Super Metroid

Yep. Not even a full day after finishing Seinfeld, one of the greatest shows of the 1990s, I've beaten Super Metroid, one of the greatest video games of the 1990s. I'll cut right to the chase with this game: the hype exceeded the payoff. I don't mean to disrespect its legacy and I'm sure it would have blown me away fifteen years ago when it came out, but it just didn't seem like a legitimate candidate for "best game of all time," a title many have actually bestowed upon it. It's actually one of the most nonlinear and "customizable" games I've ever played; while you need to beat four certain bosses before heading to the final boss, you can technically defeat them in any order. And although certain power-ups are required to access certain rooms, short-cuts and loopholes abound (many are glitch-based), leaving it highly unlikely that any two first-time players would advance through the game in the same manner. It's not an especially long game (it can be 100% completed in under an hour and a half by professionals and hardcore fans), but it still took me eight to ten hours to beat. After all, so much of the fun of this game and its nonlinear style was the exploration element. At times, the game was frustrating. Skills like the "shinespark" and wall jump, for instance, required a lot of precision in timing and button pressing in order to pull off. Most bosses took me two attempts to defeat. I suppose at the end of the day, I just enjoyed Metroid Fusion a little bit more than this eight-year predecessor. And the 3D Prime series is just too different to allow for a fair comparison to this game. I can't stress it enough, so I'll say it again: the game was a decent one, but its lofty reputation just couldn't be matched. My biggest complaint, though typical of all SNES-era games, is probably the lack of story. Why am I on the planet I am on, doing what I am doing? This boss looks pretty badass, but what exactly is he and how does that relate to the adventure as a whole? Frankly, I can only recommend Super Metroid to big fans of the series and people who don't mind its graphical limitations. Regardless, now that I'm done with it, I'm done with every SNES game I own (and by extension, every downloadable Wii game). That feels pretty nice; Super Nintendo was my very first system and though I'll make no promises, I think I've now beaten every acclaimed game it had to offer. As far as the Metroid franchise goes, I don't know if I'll ever finish that one off; Prime 2 and Prime 3 still await my attention in the backlog, but I have yet to buy Hunters, Pinball, Metroid II, or the upcoming Other M. And why would I go out of my way to buy four new games just to beat a series? I'm not saying I will never do that; I'm just saying it isn't going to happen anytime soon. On the other hand, hopefully the completion of Metroid Prime 2 will.