Metroid II: Return of Samus

I remember Sweeney playing through this one a while back, but apparently that came even before the days of the blog; this is our first collective post on Metroid II. Here's how it all unfolded for me.

You start out disembarking from your gunship with no directions or backstory whatsoever. A little counter in the bottom right reveals that there are 39 Metroids remaining, and only through deductive reasoning do you figure out that the point of this game is to kill all these Metroids. Or maybe not - maybe the instruction manual and box art provided that much instruction. I won't pretend I wasn't aware that this was the general concept behind the gameplay before I began. Still, it was a bit jarring to press start on the menu and immediately jump right into a game with no explanation whatsoever.

Now, Metroid titles have always been nonlinear, and it was probably only three or four scrolling screens before I had to choose between going right or going left; many paths are blocked off until you've got the right equipment, but you can still get incredibly lost incredibly quickly. I dicked around for maybe forty minutes or so, and in that time I bagged myself two Metroids and a bunch of power-ups like the ice beam and the spider ball. But I was several dozen "screens" into the caverns of the game by this point and had left all kinds of corridors unexplored. I knew I was never going to find all 37 remaining Metroids just by bumbling around, and the game offers absolutely no clues to where the remaining Metroids are hiding. In fact there's no in-game map at all, which is just such an artifact of 1990 with zero appeal to modern gamers. I can just imagine people 25 years ago making intricate maps on graph paper and plotting out every save station and power up. Today, of course, a simple Google image search for "metroid 2 map" gives us in half a second what it must have taken countless hours to produce back then. Amazing! And also game-changing. Once I made the decision, forty minutes and 2/39 Metroids into the game, to use maps and walkthroughs from the Internet, the game ceased being a wide open exploration and instead became a lengthy series of recipe-like instructions. Wonder was replaced with focus and curiosity was replaced with monotony. I'm very confident I made the right decision here - I wound up finishing in six hours or so what would have surely taken me twenty otherwise - but I can't shake the nagging feeling that I went about this game all wrong and played it without any regard to how I was supposed to play it. It's crazy; just give me an in-game map and I'd have been all the more likely to explore this one further. I love the 2D Metroid games, but up until this one I'd never had literally no idea where I was or how to get back to where I'd been.

Oh well! This isn't the first time the Internet has held my hand all the way through an old game and it certainly won't be the last. Onward and upward!