LogFAQs > #943315940

Zeus posted...

The NES one was awful. Even after playing and enjoying later titles, I can't get into the NES one (and even the GB one was kinda meh)

Going back now, knowing what we know about platforming and backtracking, having maps, that sort of thing...yeah, OG Metroid is painful.

Being an 80s kid raised on Nintendo Hard and inscrutable password systems, when drawing maps by hand in notebooks was the norm...Metroid was totally rad. I'd even go so far to say it was bitchin.

For something so early in the NES period, it was downright revolutionary.

At that point, you had 3 types of games (ignoring the finicky peripheral light gun/ROB/track pad games. There were the janky single screen sports games, there were the single screen arcade ports like og Mario Bros, Popeye, ice climbers, donkey Kong, punch out, excitebike, etc, and then you had games like Metroid, LoZ, kid icarus, ikari warriors, jackal...etc. games like faxanadu, battletoads, clash at demonhead, battle.of Olympus, Athena...those were still a few years off.

At the time, Metroid was entirely its own thing and hadn't crossed paths with Castlevania yet to get the chocolate in the peanut butter so to speak. There wasn't anything else like it when it came out except maybe LoZ. And LoZ at least had rudimentary clues. Metroid had this feeling of total isolation. You were completely on your own.

That being said, comparing something like Metroid to Metroid 2 or super Metroid doesn't quite compare to say, Link's Awakening or LttP (we're ignoring LoZ2 for now because that's way closer to Battle of Olympus or Athena...and yes I know Olympus' dev team had a lot of overlap with LoZ2).

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