so you could plan routes without having to fucking constantly flip map types. The map also needed at least one more pass for simple ease of navigation by adding additional portals, simply so you aren't doing dumb shit like 15 minutes of backtracking because there isn't a set of portals to span five feet of blocked tunnel. The aggravation of navigating the two different worlds is alone enough of a reason for me to not want to go back to MP2.
I got my Art of Shantae book today. It’s great and even more makes me want an Art of Metroid book. Come on Nintendo, stop being stupid.
RidleySaria Metroid Dread special edition comes with an artbook
Yeah I know. Good luck getting one. There’s a special place in hell for scalpers.
ngl somewhere in my list of constitutional amendments is one that reads "It's legal to scalp scalpers while they scream and bleed out. Anything done to their corpses after is also legal. Fuck scalpers."
Oh god I’m remembering now. That WAS aggravating. It was fine in A Link to the Past but that game was far simpler and had enough shortcuts as to not be a pain.
H3KnucklesBut we decide which is rightand which is an illusion.Registered Userregular
edited September 2021
Also ALTTP had the mirror, which let you warp between the worlds pretty much wherever & whenever you wanted. It had the limitation that it could only take you dark to light, but left a portal you could use to go back to the dark until the next time you crossed over (or closed out a play session).
But 3D games like Prime 2 would've had a much harder time pulling that off, short of making you sit through a load screen whenever you used it.
Brainiac 8Don't call me Shirley...Registered Userregular
So I have the OLED model pre-ordered to pick up at Best Buy near me. My goal is to try and see if I can head up there early when they open and hopefully pick up both the Collector's Edition and Amiibo pack at the store since online pre-orders were scalper city.
Since the Zelda and Loftwing Amiibo have become readily available I’m sure the Metroid 2 pack will get easier to find over time. Not so sure about the Collector’s edition of the game though. Nintendo only makes enough collector’s edition stuff to fulfill the demand of scalpers.
I love Zero Mission. It's one of my top 3 Metroid games. However it did come out at a time when Nintendo was moving towards getting more hand holdy. I guess I kind of get it though. It has to be a tough balance to strike. A lot of people will just give up when they don't know what to do next. As much as I love Metroid, I don't remember Metroid Prime 2 quite as fondly because I got a little too lost in that maze of a world. But others enjoy that sense of discovery and long for an era when there were no auto maps.
But yeah, you should be able to turn off the hints.
It is kind of crazy that we went from "here's a world with no real markers and no map full of identical corridors, fuck you if you can't find your way" to "you got a rupee! It's been 30 seconds since your last rupee, better tell you what a rupee is again!" in a pretty short short span of time.
Super Metroid perfected this, and it's been downhill from there.
Maddie: "I named my feet. The left one is flip and the right one is flop. Oh, and also I named my flip-flops."
I love Zero Mission. It's one of my top 3 Metroid games. However it did come out at a time when Nintendo was moving towards getting more hand holdy. I guess I kind of get it though. It has to be a tough balance to strike. A lot of people will just give up when they don't know what to do next. As much as I love Metroid, I don't remember Metroid Prime 2 quite as fondly because I got a little too lost in that maze of a world. But others enjoy that sense of discovery and long for an era when there were no auto maps.
But yeah, you should be able to turn off the hints.
It is kind of crazy that we went from "here's a world with no real markers and no map full of identical corridors, fuck you if you can't find your way" to "you got a rupee! It's been 30 seconds since your last rupee, better tell you what a rupee is again!" in a pretty short short span of time.
Super Metroid perfected this, and it's been downhill from there.
I've made this argument before, I don't think the old gen games were MEANT to be confusing, it was a size limitation of the games and the designers having no experience on what kind of guidance would be most helpful. The original Zelda had a pretty extensive manual and map to train you on what they intended the early game experience to be like. Dragon Warrior just came with a full player's guide since they weren't too sure if the NA audience would "get it" or not. The tips in Castlevania 2 and Zelda 2 are meant to actually be tips, etc. Once the game size grew, the games became WAY more readable, it wasn't a coincidence or them changing their minds, it was the original intent being shown more clearly.
+2
jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
edited September 2021
Game manuals weren't just niceties in the 80s and early 90's, they were often required to beat the games.
Mostly because when your games tended to hover around the 350KB size, a printed manual would contain probably half of that information in text and there was no fucking way you were fitting all of that into the ROM of an NES cart.
A particularly interesting example of being able to move through a dual world system was in Zelda: Oracle of Ages.
Early on, you have just the one song for the Harp of Ages; it opens time portals on special swirly tiles. If you want to move between the past and present, you need to find a tile in the world itself.
Later, you get the Song of Currents. That one will send you from the past back to the present, anywhere. The game’s puzzles consequently stop requiring you to find portals in the past, and instead use the past to move to locations in the present that you can’t otherwise reach.
Finally, the third song allows you to go to the past or present from anywhere at all.
I like that progression of opening up the world. I think Metroid Prime 2 might have benefited from something similar, perhaps around the same time you get the Light Suit and are cleaning up the key fetching quest.
At this point we really should have the tech we need to keep two worlds loaded at the same time, and allow the player to smoothly transition between the two with no loading animation whatsoever.
+2
H3KnucklesBut we decide which is rightand which is an illusion.Registered Userregular
edited September 2021
Sure, but Prime 2 came out back in 2004. That's seventeen years ago.
At this point we really should have the tech we need to keep two worlds loaded at the same time, and allow the player to smoothly transition between the two with no loading animation whatsoever.
The Medium actually tries something like this. It is TREMENDOUSLY, INCREDIBLY poorly optimized.
0
H3KnucklesBut we decide which is rightand which is an illusion.Registered Userregular
edited September 2021
A Switch game probably couldn't do it without significantly compromising on graphics &/or finding other ways to minimize the RAM it needs to work with per map, but IIRC wasn't this exact scenario (quickly swapping between two worlds) something that was thrown out as a hypothetical use for the PS5's uniquely fast read times?
Is the any reason that you couldn't just halve the detail on both of the worlds? We're at the point where that sort of thing wouldn't make that much difference in what the player actually sees. Both worlds would be fully loaded at all times, but only the objects in the currently visible world would be rendered.
A Switch game probably couldn't do it without significantly compromising on graphics &/or finding other ways to minimize the RAM it needs to work with per map, but IIRC wasn't this exact scenario (quickly swapping between two worlds) something that was thrown out as a hypothetical use for the PS5's uniquely fast read times?
It is one of the new Ratchet and Clank's defining features (though ironically, Psychonauts 2 also has a very similar feature, didn't advertise it at all, does it better, and is on my PC and not my PS5)
A Switch game probably couldn't do it without significantly compromising on graphics &/or finding other ways to minimize the RAM it needs to work with per map, but IIRC wasn't this exact scenario (quickly swapping between two worlds) something that was thrown out as a hypothetical use for the PS5's uniquely fast read times?
I haven't played it, but isn't that one of the big gimmicks of the PS5 Ratchet & Clank game?
At this point we really should have the tech we need to keep two worlds loaded at the same time, and allow the player to smoothly transition between the two with no loading animation whatsoever.
Really want a Metroid full of 1930s screwball comedy dialogue now.
“Samus! Some flappy flim-flam artist weaseled his way into the lab and did a 23 skidoo with the last metroid!”
“Ooooh, Ridley, that purple pincher, I’ll cook his goose yet!”
Posts
Yeah I know. It's not really what I had in mind.
Some possible spoilers, obviously
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
@RidleySaria Metroid Dread special edition comes with an artbook
Samus meeting a non-armored Chozo.
Samus finding the Varia Suit.
There's probably more, everything goes by so fast.
Well nothing that hasn't been spoiled by prior trailers at least.
Yeah I know. Good luck getting one. There’s a special place in hell for scalpers.
It's got more Super in its design than Fusion, in that it isn't totally linear. I don't think you can completely break Zero Mission in the same way you can break Super, though (e.g. reverse boss order probably isn't happening). But for example I got Varia before high jump, and I'm pretty sure I got super missiles early. There's some room to explore and forge your own path.
A lot of them block the way completely
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
But yeah, you should be able to turn off the hints.
That’s probably the big problem I had with it. A maze is considerably more confusing when you don’t have distinct landmarks as a point of reference. In my opinion Super Metroid, Metroid Prime and Zero Mission are the best games in the series because their worlds are interconnected yet feature distinct areas. The lesser (but still good) games have divided areas (Metroid Prime 3, Fusion) or samey environments (Metroid 1 & 2).
ngl somewhere in my list of constitutional amendments is one that reads "It's legal to scalp scalpers while they scream and bleed out. Anything done to their corpses after is also legal. Fuck scalpers."
But 3D games like Prime 2 would've had a much harder time pulling that off, short of making you sit through a load screen whenever you used it.
I really hope I can pull it off.
Nintendo Network ID - Brainiac_8
PSN - Brainiac_8
Steam - http://steamcommunity.com/id/BRAINIAC8/
Add me!
It is kind of crazy that we went from "here's a world with no real markers and no map full of identical corridors, fuck you if you can't find your way" to "you got a rupee! It's been 30 seconds since your last rupee, better tell you what a rupee is again!" in a pretty short short span of time.
Super Metroid perfected this, and it's been downhill from there.
I've made this argument before, I don't think the old gen games were MEANT to be confusing, it was a size limitation of the games and the designers having no experience on what kind of guidance would be most helpful. The original Zelda had a pretty extensive manual and map to train you on what they intended the early game experience to be like. Dragon Warrior just came with a full player's guide since they weren't too sure if the NA audience would "get it" or not. The tips in Castlevania 2 and Zelda 2 are meant to actually be tips, etc. Once the game size grew, the games became WAY more readable, it wasn't a coincidence or them changing their minds, it was the original intent being shown more clearly.
Mostly because when your games tended to hover around the 350KB size, a printed manual would contain probably half of that information in text and there was no fucking way you were fitting all of that into the ROM of an NES cart.
Early on, you have just the one song for the Harp of Ages; it opens time portals on special swirly tiles. If you want to move between the past and present, you need to find a tile in the world itself.
Later, you get the Song of Currents. That one will send you from the past back to the present, anywhere. The game’s puzzles consequently stop requiring you to find portals in the past, and instead use the past to move to locations in the present that you can’t otherwise reach.
Finally, the third song allows you to go to the past or present from anywhere at all.
I like that progression of opening up the world. I think Metroid Prime 2 might have benefited from something similar, perhaps around the same time you get the Light Suit and are cleaning up the key fetching quest.
That was also when I started my current job. I don’t need to be reminded how old that game is or how long I’ve been here.
Well yeah, obviously. I mean for any similar future games.
The Medium actually tries something like this. It is TREMENDOUSLY, INCREDIBLY poorly optimized.
It is one of the new Ratchet and Clank's defining features (though ironically, Psychonauts 2 also has a very similar feature, didn't advertise it at all, does it better, and is on my PC and not my PS5)
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
I haven't played it, but isn't that one of the big gimmicks of the PS5 Ratchet & Clank game?
Didn’t Soul Reaver do this back on PS1?
“Samus! Some flappy flim-flam artist weaseled his way into the lab and did a 23 skidoo with the last metroid!”
“Ooooh, Ridley, that purple pincher, I’ll cook his goose yet!”