Board 8 > Finally beat Super Metroid

(+) Yeah! (+)

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.
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It's a significant improvement from the 2D games that don't have the X-Ray Visor, where you just bomb every available surface. Fortunately the big ones just seem to be missile packs. Going through AM2R lately, "god I miss the X-Ray Visor" was my big complaint so... that's more indicative of non-Fusion 2D Metroid design that the visor slightly alleviates.

Kamekguy posted...

It's a significant improvement from the 2D games that don't have the X-Ray Visor, where you just bomb every available surface. Fortunately the big ones just seem to be missile packs. Going through AM2R lately, "god I miss the X-Ray Visor" was my big complaint so... that's more indicative of non-Fusion 2D Metroid design that the visor slightly alleviates.

That's honestly kinda weird! You'd think post-SM games would've just, like, made item acquisiton a bit more puzzlelike instead of 'BOMB. EVERYTHING'. Like to me that was the best part of exploration - seeing a powerup that I can't reach and either making a note in a wordpad that said 'Green door on room X, Area Y' or finding ways to get closer to a clearly hinted secret.
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You get that occasionally, but more often than not it's just "here is a surface that looks slightly oblong in that weird DKC1 kind of way. Bomb it. Then shine spark into it".

Honestly kinda moves into the Prime series as well, albeit more gracefully since you're already probably scanning everything.

I like the x-ray visor. My thought process was always "you can go back and find all the s*** you missed", and that didn't take away anything from the game. 100%ing the game isn't required. Also Super Metroid has been my favorite game since it released

That's a really really good time though for your first time beating it, especially with 100%. I've still never finished even close to 100%
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the x-ray visor is as optional as it gets. that's more for completionists who want to find every item.
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transience posted...

the x-ray visor is as optional as it gets. that's more for completionists who want to find every item.

Those energy tanks man, they called to me

(I really enjoyed hunting for everything except the missile packs, actually! Those were like absolutely whatever)
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Good game...didn't really remember the x-ray visor though, huh.
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