Metroid Mania!

I'm not entirely sure why but I've had a hankering for Metroid over the last week or two. I'm currently stuck on Ridley in Super Metroid and Mother Brain on Metroid: Zero Mission, and I have games going in Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. I've been attempting the original NES Metroid but I'm not a big fan of that one.

What's so Cool About Metroid?
The name of the game in Metroid is "explore." This is both the series' greatest strength and its greatest weakness. It's awesome because, well, you get to explore alien environments, and you never know what's in store for you up ahead - or behind, but I'll get to that in a moment. It's bad because often you simply don't know where to go next. Most of the time this isn't a problem, but when it is I find it very frustrating.

At the start of each game, you basically land on a planet, and from then on you're free to go anywhere you wish. As you explore, though, you'll find many doors or geographical features that are impossible to conquer with your current abilities. This is what makes these games just so addicting. As you progress through the game, you get different suit abilities, beams and missiles. Once you get a new ability, you'll almost always want to go back and explore previous areas to see if you can get anyplace new. The feeling of getting all these new abilities is fantastic, because each one changes the gameplay and adds to your arsenal. Unlike a game like Zelda, where you use a new item to defeat the current and maybe part of the next dungeon before it becomes mostly useless, in Metroid you'll always be using all of your abilities as you explore for lots of puzzles, platforming, or combat. The game design is based around the use of your abilities, so each time you get a new one, the game world effectively expands around you.

This type of gameplay is a ton of fun at the beginning, and end, of the game. At the beginning, you have virtually nothing but jumping and a regular beam. Your initial range of movement is quite limited because there aren't a lot of places you can access. At the end of the game, you can go almost anywhere and you have so many abilities and weapons that you're essentially a walking, flying (screw attack), rolling death machine, and this is when you really feel like the powerful bounty hunter Samus Aran. And being immersed in a game is a big part of what makes a game stand above others - I'm also looking at you, Half-Life series.

As I said, I only really don't like it when I get lost in a Metroid game. With Zero Mission, and each Prime game, this is rarely a problem because the games give periodic hints about where you should head next on the map screen, although they never say how to actually get there, and you're always free to explore. In the NES original, and Super Metroid, however, there are lots of times where I just don't know where I should be going, and there isn't much fun to be had backtracking aimlessly around the world looking for any tiny detail you missed.

I want to end this on a positive note, however, and say that Metroid is one of Nintendo's best series. I like it better than the Zelda series by far. Metroid Prime is just an incredible experience so far, despite the sometimes annoying controls. And Metroid Prime 3 fixes the control problem completely with Wiimote aiming. I consider these two games to probably be the best in the series (Prime 3 over Prime, though).

Also, Samus is the hottest videogame character ever: