daily knowledge: twitter introduced its current default profile picture in 2017. the design process was explained in depth on their blog, where they said the following:

"We felt that the circle of the head in the figure still seemed masculine, even though it technically had no design characteristics to indicate that it was a man. So for inspiration, we looked at how women are portrayed in generic, wayfinding iconography, such as bathroom signs, and noticed that the only difference between the sexes is the shape of their clothing.

Regardless, people have come to associate the circle head with masculinity, and because of this association, we felt that it was important to explore alternate head shapes."

Super Metroid was one of the first Metroidvanias I’ve ever played, alongside that, it was the first Metroid title I’ve ever played as well. I first got it on my 3DS back I think around 2017, and I remember absolutely loving it. I mean, it’s Super Metroid, what more is there to say on the matter? I wanted to replay Super Metroid now that I’ve gone and played the other major 2D Metroid titles, sort of coming back to where I started in a way. And even still, Super Metroid I still find to be one of the best Metroid titles, and I absolutely loved my time with replaying it.

Though I don’t play them as much as I used to, Metroidvanias are one of my favorite genres when it comes to videogames, and Super Metroid is one of the games that help create this genre. With that in mind, I bring it up because an important part of Metroidvanias that they all need to get right is level design. Metroidvanias are mazes, simply put. They’re large explorable mazes, where you can find upgrades, secrets and methods to unlock new paths and shortcuts. Making the entire world a maze provides a difficult challenge though, as it leaves you asking one important question. “How do you direct the player where to go next without outright telling them?”. And I like to think that Super Metroid does a really good job at doing so. The typical method of indirectly telling players where to go that Super Metroid does is placing enemies behind walls. I remember seeing so many rooms that I’d normally think impossible to go to, but then I see an enemy and think “that was put there for a reason”, thus I know I can probably go up there. I also remember a room where there’s a secret path in the middle of it, but you can only tell that it’s there as an enemy crawls out of it. The more I played Super Metroid, the more I noticed these subtle cues to where the game tries to direct you and I find it really impressive.

Another major aspect of Metroidvanias is the list of abilities and upgrades you can get along the way. And I don’t think I need to elaborate too much here, Samus’ list of abilities, especially in Super are downright iconic. The Morph Ball, Power Bombs, Grappling Hook, The Varia Suit, The Gravity Suit, The Screw Attack? These are practically all staple aspects of Samus’ abilities, and from what I remember, they persist from this point onwards. Super Metroid is where Samus really gets going in this regard. What I will say though is that later games do get better at the switching between Missiles and regular shots, and I do like how Super Missiles eventually become an upgrade to Missiles, instead of their own ammo source. Though then again, I love how busted the Super Missiles are, being able to destroy a lot of bosses really easily.