Pauline Ragny

it's my favourite rando and also i didn't prepare anything for tonight cause im tired

https://www.twitch.tv/paulineragny

We just gotta drop the last baby metroid at the day care and we're done for the night. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

https://www.twitch.tv/paulineragny

I get a bit annoyed when people say super metroid's wall jump is clunky. The input for it works reliably if you understand how it functions and it's this way for a reason.

The typical way a wall jumping mechanics would be implemented, even before Super Metroid, would be to simply press the jump button while the character is touching the wall, see NES Batman or Megaman X.

In Super Metroid, you jump against the wall, then pull away for a few frames, then press the jump button. Samus has a unique sprite that specifically displays while she's in the input window for a wall jump.

Now you may ask "that sounds really unintuitive, why would they implement it that way?"

You have to imagine yourself in 1994 when the game was still a mystery and there weren't millions of guides online detailing everything about it. The game doesn't want you to realize you can wall jump right away from the start. The manual doesn't even mention it. They want to keep it secret until you find the etecoons in Brinstar. They are there to tell you that wall jumps are possible. Their section of the map is even specifically designed to force you to figure it out. They bait you with a health upgrade that's located behind a patch of crumbling floor that drops you right next to a save room. That's a deliberate trick to get you stuck in there. The only way to escape that section is to wall jump like the etecoons.

If the wall jump was implemented the same intuitive way every other video game wall jump is, there is a high chance you would find out earlier by accident and you wouldn't get this experience they tried to craft. They wanted to give you the feeling of discovering partway through the game an ability you had in yourself all along. They easily could have just placed in that section an item that unlocks the wall jump ability. But that would not feel the same. That experience unfortunately doesn't really work nowadays unless you somehow have avoided all knowledge of the game through cultural osmosis but it doesn't mean it wasn't worth doing something like this at the time.

Now, if you still find it hard to input, I get it. I'm not gonna deny it makes it slightly harder to pull off. But it's not "old game jank", it's intentional. Older NES games already had intuitive wall jumps. It's implemented that way to obfuscate it for a little while. Every 2D Metroid game after Super has a more intuitive and generous wall jump input because, by then, everyone who played the SNES game knew Samus could do that. It was no longer a mystery so there was no point in obfuscating it.