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[Dragonmaw]

Howdy! It's time for our first month of the relaunched Game Club. Our first game? Metroid 2!

Metroid 2 was released by Nintendo on the Game Boy. Samus fights some nerds, blah blah, whatever.

Play it on the original handheld, download a ROM, whatever. No downloads or links will be given out through this thread. The only caveats are:

• You have to play the original Metroid 2. No remakes.
• You can't use any emulator features, such as save states or cheat codes.

Discuss all your findings and thoughts in this thread! Please put spoilers behind glow tags, like so. The tag is below, if you need a copy-paste for it.

Code:

[glow=black,2,300][/glow]

[Slader16]

Let's do this! :D

[FK in the Coffee]

I'm stoked! I've actually never played a Metroid game before, so this should be interesting!

[jamesprimate]

YAAAaaaay lets do this

[JWK5]

Last time I played Metroid 2 was on an actual GameBoy back in grade school. This ought to be interesting.

[baconman]

My body is ready.

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<O^=^O>

*cue fanfare*

[Tanner]

yeeeeah i'm shit enough at video games that probably going to end up using the save states on my 3ds. sorry guys. i'm excited for this one, though!

[Slader16]

I've been going through the original Metroid all day, this game is hard

[vinheim3]

Some of the metroid fight arenas are killer. I'm loving the powerups though

[forwardresent]

Still have my original cart and DMG! Battery is probably gone by now though I haven't played it in years. Music in this is super good.

[Schoq]

years ago since I played it but there are too many indistinguishable corridors and it doesn't help that all of them are grey but I had a fun time with it and the music is

[valrus]

years ago since I played it but there are too many indistinguishable corridors and it doesn't help that all of them are grey but I had a fun time with it and the music is

I kinda appreciate that about Metroid II, actually.  Like the original Metroid, it feels like a world that wasn't made with me in mind.  (But that's something I appreciate at a distance, more than when I actually play them.)

[FK in the Coffee]

I feel like the difficulty spike from the earlier game areas to the first Metroid battle is absolutely insane. Is there any pattern to them, or do they just rush at you full force?

Also, I love the little detail Nintendo put into Samus's sprite in-game. They could've gotten lazy and just mirrored her left and right directions, but I loved that her blaster always stays on the correct side.

[rj]

"at least it's better than metroid 1" i think, booting it up on my 3DS and playing it for a few minutes before turning it off and saying "i'll do this later;" i will, because it's good for me, but also because i have an essay to write and i've got little time to write it.  

i've never finished metroid 2. or metroid 1, for that matter. i've got a mental block i think for games this slow that were designed in any sense to be this slow, where the difficulty spike is astronomical without approaching in an enjoyable way.

i, like some others, treat super metroid as the "true" start of the franchise; the speed and fluidity increases to a point where the game feels like ballet. metroid 2 plays like a helicopter that has problems getting it up. it's so vertical and slow slow slow in the left and right department.

part of the reason I Die So Much is that there seems to be a terrible lack of FOV in this game. most of that is likely because of the sheer size of everything. samus is huge. enemies are pretty huge. everything takes up so much screen real estate and it gets claustrophobic fast, which is on the one hand a feeling that a metroid game should be giving me (so kudos) but on the other hand makes things feel impossible.

i'm determined to finish this, though.

I feel like the difficulty spike from the earlier game areas to the first Metroid battle is absolutely insane

this, for the record, is where i stopped playing

fuckin nuts

[Tanner]

same here, now that i think about it.


i never understood gameboy games with huge sprites that still played like they were supposed to be normal-sized (see: super mario land 2, donkey kong land or w/e it's called and all the mega-man games (wario land is an example of something that *does* do it right, though, because it's designed around wario being a lardbutt))

i've got a lot of schoolwork right now so i'll probably be getting to this later this week.

[FK in the Coffee]

Fuck. These. Guys. Fuck absolutely everything about them.

[Alevice]

I feel the first alpha metroid should have been faced on a more even ground to get the player understand the strategy needed to get rid of them. As it is, I think the steep inclines on narrow spaces make for a poor introduction.

I feel this is more interesting as a case study for the series progressing rather than as a stand alone entity. It should be noted that the sprite is even larger than the nes version. I think they tried to compensate for readability given the limited pallete.

As mentioned the rather small fov enhances the atmosphere. SO far i havent felt that it has worsened the gameplay perse. The level layout seems to be far more linear to acocunt for such, because more open spaces are hard to read on a single screen.

[FK in the Coffee]

One thing on the small screen real estate: I really wish there was some way to peek below you.  For all of the vertical movement you're doing in the game, it seems like a feature that would really help you spot potential threats before taking a leap of faith down onto the next platform.  On top of that, I feel like the lack of aerial maneuverability Samus has really hampers my ability to navigate the platforming segments above the pools of lava/plasma/whatever.

[baconman]

I'm already just past the point where you get bombs, and it's expecting you to learn the bomb jump.

That last one is a flippin' doozy. It requires a TRIPLE BOMB JUMP, while avoiding a pacing enemy that basically paces for about 5-6 tiles; pop into crouch position and blast it before it bumps you off.

>.< That is NOT how you do that. But at least, from the sound of it, I'm considerably further than you slobs.

Those Alpha Metroids aren't *that* hard. Use your crouching.
__________

And I'm 2DS'ing classic Metroid. I made it to the corridor where I get the Varia Suit (without the Hi-Jump Boots!), and I'm trying to do that irritating bomb-jump-over-the-invisible-gap it takes to get in there. Sub-pixel collision detection ABSOLUTELY SUCKS. Even when it looks like "you've made it," if you're displayed even with it because you're at 0.8 pixels high instead of the full pixel, it's still just like hitting a wall.

Who the balls thought "shoulder high blaster, knee-high enemies, no crouching" was a good idea, either? I don't blame Nintendo singlehandedly for that - a LOT LOT LOT of computer games of the time tended to do that as well.

[Alevice]

I got the bomb, the ice beam and the spider ball and i am not sure which part you mean. I kinda like they did take into account how rooms warp as a whole with the spider ball, but there are areas where its just tedium avoiding those circle motion wasp thingies.