Grozlam Plays Some Metroid

Hey there, nobody. I'm taking a different turn with this blog than we previously have, mainly because I haven't done jack shit on Dog Adventure since school started. Well, finals are this week, and I think I've had a long enough hiatus, so with any luck we'll see more of that in the weeks to come. Anyway, I'm bored and hiding from studying, so instead I decided to just ooze my brains out here about my experiences with the Metroid series, specifically the original. I guess it'll read more like an actual blog entry, I dunno. Anyway, here we go.

I'd had Metroid for a while on actual NES, and can recall maybe like 10 separate instances where I've tried my hardest to play through that god damned maze of a game. Well, I finally got down to FUCKING BRASS TACKS and am actually getting around to playing the game proper-like.

Super Metroid was my first Metroid game, and my first Castleroid in general (If you use that term. Metroidvania, if you're an idiot). It's probably one of my favorite games ever, even though it took my 5 year-old ass like a full month to play through the whole thing. I picked up Metroid II: The Return of Samus shortly afterward, but I didn't like it very much because I was a stupid kid who couldn't handle taking steps backwards.

Flash forward to when I was like 10, maybe, when I re-bought an NES. I'd had one when I was a kid, but my parents sold it when I was pretty young, and I was too stupid to care at that point. I had the Super Nintendo, so why did I need that shit? Anyway, I saved up some cash and bought a new one in 4th grade, and proceeded to pick up whatever games would turn up cheap at FuncoLand. It wasn't long before I got my hands on the dirtiest-ass copy of Metroid ever. Like, the sticker and the contacts were all covered in this, like, brown film. I have no idea how the hell FuncoLand got their hands on it, because they're usually huge assholes when it comes to a speck of dust being anywhere near what you're selling. I remember I blew into the cartridge at the store and a bunch of dust visibly came out of it. The clerk was like HEY DON'T BLOW INTO THAT IT'S BAD FOR IT, but seriously it couldn't h ave been worse than it was.

Well, I bought it anyway because it was cheap and I hadn't ever played the original Metroid before. After about a hundred years of scrubbing the shit out of it with those pink scrubby brushes and ELIMINATOR spray, I got that thing working, and was immensely disappointed. I think by that time, I was old enough that I could respect games in their original context, but to be honest, I wasn't really big into Metroid. Climbing giant vertical towers of retarded jumps with spiky turtles wasn't my thing, and I really lacked the patience to play the game properly at that time. Like I said before, I probably started and tried to make progress in Metroid like.. several times, and never succeeded in getting anywhere, unless I just blew straight through to Norfair and got my ass handed to me.

But yeah, now in 2009 with another like 10 years of life under my belt, I decided I'd give it one more try, and this time I'd go for a more methodical approach. I sat down and started playing, and any time I'd reach a door, I'd add to a map that I started drawing in one of my notebooks. There's a picture of how far I got on the left. I decided that because this entire game was basically one giant maze, the only way I was going to get through it is if I knew where the hell I was. This was going just great for a while, and I was actually, for the first time in my life, legitimately enjoying Metroid. Everything was going great. Then I got to fucking Kraid's Lair and everything turned to shit.

I dunno if you've ever played Metroid, but if you have played it, you know how giant of a pain in the ass Kraid's Lair is. It didn't help that the first time I went there, I had like 1 extra energy tank, no Varia suit, and nothing else that'd make the place bearable. So while I'm going along my merry way trying to map out this tunnel of doors, I'd usually just get my ass killed and have to start exploring all over. It was at this point that I decided fuck drawing my own maps, I'm just gonna look one up. I had a subscription to Nintendo Power as a kid, and while Nintendo Power didn't go into publication until 1988 and I didn't get into being alive until 1989, I assume I would've gotten my hands on the map somehow around that time. I think I remember the Angry Video Game Nerd showing some pictures of Metroid maps in an issue of Nintendo Power. Maybe they put them in an issue when they did that yellow-stickered Metroid reissue cart. The one that didn't have the ADVENTURE SERIES thing on it with a terrible hand-drawn screenshot. But, I digress.

So, not only is the place hard as hell if you come ill-equipped, but it really is just a giant god damned maze. The game as a whole is a maze, but compared to Kraid's Lair, it's nothing. Kraid's Lair is a horrible mess of identical looking rooms with identical powerups placed specifically so you don't know where the hell you are, exactly. As I'm writing this, I'm looking at a map and seeing there are only like 4 missile upgrades jammed around there, but when I was playing it I felt like there were thousands. I'm probably just some kind of idiot. To make matters worse, there's a fake boss in there. It'd be a pretty huge smelly pain in the ass if you killed the fake Kraid, climbed all the way back up to the door to Tourian only to find that you killed the wrong one. So, you climb all the way back down, find your way to the real Kraid, finally actually kill him, and then have some retarded wall climbing shit where you have to blow holes in a wall of those bricks that come back after you shoot them. It doesn't help that I had the wave beam here. Suicide was faster. I'll stop this section here because I don't want to turn into another AVGN ripoff. Takeaway message: shit's frustrating.

I'm actually having a lot of fun with the game now that I'm out of that hellhole and have an actual, decent quality map. It's like I'm playing my good old friend Super Metroid, just a little more primitive. I'm planning on moving on to Metroid II again after this, and hopefully playing through the whole series. I'm especially looking forward to playing Zero Mission after this, which I hadn't played before. I'm sure it'll take out a lot of the more frustrating crap that's here. The screenshots look like Super Metroid, so that's cool. I dunno if I'll include the Prime series. Probably not. People love them though, so maybe I should. I dunno.

Well anyway, that's all I can think of for now. I sure killed a lot of time and avoided a lot of studying by writing this. GROZLAM OUT