• they/them...for now

weird depressed person trying to make a game? actually not sure. yeah i should probably more thoroughly interrogate my appreciation of the referenced video game character


So I made the mistake of writing a comment on a reddit thread about something I care about. Luckily I realized I didn't want to feed their sludge mill that much, and that I'd already lost like 20 minutes typing, so instead I'm putting it here. Might make some edits and finish the thing. Hopefully it doesn't suck.

Anyway...

After considering Metroid one of my favorite franchises since I first played Metroid Prime 3 on the wii, I find myself mostly ambivalent about what could come next. I had only played Hunters prior, and that is the game that is the least representative to me of what Metroid actually is.

Prime 3 isn't even my favorite because Tallon IV in Prime 1 blew me away, and Super exists. I think playing a couple of the games had a profound impact on my tastes in games and probably opened me up to playing so many other games influenced by the franchise.

But with Samus Returns and Dread, it just lost so much of its luster. The art styles, while maybe technically impressive, didn't do much for me, especially compared to the alien vistas of Prime and the music composed for it which gave me chills. It kind of felt like Dread was stuck trying to look like a Metroid game, without understanding some key parts of the identity of the 2D games, and also not pushing the game far enough to become something new.

The eerie and irregular suspense in the rest of the franchise was replaced with clean metallic hallways filled with nothing, as the machines stalked you because the previous, more interesting apex predators had been snuffed out in favor of adding a massive number of discrete stealth segments. Couple that with such a bland and ridiculously nasty villain.

I can't really be upset though, because so many other games are carrying forth what Metroid brought out, while also twisting those elements in exciting and often fascinating ways. The old gods are dead and in their place is a burgeoning colony of...(dear god what am I doing with this metaphor I am too tired to finish this statement)

Hi cohost! I kind of lost whatever I was going to say next, but I still felt like I needed to express my annoyance, for some reason, that there are no other games like Metroid Prime and that's such a deep well of possibilities.

I guess I also want to mention that the Prime games are probably the ones that have made the best case for "immersive" lighting effects and filters for me. Something about remembering the water falling off Samus's visor or the fog obscuring her view is sublime. (They did this on the fucking gamecube!) I don't think we've gained enough in that space since, but my sample size of graphically demanding, "realistic" (what does that word even mean) games I've actually played since is laughably small.

Also also, play Pseudoregalia


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in reply to @lankyfromnowonbutprobablynot's post:

Good post.

I came to a similar conclusion here around 2010, though in my case the instigating games were Prime 3 and Other M, and the games that provided me a new horizon were SM romhacks (particularly Eris), which felt like they could be atmospherically and/or mechanically maximalist in a way that commercial products cannot.

At this point, the prospect of New games in the official Metroid serieses feel as much points of curiosity as anything else. SR/Dread are interesting to me in the way they awkwardly blend traditional metroidian sensibilities with modern AAA design/production, and particularly in the way they appear to be bizarrely conversant with the metroid romhacking scene (or maybe just coincidentally evolutionarily convergent).