SuperMetroid: --I fail at leaping! Help! ;w;

[mental]

did dragon heart just say the ORIGINAL metroid had better controls than super?!?!?!?

Well, given his complaint was that Super Metroid's controls are too complicated -- the original Metroid certainly has simpler controls...

It's not like the issues he picks up on are nonexistent. Who here hasn't gotten frustrated cycling through beam/missiles/super missiles/power bombs in boss fights? Who here hasn't found the occasional three-button chording (run+jump+shoot) awkward?

[Emperor Ing]

Though this may have little to do with controls, going through Maridia and beating Draygon last night reminded me why I can't friken stand lower Maridia (after you go through the long pipe).

The quicksand is probably the most frustrating thing to control in in the entire game. It's not jumping through it that's a problem. It's landing in it. I mean, I have to wrestle with the game for control of Samus, and after several playthroughs, I STILL haven't found an easy and relatively stress-free way to deal getting out of that stuff and actually being able to JUMP normally. I mean, if anyone has a phobia of losing control of your own body, this section is the perfect damn place to exploit it.

I had to press start after a particularly long hallway of the stuff just to calm down, i was pretty irritated.

As well, trying to grapple vertically up those walls in Maridia is pretty annoying.



----

As an aside, I am trying for my first-ever sub-3-hour playthrough of Super. I have one more guardian to go, Ridley, and I'm at the entrance elevator to Lower Norfair. My current time is 2:02. Think I can make it? I know i'll have to hustle, but hopefully that's enough.

[Schrau]

As an aside, I am trying for my first-ever sub-3-hour playthrough of Super. I have one more guardian to go, Ridley, and I'm at the entrance elevator to Lower Norfair. My current time is 2:02. Think I can make it? I know i'll have to hustle, but hopefully that's enough.

Depends on if you're going for 100%, and how much you have collected. 2:02 at Lower Norfair is pretty good for a sub-3hr game.

The beautiful thing about Super Metroid's layout is that, by the time you've reached the Penultimate Boss™ you've gotten pretty much everything apart from odds and sods here and there. You don't have to backtrack over, oh, all the available game again to collect every last item (I'm looking at you, Fusion) with the Screw Attack. Really, by the time I've beaten Ridley I'm usually missing a few pickups in Blue Brinstar/Old Tourian and maybe the Gauntlet, and now I'm in the habit of doing the Gauntlet after returning to Crateria surface with the Speed Booster. At the very least there's the stuff you pick up on the way back out of Norfair.

Go for it. 2:02 should get you there.

[Opium]

A sub 2 hour 100% run is quite easy to pull off, I suggest going for that rather than sub 3 hour. It would just entail some of the easier and more common sequence breaks as well as optimal route, not even any major tricks/breaks are required at all.

( I'm SOOOO close to sub 1 hour 100%, I seem to have hit the wall at a high 1:04 )

[Dragonheart91]

It might be a generational gap, but I grew up on the NES. (Not because I'm actually that old, but because I'm so cheap that I am always way behind.) Most of my favorite games are 16 bit 2D games on the Super Nintendo or Gameboy Advance. I'm also not trying to say that Super Metroid is a bad game. It has multiple great features and awesome advancements that have made the rest of the series possible and some very awesome moments. I won't say it's my favorite game, or even my favorite Metroid game. However, I can understand the parts that other people like.

I don't think Nintendo gets it. Some of the parts of Super Metroid that long-time fans love such as sequence breaking and subtle storytelling are getting ignored and some of the worst parts like bad controls and the "human element" are being focused on instead. IMO, the entire series has been going in the wrong direction ever since the 7 year break ended with the exception of Zero Mission. Fusion was a nice aside and I wouldn't mind seeing that kind of story driven game on occasion as long as the rest of the puzzle pieces fit like they did in Fusion, but it shouldn't be the focus of the series. Zero Mission, however awesome, was a short hand-held remake and can't stand up against other main entries in the series.


I think we need a REAL console Metroid. 2D (maybe some 2.5 parts), atmospheric, smooth simple controls without gimmicks, sequence breaks and good level design, etc. I want a "fixed" version of Super Metroid made for the next generation of gamers that don't tolerate legacy issues and controls that don't stand up to modern games. (And some people might argue that the graphics don't stand up either, but I personally think Super had the best graphics in the series.)

[Emperor Ing]

A sub 2 hour 100% run is quite easy to pull off, I suggest going for that rather than sub 3 hour. It would just entail some of the easier and more common sequence breaks as well as optimal route, not even any major tricks/breaks are required at all.

( I'm SOOOO close to sub 1 hour 100%, I seem to have hit the wall at a high 1:04 )

Thanks, but see all this suggesting stuff for me seems to forget that you are not aware of my circumstances like how i just posted that my time was 2:02 and that my post made no mention of going for 100% items (which I would have mentioned).

Just saying.

[Opium]

A sub 2 hour 100% run is quite easy to pull off, I suggest going for that rather than sub 3 hour. It would just entail some of the easier and more common sequence breaks as well as optimal route, not even any major tricks/breaks are required at all.

( I'm SOOOO close to sub 1 hour 100%, I seem to have hit the wall at a high 1:04 )

Thanks, but see all this suggesting stuff for me seems to forget that you are not aware of my circumstances like how i just posted that my time was 2:02 and that my post made no mention of going for 100% items (which I would have mentioned).

Just saying.

Yeah I did read your post. I was talking about going for 100% on a future run. Guess not.

[Emperor Ing]

I'm not quite at that level of SM mastery yet.

I expect at least high 70s this time around.

[sockmonkey]

Sequence breaking = fun + awesome feeling. However, when it's put in on purpose like in ZM it makes me feel like a chump when I can't do it instead of making me feel like the king when I pull it off.
The "steering" in SM was a bit better than in Fusion, (not being able to do a wall jump climb on just a single wall bugged me) but other than that I love how Fusion fixed all the other controll annoyances SM had. Aside from losing the X-ray scope I could do everything I could before with fewer controlls and less hassle. The only thing I would have added that that was missing was having the beam charging be automatic like the speed booster.
Having only one type of missle at a time was such a blessing. I was happy to have a lower number of missles for them all to be super missles and not have to switch.
Shinesparking in Fusion seemed wasier than in SM but that might just be because I was more experienced with it by then.
Yes, the quicksand in maridia is a pain.
Customizing the button layout in SM went a long way to making the muti-button moves tolerable.
There were some things in ZM that I simply could not do without savestates like getting the missles surrounded by the breaking blocks.
Well, I could have eventually, just not in less than a day.

[Emperor Ing]

Just beat it tonight.

I wasn't at 2:02. I was at 2:12, making me mighty nervous as far as time goes.

I beat Golden Torizo and got to the next save in 5 minutes. After that, I beat Ridley after a few tries and went back to the ship, putting my time at roughly 2:32.

I beat the game in 2:44, my first ever sub-3h run of SM.
And there was much rejoicing.

I didn't think I'd have all that time left over- I might just go back after vacation and look for another e-tank or something.


Also, to add to my grievances with SM's control:
The Space Jump. That and the quicksand are still things I have yet to figure out. Sometimes SJ works, sometimes (conveniently when I need it most aka escape from Zebes) it doesn't. Which is no good.

Also, my item collection was 66%. That's sad; I could have SWORN i was gunna get 70% at the least. That means there's a whole third of the game i didn't get to. Which SUCKS, bro.


As far as controls go, I just don't know how Metroid controls can get better than the setup Zero Mission had. I mean it's just... perfect. Refined and fine-tuned in every possible way. If SM had ZM controls.... hoo boy, that would be like making Super Metroid completely and utterly without blemish instead of just being near-perfect like it is right now.

[loro]

Space Jump always works. It is just a matter of timing. If you fall you've probably waited too long to hit the jump button. I also thought Space Jump was broken when I first started using it...but that was for another reason. I thought you could only use it in the vines in Maridia. For some reason that was the only place I could get it to work. But sometimes even in the vines it failed me, and I thought it was a broken mechanic.

Just give it some time and you will perfect it and see that there is a perfect sweet spot that you must hit or you will fall every time. Yes, this could be "fixed" and they could make it easier to perform the jump....but I'm of the camp that thinks that some of these moves "should" require skill. Take the wall jump in SM vs the wall jump in Mario as an example.

[Steamlord]

See, the thing is, I'm not a fan of games that rely on frustrating controls to be challenging. I consider that bad game design. Good game design is making you do difficult things with easy controls.

However, since that's just about the only thing I don't like about SM's controls (well, that and weapon cycling), I still love the game to death.

[mowan259]

Hrm, I'm not really sure who started the whole "SM controls are hard" thing, and I hope it wasn't me I never had trouble with SM's controls, all I said was that ZM and Fusion have tighter controls and character physics. Because IMHO, they are. ZM and Fusion accomplish the same with less buttons. I also like the newer Shinespark method that doesn't use a separate button for dashing. And weapon cycling just sucks.

As for the character physics, SM isn't terrible but the physics aren't entirely deterministic. For example, holding the jump button down for the same duration of time doesn't always produce jumps of equal heights. Ok, I didn't totally research that to verify it, but it feels that way for whatever reason. The newer 2D Metroids feel a lot tighter, are more responsive, and are a lot easier to predict.

As I've stated in the past, my ideal Metroid would be Super, but with ZM controls and physics

[Lazarius]

L1-dash/x-ray
L2-Aim diagonally down
R1-rapid fire (optional, you could just as easily fire manually)
R2-Aim Diagonally up
Select-fast forward (so you dont have to listen to the fanfare every time you obtain an item)
Start-Map/Inventory screen
X-Item select
Y-Item Cancel
A-Fire
B-Jump

See, this is frankly too many buttons! AND he had to get a controller with extra trigger buttons just to make it comfortable to use! Combine this with the inconvenience of scrolling through missiles/bombs and having to pause the game to deselect items occasionally, it's just not intuitive.

[Schrau]

Now see, what's wrong with the basic SNES pad setup? Okay, not the default since that's almost unworkable, but my personal preference has always been:

A: Cancel Item
B: Jump
Y: Fire
X: Run
L/R: Aim up/down
Select: Item select