Emergency Order: Let's Play Metroid Zero Mission!

Space pirates have attacked a deep-space research vessel and seized capsules containing a previously unknown organism that has just been discovered on Planet SR388: "Metroid". Intercepted logs and transmissions indicate Metroids are aggressive, dangerous, insatiable predators, capable of latching onto and killing any other organism within seconds. Details of this process are not yet known.

Federation records indicate the entire civilization of SR388 was destroyed by an unknown agent. It is becoming increasingly likely that Metroids were responsible. If the Space Pirates begin to breed Metroids and use them as a weapon, they could threaten galactic civilization.

After a desperate search, Federation Police have at last found the pirates' headquarters, the hostile planet Zebes, and launched a full assault. But the Pirates' resistance is strong, and the Police have been unable to take the planet. A Metroid breeding program is no doubt underway.

As a last resort, the Federation Police have decided on this strategy: to send a space hunter to penetrate the Pirate base, and destroy Mother Brain.
The space hunter chosen for this mission is Samus Aran. Samus is the greatest of all the space hunters and has successfully completed numerous missions that many thought were impossible, often with a clear time of less than two hours. Even the Space Pirates fear Samus's legendary Power Suit, which can absorb and utilize virtually any item, weapon, or artifact.

Payment will be awarded upon successful completion of the operation.

Hooray! I enjoyed this, up until the difficulty spike at the final boss. Never did finish it.

You know, for all the crap Samus puts up with in the Metroid series, she must be getting paid ridiculously well. Which might explain why she buys a new ship for every single mission she does. Sure as hell she doesn't ever think to invest in a module to keep her suit from losing all of its functionality between missions, because that seems to happen with alarming frequency.

She has the same ship in 2 as in Super as in Prime 1-3. She just has bad luck with the GBA I guess.

This game was great fun, not least because they baked all sorts of routes into the world design, while holding relatively true to the original map. [And Super's map as well.] It's like the game-design polar opposite of Fusion.
in an interesting twist, (final boss spoiler)there's a multiplier on the final boss' health if you get 100% items.

Some think she hawks the Chozo stuff for [insert addiction here] between missions.

Zero Mission is the best Metroid game in the series for me. They took everything they learned from Super Metroid and applied it to the first game while speeding it up even further and tacking on a (kind of cool) scenario at the end, all while giving it a slick comic book style for good measure. I play this game every couple of months just because it's such a brisk playthrough. My fastest time was just over an hour.

You are going to show off the crazy awesome shortcuts you can take to beat this game with less than 10% of the items, right?

I have the same sort of gripe against this game as (I think) Brickroad does: They muddled up the Super Metroid physics and they made the sequence breaking too ready-to-order for my tastes. I liked it more when mockball was a hidden bug that felt perfectly natural anyway.

Here's how it's going to work, guys. I'm going to be doing this as a video series, with rotating guest commentary, just like last time. I want to start things off by having Brickroad as my first guest. Hopefully, that will happen this week, but if he has to reschedule, I'd like to have someone in reserve.

If you want to volunteer for guest commentary, let me know.

That's a fairly tall order, though: "I want this game to be playable in a way that's not the original intent, and it should be really polished, and the programming mistakes should add to the experience"

Yeah, I know how unfair that demand is. Basically I'm just plain afraid of new things in my Metroiding.

Zero Mission really was superbly done; I'm just too used to Super Metroid's rhythm. It's not just the bugs--I prefer the bomb jump and wall jump timing of the SNES original.

I don't know, I think it all depends on the sequence break in the game. The golden example that everyone has given for SBs in the game is skipping the Long Beam. While I do agree that it's kind of cheesy and pretty lazy, there's still plenty of natural stuff that's come about like going through Norfair somewhat backwards to get to Ridley before ever setting a foot into Kraid's Lair. Speaking of Kraid's Lair, there's also the Acid Worm skip that requires some crazy horizontal bomb jumps and a somewhat tricky Shine Spark to pull through. Those are the kinds of SBs I like. I couldn't care less whether or not it was the developer's intent so long as it feels like I'm being rewarded for doing things in an unconventional manner.

If you need another person, just let me know.

Yeah, 'being awesome by accident' is pretty hard to do.

Finding the shortcut to Norfair and Ridley almost immediately and having to start over my first time playing was pretty easy to do =\

I love me some Metroid but I've never been able to memorize all the crazy things the rest of you do. I just like running around, finding things, and then killing them.

I'm looking forward to this! I'd volunteer to do commentary but I'm sure no one wants to listen to me stammer how I have no idea what I'm ever doing and just kind of stumble through these games.

In probably more than half of Metroid games, there's an explanation for this:

Cases where Samus definitely has a plausible explanation: In the original Metroid and Zero Mission, it's likely that she just hasn't got any of the equipment yet, as they're both the first in the series. Metroid Prime 1 and 2, and Other M, each have Samus with a wide range of equipment at the start of the game, but some plot-related reason why she can't use it (malfunction in Prime 1, theft of the equipment in Prime 2, superior's orders in Other M). In Metroid Fusion, she clearly isn't in her usual suit, and it's pretty clear that the equipment is part of the suit, rather than the person. In Metroid Prime Pinball, it's a little unclear what equipment Samus actually has, given that it's a pinball game, but based on things she's seen using, she probably has the entire range of equipment from Metroid Prime 2 (a little out of sync, given that the game itself loosely follows the plot of Metroid Prime 1; she's definitely seen using a power-up, the Screw Attack, that didn't exist in Metroid Prime 1.)

Cases where Samus has a moderately plausible explanation: In Metroid Prime: Hunters, none of the equipment she collects exists in any other Metroid game, other than Missiles, so it's not implausible that she doesn't have it. (But this doesn't explain why she isn't carrying her equipment from other games...) In Metroid Prime 3, she actually starts with a reasonable selection of equipment and just keeps it all game, but it's rather less than at the start of Metroid Prime 2. (Perhaps she just travels light between missions?)

This leaves just Super Metroid and Metroid II as games that don't explain the loss of equipment at all, completely or half-heartedly.

Thus, I wouldn't accuse Samus of losing all her suit functionality with alarming frequency; more that she screws up occasionally. Perhaps she's just lax in taking backups.

Other M really opened my eyes and showed me that I'd prefer that they play the "you start with nothing, again" trope straight, rather than keep coming up with hare-brained ways to explain away the loss of equipment, to the detriment of story, gameplay or both.

And rather than launch into a tirade against Other M, I'll switch gears to say that I am excited for Zero Mission times. For a while I was repeatedly running this game and Fusion back to back on my BART ride to/from work (Fusion looks a lot better in a post-Other-M world - there I go with the tirade again). I'm not sure that Zero Mission is better than Super, but I can at least concede that it improves on the one glaring problem in Super (the controls).

I'd totally be up for taking part in an LP like this, except that I don't have the time, experience, recording equipment or reputation to justify it.

Ignoring ais523 and his excellent rebuttal:


What should they be saying?
(and the textboxes are too small)

On the flip side, ZM was worse in that it didn't include item toggling, or (as far as I know) any of the ridiculawesome hidden moves like powerbomb beamcrush or recharge.

Metroid II you start with 20 Missiles, Maru Mari, and Long Beam at least. The lack of Ice Beam and Bombs and less-necessary items remains a mystery.

I would volunteer, but due to my extreme lisp (just ask Sky Render), you'd probably end up subtitling my commentary, so instead I'll just...uh...not volunteer. :P

Samus: ...and then Ridley says I remind him of some guy named "Sisyphus."
Mega Man: I get that all the time. Dude must have an arm cannon.

Samus: I swear I'm switching dry-cleaners if my suit comes back stripped down again.
Mega Man: Let me know if you find one. I've been looking for years now.

Clearly, Samus lost them at her other (moderately nsfw) job.

I'm always slightly confused by the love for/existence of Zero Mission. It's like, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool to run through the original Metroid with most of the power-ups, graphics, and interface changes from Super Metroid?"

To which my first thought is, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool to run through Super Metroid with a few power-ups, areas, and bosses stripped out of it?"

I mean, if Super Metroid had gone off and done it's own thing in a different setting with different monsters and bosses and stuff, I'd totally get it, but... seriously, Zero Mission is pretty objectively taking a step backwards.

Yay, Zero Mission! I really feel like they perfected the Metroid formula with this. It lost a few peripheral elements from the previous games, but sharpened everything up and brought the overall game design into razor focus. A great way to end the series. [font color=white]NO SHUT UP THERE WERE NEVER ANY OTHER METROID GAMES AFTER THIS[/font]

My one complaint is that the comic book style wasn't carried through, so once they changed Samus back to a more traditional sprite there was a disappointing disconnect between her and the backgrounds (and not all backgrounds carried over the comic style, either). A minor aesthetic issue, though.

Best of luck with the LP! I have trouble enjoying any non-screenshot LP but I will be cheering you on in my soul.


So what you're saying is that you're bewildered by the existence of remakes in general, then?

So you don't like Metroid Prime 2 and/or 3, I take it?

I'll commentate with you if you want someone who has played through Zero Mission once.

All I can say about this game is oh god the stealth part oh god fffff

She has different ships in all three Prime games, all of which are variations on her Metroid II/Super Metroid ship. It was like Retro could never figure out how to make that design work in 3D (even though the work was already done for them).



This opening was incredibly heartening to see after the overwrought nonsense of Fusion. The quick cuts and presentation of only the most essential information immediately indicated that this game understood the eloquent and dramatic genius of Super Metroid.

Of course, the game itself demonstrates that it totally doesn't. At all, really. But hey, nice opening.

I will never understand why people hate Fusion so much.

I'm sure you know the issues: Fusion's narrative is intrusive and a little ridiculous, the game leads the player around on a short leash, and it actively prevents backtracking and exploration using arbitrary locked doors.

That said, Fusion is also a much better game than many people (myself included) thought at first. The environment changed over the course of the game in ways that made the world feel alive (Zero Mission took this and built on it to great effect), and the level design carefully gives players the feeling that they are going "off the rails" even when following the prescribed sequence (Portal made great use of the same device).

As far as I remember, Fusion's narrative was mostly restricted to the intro, the elevator scenes, and the ending, with some stuff squished in with the computer briefing.

And I thought the fact that Samus was so restricted was the point: if every single security gate was unlocked, the X could spread everywhere unhindered. As for the leash, Samus was ordered to listen to her computer. And though the computer tries to control her, all it ends up being capable of doing is point her in the direction of her next target.

But really, minor narrative issues can be overlooked if the game itself is enjoyable, and I found Fusion to be an excellent game.