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Tag: intelligent systems

  • Metroid (Nintendo, 1986)

    Metroid (Nintendo, 1986)

    Developed/Published by: Nintendo R&D1, Intelligent Systems / Nintendo
    Released: 06/08/1986
    Completed: 28/08/2025
    Completion: Killed Mother Brain in less than three hours.

    I hope it was obvious from the conclusion of my article on The Legend of Zelda that the game I was referring to was this, Metroid, but I suppose the real heads might have been like “well, The Mysterious Murasame Castle is pretty good, I guess…”

    Metroid is a game I was absolutely certain I was never going to beat. After all, I’ve beaten Metroid: Zero Mission, isn’t that good enough?

    But the original is a game I’ve picked up and put down a few times out of my urge to really understand the Metroidvania genre’s beginnings, and the reason I’ve put it down is probably the reason most people do: the obvious lack of any sort of map (never mind an automap.) That would be bad though, but when you combine that with the game’s reliance on completely hidden paths for progression, and an early difficulty that is, I think, worse than The Legend of Zelda… Metroid just isn’t very enjoyable. It doesn’t seem worth the effort.

    Sadly, unlike The Legend of Zelda, there isn’t a wee hack in pulling up the manual, because it doesn’t offer the kind of help you actually need. While it does offer lots of useful hints on what Samus and enemies can do, the included map is very vague. With the graphics in each area quite samey (look, you tell one corridor or shaft apart from the other) you really need to therefore either have a map already to hand or be mapping the game out as you go, and I think my resistance to the original Metroid has always been that while in a game like Wizardry or The Bard’s Tale you can take your time to draw out maps, here you’re stopping during an action game, which apart from just being sort of annoying, is an active flow breaker.

    Thankfully, it’s 2025, and I again have to thank two people–romhacker Infidelity and Hand Drawn Game Guides artist Phil Summers–for making Metroid manageable. Infidelity has ported Metroid to SNES creating what is easily the ultimate version of the game, with the Famicom Disk System saving, the addition of a mini-map(!) and even the ability to combine the wave beam and ice beam like later games. And Phil Summers’ Hand Drawn Game Guide for Metroid might be the perfect thing to hand for a player who doesn’t want to just follow a walkthrough beat-by-beat: it offers a route through the game, but the maps and tips leave a lot of the exploration and discovery up to the player.

    It’s a shame, to be honest, that even with all of that, I still just don’t like Metroid all that much. In fact, I’d argue that the Metroidvania “vision” here is still so far off that this is very much a fish with limbs flopping about gasping for air compared to an actual amphibian. Er… Metroidphibian.

    When you start playing Metroid, there is some familiarity outside of the franchise signifiers–the opening area gives you some rope, but works to funnel you towards the necessary early pickups before the game opens up. But quickly you realise Metroid is far less interested in the now de rigueur “I can’t go there / unlock ability / now I can go there” loop than just killing you as much as possible and getting you lost. The upgrades which are required for progression act generally as just “keys” to new areas and don’t provide you the means to solve puzzles or allow you to interact with them in interesting ways (even the morph ball goes strangely underused) so you mostly find yourself shooting/bombing walls or hoping lava pits have a false bottom when stuck after you’ve got them all. And like other games of the era, Metroid makes sure to often punish you for doing that, giving you plenty of pointless dead ends that just sap you of health as you try to survive.

    In fact, I’m struck by how the game poorly rewards exploration beyond getting the necessary upgrades, and then how short the game actually is once you have them outside of forced backtracking–kill two minibosses and then head to the final section to kill Mother Brain, a section which is completely linear.

    As a result of all of this, you realise familiarity with modern Metroidvanias is really a hindrance when playing Metroid. For example, beam upgrades (ice or wave) don’t seem to actually increase your power much if at all, so unlike later games, Metroid seems tuned around using your missiles on regular enemies. You’d think therefore that missile upgrades would make exploration worth it, but you end up getting bogged down just to have five more missiles in your quota, where if you beeline to the bosses, each one gives you an almost absurd 75!

    And you’ll want to do this because the drop rate on health and missiles is so miserable that every trip down a dead end (or worse, a corridor you’ve forgotten you’ve seen already) requires what feels like never-ending grinding of the game’s infinite spawners. When you first see them, you think “that’ll save me sometime” but after your first ten, twenty minutes waiting for enough health to fill one tank, you realise you’re far better  just running through the levels trying to rely on screw attack jumps to avoid combat (which does, generally, work.)

    That even goes for the last section of the game which should be tense and exciting as you finally face off against the Metroids, but no, you’re better off… freezing them and running past. To add insult to injury, Mother Brain is just a complete pain in the arse. It’s an endurance test–have enough health that you can survive being shot the whole time while you pound her with missiles.

    I suppose that the escape is a fairly-exacting platforming challenge is kind of funny, though.

    Much like The Legend of Zelda, though, Metroid feels like a product that makes more sense in its original context of players with bags of time and nothing much else to play. Bar one very annoying thing–that you have no way of shooting things shorter than Samus, which really makes the opening of the game frustrating and much harder than it should be–Metroid controls well, and I assume the players willing to map got a lot out of it, and those who didn’t probably just eventually got Samus powered up and to the end by sheer effort (the zone between “I have the morph ball and missiles” and “I have enough energy tanks and the screw attack to survive to explore” is so miserable, however, I do find it hard to imagine.)

    Even if I find that hard to imagine, I don’t find it hard to see how Metroid captured people’s imaginations. I’m not sure it has quite the same completeness of vision as The Legend of Zelda (or The Mysterious Muramase Castle, for that matter) but the visuals and especially the sound really give the game a uniquely lonely feel; a solo decent into a deadly and foreign cave system (I do love that the name of this game is a portmanteau of “metro” and “android”–I can almost imagine one of the designers, lost in one of Tokyo’s many confusing train stations, thinking “there’s probably a game in this.”)

    And maybe it’s just the fact that it’s a side-on 2D platformer, but even more so than with The Legend of Zelda/Sabre Wulf, Rare has a case that Metroid is heavily inspired by Underwurlde, if not an outright rip off. Not just the shafts with platforming challenge (which would be enough) but that areas of the map are locked off without using a particular weapon. 

    Separated at birth??? Alright, this one doesn’t look as damning as the Sabre Wulf one but trust me.

    If I was being really harsh, I’d point out there were plenty of platfomers of the era with big maps to explore, things to collect and keys to use, from the obscure to the very well known. Impossible Mission. Saboteur. Citadel. Journey To The Centre Of The Earth. And many of these games play well, too!

    So I after playing it all the way through, I do feel like I still have some questions if Metroid really does deserve the crown as originator, but then I also suppose we also live in a world where we don’t play Beneath Apple Manor-likes.

    Will I ever play it again? Well, there’s no Satellaview version of this, so I really have played the “best” version of it I could. I’ll play Zero Mission again, though, which I remember as being the peak of the franchise, and I can’t remember if that’s controversial or not.

    Final Thought: Of course, there’s also the other side of the Metroidvania… the vania. And the first game in that franchise doesn’t even attempt to be a Metroidvania. It’s even got a new SNES port too…

  • Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. (Intelligent Systems, 2015)

    Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. (Intelligent Systems, 2015)

    Developed/Published by: Intelligent Systems / Nintendo
    Released: March 13th, 2015
    Completed: 25th April, 2017
    Completion: Finished all the levels, collecting all but eight of the gears.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    Here’s another Nintendo failure, then! You know, I do like to complain that Nintendo only seem to pump out games in just a few franchises (Mario, Zelda, recently Fire Emblem) but here’s what happens whenever they put anything else out: it tanks. So no wonder they’re getting the idea that people just want the same thing over and over until they run it into the ground. And honestly, sometimes it’s fair that the things they release fail, because they’re insanely misguided (Metroid: Federation Force) but then it’s also sad because Nintendo then learns the wrong lesson from them (“people hate Metroid”).

    I mean, the lesson they might have learned here—Intelligent System’s attempt at a Valkyria Chronicles-esque third-person strategy title—is probably “don’t let Intelligent Systems do anything except Fire Emblem” because bloody hell I can’t keep up with the number of Fire Emblems that have come out. (Remember Advance Wars? It’s been almost ten years, guys.)

    And, frankly: it’s a shame. Because I liked Code Name: STEAM. I know, that’s insane. I hate everything. And let me state as caveat that I immediately installed the patch that allows you to speed up the enemy turns. But Code Name: STEAM is a completely serviceable strategy title that—outside of a few frustrations—I found completely pleasant.

    Now, I can agree: it’s a bit weird looking. It doesn’t manage to nail the comic book look it wants, and the enemies are somewhat… dull. However, it’s got a weirdly interesting and diverse cast drawn from literature. It gets some points, for example, for gender-swapping Zorro (was this secretly why it failed? Neckbeard boycott?) but loses some for having Dorothy bare her midriff (why?) but maybe it gains those back by including Queen Califa. I’m not a perfect arbiter of points, ok?

    It does have some other flaws. Many (most?) people complain about the lack of a true tactical view, but that didn’t bother me because it’s obviously not what they’re trying to do. With free movement before you commit (hindered by enemy overwatch attacks), it’s a game about careful scouting and much more about the feel of being in a small attack squad. I do think the game is much too stingy with its steam-based action points, meaning you travel through levels very slowly, and the game doesn’t have any good sense of a progression of power—all of the unlocks are similar in power levels, just different, when it could have done with more steam being offered as you unlock new boilers (for some reason, most boilers don’t refill fully each turn, and the ones that refill slowly that you unlock I found unusable. Rather a big misstep, I feel.)

    I’d say the main mistakes they’ve made are in working against the slow, methodical play style that the limited action points engender. To mix things up they add a lot of “pressure”—first with baddies that spawn in (behind you, usually) which is a mild irritant, and then just the worst: “spotter” baddies in levels featuring mortar attacks.  They spawn and you have to get out of their line of sight or take a severe hit. Of course, so you can’t stall, you can’t kill them (just move them, hopefully out of sight, but it’s generally awkward to do) and this is insanely frustrating with the limited amount of action points on offer. There are certain levels where you will be harried to the point scouting is impossible, and you get situations where you stumble forward, get shot by a baddie with knock-back, and then land directly in the path of the spotter you thought you were escaping, and die by mortar. Oh, and there’s a couple of difficulty-spike levels outside of that: one with mounted guns that don’t have a clear range (frustrating) and another with a bunch of exploding enemies dropping in that I found… ragey.

    Honestly, at least one of these levels had me considering stopping playing, and that’s really awful, because the game is so close to being an all-round nice time like Valkyria Chronicles. The final boss is a pain in the arse too, admittedly—but at least it’s nothing like the final boss of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, my last dalliance with an Intelligent Systems game.

    However, the levels in which it works—it really works. In general the map design is clever, with a good mix of complex indoor and outdoor spaces, and while generally it’s a bad idea to split up your team of four, the level where you’re forced to do was a particularly fun one, I thought. There are far more fun levels than frustrating ones, it’s just the annoying ones are going to stick in your craw (I mean, they’re ultimately why I didn’t collect all the gears you can find in levels, and I wanted to.)

    I’m gonna say that it’s weird to me that Code Name: STEAM didn’t get a fairer shake when it was released. It was slated by almost all reviewers with them almost all concentrating on the (pre-patch) lengthy wait between turns, and I guess that one mistake wrecked any chance of it managing critical acclaim at least.

    Well: It’s got the only critical acclaim it truly needs: that I liked it. I mean, I didn’t love it or anything but I had a nice time. That should be more than enough!

    Will I ever play it again? I won’t, but the sequel they tease at the end I would have played, except it shall never exist.

    Final Thought: I recommend this, actually. I’m gonna… recommend it. Really! Because when I picked it up it was $5, and pretty much any store is gonna have it for pennies. You can do so much worse.

    This essay is featured in Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24.

  • Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon (Intelligent Systems, 2008)

    Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon (Intelligent Systems, 2008)

    Developed/Published by: Intelligent Systems, Nintendo SPD Group No.2 / Nintendo
    Released: February 16, 2009
    Completed: 10th March, 2014
    Completion: Got all the way to the final level, gave up and watched the ending on YouTube.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    It happened! Yes, this is a rare occurrence—admittedly one that’s more usual with Japanese games of an RPG or strategy persuasion, of which this is all of the above—but here’s a game where I got to the end boss, clunked against it without any acceptable way to progress, said “fuck that” to reloading an earlier save and grinding or some other tiresome solution, and just watched the ending on YouTube.

    And I was so proud of that time I toughed it out and beat the end boss of the original Persona, too.

    It’s sort of a shame! Because there was this… well, I’ll be honest and admit it was brief, but there was this brief period where I was sort of into Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon. In fact I was thinking “heck, everyone likes Fire Emblem: Awakening so much, and this is actually ok, so I’ll probably play it some time.”

    Now? I doubt that. Because nothing dredges up all the mistakes a game has made than a bad ending. So let’s discussing!

    Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon is the DS remake of the very first game in the Fire Emblem series, which made it feel like a pretty good place to start (especially as it’s the introduction of Marth, the first Fire Emblem character that was seen outside of Japan, albeit in a Smash Bros. title.) Unfortunately, it’s obvious that as a Famicom game originally, the first Fire Emblem was pretty basic. All the things it seems people mention about this series, like characters talking to each other in missions, are missing here. That of course shouldn’t be a problem, because the strategy core—very similar to Advance Wars—should be what you care about, right?

    Hmm. There’s a quirk! And if you’re familiar with the series, you know it already: if a character dies, they die forever. This is clearly intended to give weight to the strategy, but sadly, it doesn’t really work. You aren’t going to care about the characters, you care about how much you’ve levelled them up, and while the game does feed you new characters quite consistently—obviously to shore up your forces—you are never going to want to use them because they are never going to be better than a character that’s been with you for a while.

    So what this means is that you’re going to grind up your characters to get them to the point where it’s going to be hard for them to die (to the point, likely, where the Advance Wars-style “lances beat swords, etc.” rock paper scissors aspect become totally pointless.) Which means doing what I did, which is carefully sending your favourite characters into the arenas that are found on certain levels, and repeatedly fighting until they’re over-levelled.

    It’s boring! But, and here’s the but: once I’d over-levelled them just enough, the game became pleasantly strategic. It wasn’t an Advance Wars, no (I thought the graphics were ok, too, then I saw how beautiful the GBA Fire Emblem animations were recently and that took the shine off a bit) but it was fine. I can’t begin to imagine how unpleasantly hard the game would be if you were letting units die noble deaths or not abusing the arena, however.

    Or maybe I can! If Marth dies it’s game over, so I hadn’t been using him on the front lines, and he was woefully under-levelled by the end. The final boss? Well… The only person who can use the ultimate boss-killing weapon is Marth. Who would die after one hit, while my other once over-levelled heroes were barely able to keep on top of the constant reinforcements. So I should actually have never stopped grinding at some point earlier, removing all the strategy/challenge from the majority of the game just so I could finish the final, ludicrously unbalanced level. Great.

    Will I ever play it again? No.

    Final Thought: Pretty sure I could get lots of responses here about how I could have used a particular other character to kill the boss, or do some particular combo, or whatever. Or maybe to promise me that Awakening, with the ability to turn off permadeath, is worth playing. It’s too late, folks!