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/vr/ - Retro Games

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4661953 No.4661953 [Reply] [Original]

Can we finally admit this game is poorly designed?

>> No.4661965

They improved on the formula with Super Metroid but that doesn't mean the original was poorly designed. It just means there was room for improvement.

>> No.4661967

It's extremely well-designed.

>> No.4661972

>>4661953
well designed

>> No.4661981

>>4661953
>hindsight makes me smarter than those who came before me
good job, son

>> No.4661984

>>4661972
>>4661967
How were people expected to find hidden routes when they are literally indistinguishable from the normal terrain graphics, and when nothing even established that hidden/bomb concealed routes were even a thing?

>> No.4661986

No. For the time it was a brilliantly designed game. I will, however, admit it aged poorly

>> No.4662006

well designed...a pinnacle of the time, really

>> No.4662007

>>4661984
By exploring just like every normal adventurer does when crashes on a foreign planet. Why the fuck do people expect hand holding in genuine adventuring?

>> No.4662008

>>4661984
Did you know you had to burn every tree and bomb every wall in LoZ?

>> No.4662018

>>4661984
I'm pretty sure there is a terrain indication in the sense that the screen is bordered by an open space rather than a solid wall in the situation where you actually need to find the hidden path to progress

>> No.4662021

The only bad things about NES Metroid are that some rooms are unnecessarly large, shit you spend a big chunk of brinstar climbing up and down which gets really boring after a while but this is just subjective because i also hated the backtracking from the next games
>inb4 but sequence breaking!!!
If you know about sequence breaking on your first playthrough, you read a damn guide and/or saw a speedrun. And you'd probably use savestates too.

The most poorly designed part about NES Metroid was that the US version got the shaft, the japanese version had saving files while we got fucking passwords, passwords that are more than 8 digits long is one of the things that aged poorly from old games, specially when said passwords also include underscores and other random shit.

>> No.4662023

>>4661984

because kids have a shit ton of time in their hands. the first time i accidentally discovered an energy power up hidden in a wall i started bombing the shit out of every room.

>> No.4662024

>>4662021
Also to clarify on the backtracking and sequence breaking, i'm talking about Metroid games post-Super Metroid because Metroid 1 and 2 felt very linear.

>> No.4662025

It's fine.

Can we just stop trying to defame things for no reason?

>> No.4662029

>>4662025
Contrarian posting is the /vr/ version of being edgy

>> No.4662031

>>4662025
>for no reason?
The game has a ton of hallways that look the same and is tedious upon restart due to the fact that your tanks are always empty upon restarting.

>>4662029
It's not being "contrarian" when you have a reason for disliking something. I've never liked Metroid and don't think the series hit its stride until Super.

>> No.4662035

>>4662008
No, but metroid gets shafted much more than zelda

>> No.4662036

>>4662021

All that and the 20 minutes it take to regain your health by killing enemies which may or may not give it.

>> No.4662039

>>4662036
The original LoZ started you off with a fraction of your health upon reloading, but there was a fairy spring just a few screens away from where you started, so shit was gravy.

Why Metroid didn't have something similar, I do not know.

>> No.4662048

>>4662031

What I'm hearing is "I don't like it and I want other people to not like it"

>> No.4662053

>>4661953
It was brilliantly designed it was executed poorly

>> No.4662095
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4662095

Can we finally admit your bait is weak?

>> No.4662102

>>4661953
What are those ghost things supposed to be

>> No.4662109

>>4662102
It looks like several wireframe drawings of Samus in the process of doing a flip.

>> No.4662149

>>4662048
>What I'm hearing is "I don't like it and I want other people to not like it"

I don't know where you got this from. Are we only allowed to post about games we like? Are we not allowed to criticize stuff? My post wasn't even a belligerent take down of Metroid, just "I don't like these things"

If you like these things that's fine, but what's the point in being on a discussion board if you only want everything to flow in the direction you want it to?

>> No.4662178
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4662178

it was very well designed, I'd say the only flaw is grinding for health/weapons after death

the atmosphere is fantastic and the repeating rooms really helps to emphasize being lost. I loved the final fight against MB so much

>> No.4662992

designed? no
balanced? definitely

>> No.4663170

>>4662109
Oh thanks I could never tell

>> No.4663198

>>4662039
I play on original hardware, but if I ever played it on an emulator, this is where I'd definitely use save states. Grinding enemies is not fun. what I usually do is leave the energy tank that is near the start of the game until very late. Then I can just collect that and refill my health that way. It works especially well in the FDS version, where if you load a save it starts you off at the original start point of the game (but with progress intact).

Zelda is better, as you mentioned, but it's a shame that they didn't give you more health when you start from a dungeon. Three hearts isn't enough for most players starting out, and heart drops aren't guaranteed from enemies. This means that you often have to start from the beginning every time to refill your health (Level 6, for example). Eventually you can become good enough to just go with three hearts, but it would have been nice for beginning players.

>> No.4663378

>>4662149
This. This Reddit attitude of " y-you guys are too eletitist and stop talking about thing I don't like negatively" needs to FUCKING. It need to leave 4chan all together

>> No.4663595

>>4662178
>grinding for health/weapons after death
Or you could ... not get hit? You pick those up incidentally through normal play and don't need to be topped off most of the time.

>> No.4663602

>>4663378
This

>> No.4663605

>>4661953
It really needs an in-game map, that's it

>> No.4663628
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4663628

I beat this game before this came out at 13 years old.
It took a while, but this game would be like 4 hours long at most if you knew exactly where to go and what to do.

>> No.4663719

>>4661953
No. Not for its time. I would agree in this instance with the 'aged poorly' meme, but that's due to hindsight. Perhaps more could have been done(later NES games were fucking awesome in just about every respect), but given that Metroid was a near-launch title on a new platform with (relatively) new tech, what did you expect?

>> No.4663746

>>4663628
Why was Kid Icarus in the adventure series?

>> No.4664161

>>4661984
There are breaks in tile patterns. Exploration and experimentation are also the point of the game.

>> No.4664175

>>4661953
Yeah we were waiting until now to admit it because we never actually thought it was a great game, we really wanted to accrue contrarian opinions to show off for people we don't know on a medium that didn't exist at the time.

>> No.4664228

>>4662008
The original LoZ is bullshit for the same reason

>> No.4664263

For the time it was good, but really didn't age well, and the sequels were just better designed to the point where the flaws of the original really showed
>Start at just a mere 30 health for no real good reason
>Slow run speed
>Can only shoot in 3 directions
>Jumping was a huge risk because of how floaty it was
>Those fly enemies could seriously fuck you up
It was a god send when 2 had better health recovery options, enemies that weren't cheap as fuck and the ability to shoot downwards, not to mention wasn't as vague
>>4663595
Jumping is floaty as fuck and you could easily have your day ruined by a single wingy boy

>> No.4664306

>>4661953
>finally admit
I've been saying it's not very good since i played it for the very first time.

>> No.4664404

Metroid is an experimental game that turned out to be very interesting while having a lot of problems. It's not designed great because it had little to use as a reference and wasn't the kind of big project that got a lot of polish.

It's also rough that it gets compared to Super Metroid which is one of the most polished games ever created and fixes literally everything that's wrong with Metroid.

So Metroid is a great and well conceived game with an unfinished design that was amazing and awesome in the year when it came out.

>> No.4664440

I never got into Metroid as a kid because I thought turning into a ball was fucking stupid. I still think it is. I mean, you need a gimmick to prevent access to parts of the map and turning into a fucking ball is the best they could come up with? It doesn't make any sense and I just couldn't get into that make believe world with such a retarded central feature.

>> No.4664449

also a fucking Terradactyl is space pirate. that's just fucking stupid

>> No.4664579

>>4664449
he's a space dragon

>> No.4664590

>>4664449
Maybe this isn’t the hobby for you.

>> No.4664687
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4664687

>>4664449
>Terradactyl
I always thought he was supposed to be a skeksis.

>> No.4664710

>>4664440
They wanted a crawl animation but had to compromise for arcane limitations. The later entries kept it for iconic value.

>> No.4664737

>>4664440

Samus is like 7 feet tall. The whole point is it compacts her to a degree just crawling wouldn't. As the series progressed they expanded the functionality of the morph ball into the spider ball and boost ball and honestly they're some of the most fun sections to play.

>> No.4664908

>>4664737
Zero reason a girl should be this tall it's unattractive.

>> No.4665115
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4665115

Another example of great game design.

>> No.4665341
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4665341

Aww, can't babby get through the game without flashing quest markers?

>> No.4665487

>>4662021
>>4662024
You're retarded. Metroid 1 is the only non-linear game in the franchise; you can do the bosses in any order and you can outright skip items just by playing the game normally, no unintended sequence breaking required.

Meanwhile in every game post Metroid 1 you have to use unintended sequence breaks/glitches to change up the boss order and major item order. Even the games that encourage intended sequence breaking, like Zero Mission, still force down a linear biss order and general item order path. The o it difference is that you have more options in your routes, but even still it doesn't come close to actually capturing the fairly non-linear design of Metroid 1.

>> No.4665512

Metroid is perhaps the first game I would just come home from school and beat just for the experience and may to this day still be the game I've completed the most total times. I was called a liar on the playground for revealing Samus was a girl and I brought a suitless Samus code to prove it before the Justin Bailey was ever published.

>> No.4665514

At least it's not as bad as Blaster Master.

>> No.4666119
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4666119

>>4664449
Actually he was meant to be more of a xenomorph knock off in the original game.

>> No.4666226

>>4665341
The visuals are extremely samey and grinding for HP is tedious. Metroid had serious design problems due to being the progenitor of the genre. In case you didn't notice, the sequel is considered one of the best platformers ever released.

>> No.4666238
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4666238

>>4666226
Yep, I agree.
It's a crying shame how people ignore this game aside from remakes. It's so much improved on Metroid and Super would not have been the same game without the hard work done for II

>> No.4666426
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4666426

>>4666226

>the sequel is considered one of the best platformers ever released.

>> No.4666731
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4666731

I think looking at it today, it's very frustrating to play and riddled with questionable design (30 health is the default starting health, passwords, starting back at the beginning of the game whenever you load in etc.) but overall I think it was pretty cool for what it was back in 1986.

I love the idea of having to draw a map when playing a game since it adds another aspect to playing the game, the atmosphere as well as the music is amazing too. If you were to buy this back in 86 and not look up a guide and go in blind, you could get months worth of gameplay out of it and feel really accomplished when you discover secrets and eventually beat the game, it feels claustrophobic and scary and I think that's pretty perfect for what it was trying to accomplish.

The original Metroid isn't poorly designed, it's just dated. A lot of games from that era are.

>> No.4667258

>>4666731
>starting back at the beginning of the game whenever you load in etc

Not quite, you spawn at the entrance to the different areas in the game. So if you make it down to the elevator leading to Ridley's lair, that's basically a checkpoint.

>> No.4667312

I'm quite fond of how combat works but the game world would be a lot better if there were less duplicate hallways and a few more landmarks or some extra tiles to help distinguish where the hell you are.

>> No.4667329

>>4661953
No.
You're just a pleb.

>> No.4667356

Why is it so popular to dislike this game the past year or two? Influx of newfags trying it? A youtuber?

It's an extremely short game with two buttons, exploring is fun and barely takes any extra time, and it has great atmosphere. Fun to draw a map with on graph paper too, doesn't even require that much effort, you can just make fucking lines. If this is too much for you, then you aren't on the right board.


By the way? I fuck. on the regular. and you're crying about it. Wow, I can't believe you're considering responding to this. Seriously? Grow up.

>> No.4667651

>>4667258
Ah yes, it's been a while since I've played that game, you can scratch that off the list at least.

>> No.4667657
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4667657

>>4661953
Should have had saves like the Japanese version. It's one of my favorite games of all time with the save hack

>> No.4667667

>>4667356
Its inclusion on the NES Classic, maybe?

People need to learn to properly understand works in their original context. That's what /vr/ YouTubers should be doing, not decontextualizing old games so they can be made fun of.

>> No.4667725

>>4664440
it kinda made sense to use this because technical limitations kept them from coming up with a good crawling sprite

it is literally only kept around until today because of this shitty reason

>> No.4667743

>>4667725
Games aren’t required to be realistic to be fun or interesting.