LogFAQs > #876283649

Final time: 6 hours, 20 minutes for 100% completion.

Having finally cleared it, I can totally see why this game gets all the love it does. Almost everything about it is excellent. The one flaw I see (and it's actually a big one, just forgivable considering the era) is that the X-Ray Visor is just...so antithetical to everything else the game is about, and it leads to unbelievably lazy design. 'Hur durr let's just randomly slot powerups in the walls and assume the player will be bloody-minded enough to scan literally everything, slowly and meticulously!'. Really garbage addition in how it leads to secrets that are basically pixelb****ing instead of creative, proper interaction with the player (like showing where the entrances to places are via enemy/animal behavior and establishing consistent 'tells' the player can count on - classic examples of this I can think of were the turtle rocket cache and the random-ass string of rooms by the ship that you would never know are there without that kinda meticulous sweeping I talked about, thus finding out you're supposed to shinespark through 'em). It's especially bad because of how fun moving around in this game is, and how the visor forces you to sit still and do nothing for longer than it takes you to actually clear a room. That's my only true complaint on it, though - I would've loved to have a map I could make annotations to because I could then use that to see if I can get a better time, but that's something nobody could've reasonably asked for in the '90s and this is a good-ass game. Totally worth playing through.
---

Shine on, you crazy diamond.