The Game Boy sequel, Metroid II: Return of Samus, alleviated this lack of direction by introducing a new gameplay element: deadly lava, which blocks access to the next area until certain goals are met. In this way, there is still a vast planet for the player to explore, but always has a rough idea of where to focus his attention. Although this provided more clear-cut goals, many criticized the game for straying from the more organic progression of the original.

Thankfully, the third game maintains the non-linear gameplay of the first, while removing most of the frustrations, and also inherits many of the advancements made by the second game. In Super Metroid, Samus returns to the planet Zebes, the setting of the first game, where she once again has to face off against the Space Pirates and their leader, Mother Brain. The villains have stolen the baby Metroid that Samus rescued at the end of Metroid II, and retreated to their newly rebuilt lair. From the start, this gives the player familiar territory to explore, and it is fun (and a little eerie) to pass through the room that you destroyed at the end of the first Metroid.

Progression in Metroid is all about the weapons and equipment, and Metroid 3 takes nearly everything from the first two games, and then just about doubles it. New suits provide damage reduction and added mobility, and the Varia Suit has never looked better. (It also retains Samus’ iconic rounded shoulder armor, introduced in Metroid II as a way of distinguishing the two suits on the monochrome Game Boy screen.) There are also addition beam weapons, but while previous games required you to track down the original powerup each time you wanted to switch beams, Super Metroid makes things easier for the player by allowing you to switch each beam on or off at will. As an added convenience, some beams can be combined; so for example, you can equip the Plasma Beam, but still retain the Metroid-freezing power of the Ice Beam.

Besides the various suits and beams, Samus gains a number of new tools in her arsenal. Notably, the x-ray scope makes it even easier to find hidden passageways. As another nice touch, if you can’t destroy a block with a certain weapon, it will show you which weapon is required to remove it. There are many other abilities that Samus can collect during the game, but sadly, the Spider Ball (a favorite from Metroid II) is missing here. In Super Metroid, it may have rendered some of the puzzles too trivial, but it was a welcome addition that really opened up the previous game to complex exploration.

It should be clear by now that Metroid 3 adds more of the weapons, abilities, and tools that you loved from the previous games. But it also introduces gameplay improvements that make this game less frustrating and more fun. First and foremost, Metroid 3 finally has an auto-mapping system! Yes, you can say goodbye to those cryptic hand-drawn maps forever! The game shows you where you have explored, and convenient map rooms give you an idea of where to go next. However, the maps do not reveal everything, so some exploration is still required, but they take a lot of the tedium out of it.

Another huge change is how you discover new items and abilities. In the first game, a seemingly impassible area would suggest that some new ability was needed, but it was often unclear what you needed or where you would find it. Metroid 3 also has these same obstacles, but they are usually discovered when Samus falls into an area that she can’t escape. This added to the claustrophobic atmosphere of the game, but also provides a better idea of where you need to explore next, because there is always some way out. It may sound like a subtle difference, but it provides the same sense of progression, without worrying that the necessary item is tucked away in some distant corner of the world. Instead, you feel trapped, and there is an urgency to find your way out.

There are a few frustrations that creep up along the way, however. While many of the controls were streamlined or improved, some of the new moves are difficult to execute. In particular, the wall jump is tough to pull off with any consistency, and there is nothing more frustrating than making nine or ten jumps up a tall vertical shaft, only to miss the last one and have to start all over again…and again, and again. Other moves like the Super Jump are difficult to decipher, and frustrated players may find it necessary to consult a walkthrough to proceed.

In all, Super Metroid maintains the sense of wonder and exploration from the first two games, while including many changes to keep the player from quitting the game in frustration. The energy charge stations from the second game are retained in this one, and you even get a few reserve tanks in case you get really desperate. The mapping system relieves you of the manual effort, but the game compensates by giving you a world which is much larger than either of the first two games. The sound is more subtle, the music is better, the enemies are bigger, and the battles require more strategy. And to top it all off, the graphics are absolutely gorgeous, making great use of lighting, color, and effects. This really is one of the best examples of great 2D graphics from the 16-bit era.

Setting the story back on the planet Zebes was a nice touch, because the player can really appreciate the graphical improvements from the 8-bit to the 16-bit era. Having a familiar setting also makes you notice the little differences, which often give you an idea of where to explore. The storyline remains the high point of the series, with an ending that is tremendously satisfying. Without revealing the details of the extended ending sequence, players who have completed the first Metroid game will be taken by surprise by the battle in Metroid 3. It is amazing how much adventure, fun, and genuine emotion the designers were able to pack into this game. If you have never experienced Super Metroid, it is definitely worth your time.

OVERALL SCORE: 7 out of 7

With the first Metroid game, players faced a world that was too open, and it was often hard to tell where to explore next. Also, many of the secret areas had to be found by trial and error, and when starting from the last save, Samus would begin with a minimal amount of energy, forcing the player to go through a tedious process of recovering health before continuing.

Thankfully, Metroid II solves all of these issues, primarily by introducing a more linear level design. Luckily for Samus, the Metroids were very considerate when designing SR-388. Instead of making it a huge, open world, they mapped out a series of caverns, with deadly lava blocking access to the next area. When the lava blocks your way, it is because you have Metroids that you still need to find and kill in the current area. Once you finish them off, there is an earthquake, the lava recedes, and you are free to explore the next area. It is a very handy system that keeps the player generally focused on where to search next. In a welcome change to the previous Metroid game, you will occasionally find spots that completely recharge your shields or missiles. And since your shields and missiles are stored when you save the game, you no longer have to spend time tediously recharging every time you start.

That is not to say that Metroid II has less exploring than Metroid…not by a long shot. While Metroid had corridors that were either vertical or horizontal, Metroid II has no such restrictions. The tunnels wind around, back and forth, and up and down. Some areas include a gigantic cavern with a huge vaulted ceiling, and in the center lies an abandoned city of alien origin. It is possible to drop from the ceiling, fall for a minute, and then land with no idea of where you ended up. And since all of the caverns look generally the same (one drawback of the black-and-white color palette), mapmaking becomes that much more important. A map for Metroid could fit on one side of one page, while the maps for Metroid II could easily cover both sides of several sheets of paper. So while the caverns are more complex and expansive, they are also more enjoyable to explore, because there is a lot more to discover.

The gameplay itself is very similar to the first Metroid, except the boss battles have been replaced with mini-bosses in the form of mutated Metroids. The early caverns are littered with the discarded husks of traditional Metroids. You soon discover that they are mutating into new and more-powerful forms: Alpha, Gamma, Zeta, and Omega Metroids. And if you’ve seen Aliens, you can deduce what you’ll find at the very end of the game.

To combat these new threats, Samus has even more weapons and gadgets at her disposal. The traditional items make their return: missiles, High-Jump Boots, the Screw Attack, Ice Beam, Wave Beam, the Varia Suit, and bombs. (Samus starts off with the Long Shot and Morph Ball.) But in addition to those weapons, Samus can also find the Spazer Beam and Plasma Beam, which are even stronger weapons than the Wave Beam. Samus also gets the Space Jump, which allows her to perform a mid-air jump, and thus reach areas that she could not otherwise reach. But the best new item has to be the Spider Ball. With the Spider Ball, Samus can morph into ball form, then proceed to scale any wall or ceiling. You may pass by a ledge that is seemingly there for no reason, but then you realize that you can hop up to it, switch to Spider Ball form, and climb along the ceiling to find a hidden passage. The beauty of this ability is that it forces you to look at exploration differently, and you will find yourself revisiting earlier areas to discover new secrets.

While most of the boss fights are generally straightforward, the final boss fight may frustrate same gamers. Although the fight appears to be a simple brute-force attack, there are actually a few tricks that are not immediately obvious, that might the battle significantly easier. Tenacity could pay off in this case, but less patient gamers may want to glance at a walkthrough.

In short, Metroid II is much more fun that the original Metroid. The controls are more responsive, Samus has more weapons and abilities, and the Spider Ball makes you look at exploring much differently. You have actual save points in the game, and your shields and missiles don’t reset to a low amount when you start from your save. Plus, if you end up low on missiles or energy, you can backtrack and find a recharge station for each. The gameplay benefits from some forced linearity, but Metroid purists might miss the open-ended nature of the original. But overall, Metroid II adds more of what made the first game great, while fixing many of the shortcomings.

OVERALL SCORE: 6 out of 7

I imagine that people know the general story of Metroid by now: Samus Aran lands on a planet, has to fight a bunch of beasties and power up, and eventually destroy the Metroids that were stolen by the Space Pirates, and Mother Brain. (Is she the leader of the Metroids, or of the Space Pirates? I was never sure.) Oh, and Samus is a woman. (I think that 20 years is past the statute of limitations on spoilers.) From what I understand, Metroid was unique at the time because of its open-ended exploration. Instead of progressing through levels, Samus travels through an entire open-ended world. She might be stopped by a door she can’t open, a wall she can’t scale, or a beast she can’t kill. Each of the boundaries can eventually be surpassed as Samus powers up her weapons and armor. But at the beginning, it can seem overwhelming when you turn a corner, only to be killed in one shot by something much more powerful than you.

In general, I think the open-ended gameplay system works well. You really feel like there is a larger world around you, and you have to tread lightly because you don’t know what you might come up against. The joy of discovery is very strong. In some cases, like a locked door, it is obvious that you will have to come back later when you can open it. In other cases, you may get a new ability like the Morph Ball, and then realize that you can now pass through passages that were previously too small to get through. And sometimes you will run into a dead end with something visible beyond it, and you realize that there must be a way through. Through these various devices, the game slowly reveals itself, and you always feel like something more dangerous is lurking at the outer edges of your vision.

That said, there are a lot of elements in Metroid that are frustrating. The main problem I found was not knowing where to go next. I got to a point where I had mapped out everything I could find (yes, I drew maps on paper), found everything I could find, and didn’t know where to go next. I knew there had to be a secret passageway hidden somewhere, but it could be literally anywhere on the map. I would load my saved game, but Samus starts after saving with only a set amount of life energy. So before I could start exploring (most likely in the more dangerous areas, with the creatures who do the most damage), I would have to spend time killing smaller creatures, where each one might drop 5 energy at a time. When you have to fill up with 200 or 300 energy before you can start exploring, that can take a while. In the end, I would start a game, spend ten or fifteen minutes killing creatures to gain energy, then spend one minute exploring before I died and had to start all over again. It was very frustrating.

In the twenty years between Metroid and today, there have been a lot of gameplay improvements that would alleviate the frustration somewhat. The Legend of Zelda had a similar life system, but you could find a fairy to fill your life meter. Even Metroid II has a station to recharge your energy completely. But in Metroid, you have to charge up bit by bit. And once I was charged up, I would again be faced with a huge map and no idea where to start searching next. When gameplay progression is based on randomly bombing every wall and floor and ceiling, that seems to me like bad design. Maybe it worked okay back when kids were expected to play all day every day, but as a modern gamer, I found it horribly tedious.

After playing Metroid off and on for several months and not making any progress, I finally caved and looked at a walkthrough to find the one or two items I needed to progress. I don’t feel too bad about it, because the secret passageways I found were nowhere near where I was looking. One was “bomb the floor in this nondescript hallway, then drop through the fake lava to a secret room below.” The other one was, “Shoot the one block on the ceiling to reveal the opening, then dodge the flying creature until it flies up and through. Follow it up, then freeze it with the ice beam so you can climb up and enter the secret door.” Even when I knew what to do, it still took me 15 minutes just to do it the right way. I can’t imagine how I would have found it myself. Perhaps if I had played in back in 1987, I would have had a network of friends to ask for help; I doubt any of my friends are playing Metroid today.

So once I got past that gameplay block (the ice beam was really what I needed), things progressed pretty quickly. The boss battles were just difficult enough to be enjoyable, and I finally got to the last zone where the actual Metroids live. The gameplay got much less forgiving at that point, because if you miss a Metroid, it will quickly latch onto you and drain your energy. So, while it was difficult, at least I knew where I needed to go and what I needed to do. The final battle with Mother Brain was, again, excruciatingly hard, but still fun. I’m glad that the game ended on a satisfying note, and I really felt like I accomplished something. I hope that future games in the series fix some of the gameplay that made the mid-game so difficult.

OVERALL SCORE: 5 out of 7

While I was off doing other things, someone wrote the magnum opus of the Wii manifesto. It sums up so much of what I’ve wanted to say for so long that I’m rather ashamed that I didn’t write it myself.

Garden of WiiDS is taking a break. Go and read that article. It’s okay, I’ll wait.

That’s one reason why I was pleased to read about his recent appearance on CNN’s “American Morning,” where he talks common sense about Manhunt 2 and continues to fight the good fight against the infantilization of video gaming.

You can read his write-up on the appearance here.

I’ve said before that I’m no Nintendo fanboy. I’m a well-wisher. I did my Nintendo time growing up, and some of my fondest memories are behind white/black/gray/red and white/gray/purple/super-purple controllers. I remember the jingle from the Nintendo breakfast cereal commercials. I was just as excited about Super Mario Bros. 3 as I was my first kiss. I just want to make that clear before I say that the 360 rules my household.

I really enjoyed Metroid Prime 3, but in general the Wii games just arent there. And in a holiday season that is being heralded as the greatest season for video games since 2003 (when I was still on video-gaming hiatus trying to finish my master’s), I can look forward to only two more AAA games this year: Super Mario Galaxy and Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

On the other hand I look at the XBox 360 and I see The Orange Box. The Simpsons Game. Assassin’s Creed. Mass Effect. Rock Band. And a lot more I’m neglecting to mention. Let’s also not ignore the fact that my girlfriend has almomst totally abandoned Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree and Wii Sports in favor of the five-minute crack rock sessions of Pac-Man Championship Edition.

Now, you can ask me how profitable the games division at Microsoft is, and I’ll smile sheepishly and shrug to the tune of an 80′s sitcom jingle. But the XBox 360 is not just the gamer’s system that I believed it was prior to owning one. The casual and marketplace content is there in spades, but marketing is just telling us to “Jump in (to an FPS).” I recently asked Microsoft Group Marketing Manager Aaron Greenberg about this image discrepancy, to which he responded, “We felt it was important to satisfy our core first.” I think it’s pretty safe to say the core is now satisfied, but beyond that you’ve got the other stuff as well.

Contrast this with Nintendo. The core of the Wii user base is people that don’t game regularly or at least didn’t before the Wii. Wii Sports, Warioware: Smooth Moves, Cooking Mama and Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree have done a lot to draw these people in, but with so few titles that appeal to them (and those themselves being long in the tooth) the core audience is growing restless.

How about that other stuff? You know, hardcore games? Metroid, Mario, Smash Bros. That’s what you get (okay, maybe Guitar Hero III). I couldn’t even tell you what the next big hardcore game on the horizon is beyond December.

I’ve heard people criticizing Nintendo for months now about not bringing the equivalent of Nintendogs to the Wii — that piece of software that really shows what the system can do and others can’t. I’ve also heard that Nintendo needs to bring more hardcore franchises to market so that they don’t lose their GameCube core. I don’t think either of those are that important. Nintendo is making money hand over fist no matter how loudly we complain. But I do see one glaring difference between Wii’s AAA titles and the 360 competition: Microsoft doesn’t have to make all their own AAA titles.

It’s been said that when you’re developing for a Nintendo hardware platform, your biggest rival is Nintendo. That may be true, but Nintendo needs to at least encourage them to compete.

For the uninitiated, Picross DS plays out like a blend of sudoku and minesweeper. The game is played on a grid of varying size, and each column and row has a series of numbers that denote the number of consecutive squares/spaces that are to be filled. For example, in a row of five, the numbers “3 1″ can only mean three consecutive dots followed by a single space and another dot. However, on a row of ten, it’s impossible to tell where the dots go and how many spaces are before and after each number group without some extra help.

Your extra help comes in the form of what I’ll call “bum” squares. Not only can you place dots in spaces where you know they belong, but you can also place bum squares at each point that you know they don’t. Eventually the placement of dots and bum squares will allow you to reason out the placement of more dots and bum squares until you’ve solved the puzzle. Each solved puzzle forms a picture which, if you finished in under an hour, animates. Though I have yet to encounter a puzzle that takes as long as an hour, your time is penalized by any mistakes you make in the normal scoring mode.

Picross DS comes with a variety of modes including daily play and ad hoc/wi-fi multiplayer competitions where you try to solve puzzles the fastest. You can even design your own puzzles and upload via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. In the future, new Picross puzzles should be made available via the service from Nintendo, but to date none have appeared. Believe me, I’ve been checking.

The graphics are only serviceable in Picross DS, but this clearly isn’t designed to be a visually stunning game. The music can also be a bit grating with only three tunes that you can manually switch among, but the soundtrack adds very little to this game and can be disabled altogether. I do personally enjoy the “slapping” sound of laying down dots in a row and dread the mistake squeak, though.

This game’s biggest flaw is that despite being a DS game, larger puzzles cannot be played comfortably with the stylus. Not only is the zoom system pretty unusable as it is, but even 10×10 and 5×5 grids suffer from inaccuracy in touch screen recognition. Since the game already penalizes you for mistakes, having the game make a mistake on your behalf because it thought you were touching an adjacent square gets old very quickly. No number of touch screen calibrations fixed this problem, and though another reviewer claimed to experience the same problem, he didn’t note it in his review because he thought it was just his DS. If that is the case, there may be some systemic problem with touch screen recognition because my friends and I have had the same issue. Stick with the control pad and face buttons on this game.

Where Picross really shines, however, is its ability to stimulate your reasoning skills. Though earlier puzzles always have some explicit “no option but this one” areas of the grid that make it easy to proceed, later puzzles will have you straining to find the little bit of logic you’ve overlooked that will allow you to proceed. You could always just guess and take the time penalty if you’re wrong, but guessing is never necessary to solve puzzles. In fact, if you guess when you should be using your brain, shame on you.

All in all, Picross DS is a must-have game for anyone that enjoys mind-bending puzzles in five- to thirty-minute increments. The minimalist, slick presentation makes it non-threatening to casual gamers, and the sheer number of puzzles included will keep you busy for weeks — longer if more puzzles finally begin to appear on the Nintendo WFC. But be careful, Picross is addicting!

We Liked:
tons of puzzles
inclusion of daily play
ability to share puzzles and compete online

We Didn’t Like:
shoddy touch recognition
small selection of music

OVERALL SCORE: 6 / 7
That’s right, we’re on a 7-point scale on WiiDS!

My name is Andy Bates, and I’ve been gaming since 1977, when my brother told me to ask for an Atari 2600 for Christmas. I had no idea what it was, but I trusted him, and we got our Atari. I played console games until the Crash of ’83. At the time, it really was a huge crash. I mean, why spend all this money on console games, when there were computer games available that were much more complex? I actually remember talking with a friend in 1985, and he asked me what I thought of the new Nintendo console that was coming out. My response was, “Too little, too late.

”Besides playing a few games at a friend’s house, I completely missed the NES. The only SNES game I played was Super Mario World at a friend’s place in college. I got a Genesis late in the game, and spent some time with that, but back then video games were still seen as a fringe activity. And then the PlayStation came out. After my wife rented one for my birthday one year (we had some guys over), I eventually got a PSX of my own. Finally, games were becoming more mainstream, and I ended up on the PS2 bandwagon. But at that point, I still hadn’t owned a Nintendo console.

The system that finally got me into Nintendo was the Game Boy Advance SP. At some point, I got over the stigma of playing portable games in public, and realized that there was this completely untapped system just waiting for me to try it out. I was also really fascinated with WarioWare for some reason. So I picked up the SP, and suddenly there was this huge backlog of classic Nintendo games that I wanted to try. Thanks to the SP, I played through all of the classic Super Mario Bros. games that I had never finished, from the original all the way through to Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island.

It was all downhill from there. I ended up getting a $99 GameCube with Christmas money one year, and again, since I got it late in the cycle, I had a much better selection of really good, cheaper games to choose from. By that point, I was hooked. I picked up a bunch of used games for cheap, then the Nintendo DS, and then the Wii as a birthday present.

One other thing you should know about me is that I’m a completist. Remember all those old Nintendo games that I missed? Well, I’m going back and playing them now. For example, I just finished Metroid a few weeks ago; and The Legend of Zelda a week before that. I am trying to catch up to the present day, but there are so many good games that it’s kind of slow going. Hopefully I can share my thoughts on these classic games, albeit with a perspective of playing them twenty years too late.

As new contributors join the blog, I’ll try to give a short introduction of each writer. But for now I guess I should finally introduce myself.

My name is Torrey Holbrook Walker. My first love is music, just so that’s clear. But I’ve been fascinated by interactive electronic entertainment for nearly as far as I can remember. I can recall with fondness being sent off to the arcade with a five dollar bill in-hand while my mother navigated the shopping mall. Kid Niki and Rastan were some of my most beloved babysitters.

From July 1999 until July 2001, I worked in Japan on the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme. During this time I developed conversational proficiency in Japanese, and I’ve visited Japan many times since moving back to the United States. My most recent visit was to Tokyo for the Tokyo Games Show and a much needed vacation. I should be headed back there next month.

As far as gaming goes, I am very much a fan of new experiences be they proper (“hardcore”) games or otherwise. There is a certain charm to hopping on turtles and rolling giant balls to break up the monotony of get gun, get bigger gun, kill, kill, kill. Not to say that I don’t enjoy picking up a pixellated gun every now and then.

Though I certainly don’t think Nintendo has the market cornered on good gaming experiences, I like what they’re trying to do to break down the wall between the gamer and non-gamer. That’s why I started this blog.

Good to meet you.

I now have to compose in a separate application and copy-paste entire entries. This wouldn’t be so bad if I could retrieve the exact code that I copy-pasted, but since it is mangled immediately I have to edit the original text file and copy-paste again if I make a correction.

For this reason I am heavily considering relocating this blog. I do not, however, relish the idea of trying to copy all of the old mangled entries and reformatting them so they are readable. When I’ve decided what to do on this, I’ll post an entry detailing the resolution and hopefully where I’ve moved.