Metroid: Other M

[BardicKnowledge]

My problem with Other M isn't the story they were telling, but the way they went about it.

Overall, the _idea_ of the plot is good: Samus finds her old commander and agrees to follow some orders for the safety of the other soldiers, the MB bait and switch is good, even the Ridley thing is good.

However, they are so campy in the way they go about it that it all falls flat. I don't think Bleck is arguing that the _ideas_ are bad, as evidenced by his statement that you could do an effective Ridley child-flashback on the SNES. But it could have been accomplished in a believable way instead of how awkward some of it came across.

Similarly, the only weapons that should have been restricted are Screw Attack and Power Bombs (as these two legitimately endanger allies closeby). None of the movement stuff. Gamers are used to not having Space Jump, Speed Booster, and Grapple Beam at the start of the games...it doesn't have to be rationalized for us. Those two being authorized? Sure. Don't tell me I can't run fast or grapple because some dude says so though -- just have us find those upgrades like we're used to.

[Bleck]

I wasn't speaking directly to your previous point as much as I was to the idea that people think that Super Metroid actually had some semblance of a plot

nobody had this idea

in fact the past two pages were centered on my dissatisfaction with the fact that Super Metroid didn't really have a plot, because if that was Sakamoto's plan all along, there is no reason that he could not have executed it right then and there instead of waiting until now

this is stuff you would have known had you maybe read the posts

I don't think Bleck is arguing that the _ideas_ are bad, as evidenced by his statement that you could do an effective Ridley child-flashback on the SNES. But it could have been accomplished in a believable way instead of how awkward some of it came across.

Exactly.

[Bigfoot]

Speaking of power ups, I just want to know why we had to get authorized to use the Varia/Gravity suit. Also, the Gravity suit is supposed to look different than the Varia. At least the color, anyway.

[EC2151]

What they should have done is in the quarantine they would have said

"Samus it looks like using the hyper beam short circuited all your equipment; we'll be working on modifying your upgrades now" or something.

Then on the Bottle Ship "Samus we'll be trying to send you the data for your upgrades now that we've got them finalized (or one by one); seek out the necessary terminals."

Gamers would have been "yeah that's kinda silly and a rip off of Fusion but I'm ok with it."

And while Super Metroid doesn't have a 'plot', it does a GREAT job of environmental narrative. It DOES tell a story effectively without a single word need spoken.

[The Mutericator]

I disagree with you on two points, but at least we can agree on gameplay!

Honestly, I can't see you budging your opinion on the character development aspect. Moving someone from a long-standing non-character to being a fully three dimensional and fully fledged character is bound to be a rough transition, even for the best of authors and... blah. I know what's really at play here.

Samus Aran is one of the video game heroines that is hardest to find hentai of. Because guys respect her, because she's one of them, or so they think. Raised on the 80s and 90s of having no emotion = awesome and badass, a la terminator and Rambo, only showing the faintest signs of budging when a child or something else helpless comes into play, there's a lot going on there I think. Most people have this image of her and preconceived notions of what it takes to be cool.

Sadly, a lack of emotion isn't cool. It's boring, it's stupid, and it's incredibly scary. Ask anyone that has been through real emotional trauma and hardship - the easier thing to do is switch off completely, it takes real courage to deal with that emotion, take the hits, the freezeups, and the emotional beatings, and continue to trek on.

To me, having her go into a full fledged panic attack and then come out of it rather than go fetal, that endears me to her even more. As someone that's had panic attacks, I know what that's like. Maybe it's something people on the outside can't understand?

And regarding the George Lucas thing.... wow.... That's insulting. To insinuate that I might enjoy the prequel trilogies outside of the spectacle that is episode 3 hurts... I'm just going to leave it at "not the same situation, at all."

*Edit* And YES YOU CAN justify taking 20 years to define something. It's the success of the original metroid and metroid 2, and listening to the fans and feedback and hearing that they want to be a space bounty hunter (wtf is that, even? Has she ever actually gotten a bounty? Does she bring in criminals? Who pays her?) They wanted another game that was built entirely around gameplay and was a throwback to the NES days. And they got it. Super metroid was awesome, but I refuse to go over to the opinion that not having story and characterization injected there makes it "too late" for the series to have them at all. That's a complete pile of bullshit. I can't think of any parallels to that situation because long standing things ALWAYS have drastic changes from beginning to end.

But this ISN'T REAL LIFE. It's a GAME, and I want to PLAY it. Not sit through watching my main character have panic attacks over some enemy I've faced 5 goddamn times.

Look, I don't CARE what's realistic. The point is, this is a drag on the GAME that I came to play, and the cutscenes ruin the experience. Stop trying to justify a retarded cutscene made by some idiot who seems to think we give a damn what Samus thinks. She's there to let us explore a planet, not emote.

It's like trying to justify those terrible laughing scenes in Final Fantasy X, but worse because JRPG's are SUPPOSED to have heavy stories. Platformers, Metroidvanias, and action games aren't.

[Ferret]

Games like Metroid can have story, but it shouldn't interrupt the gameplay for ten minutes at a time, and I also have to agree that someone who's faced the same nemesis multiple times over the course of her career should not under any stretch of the imagination be freezing up at the sight of him. It'd be like Sonic having a panic attack every time the Egg Carrier showed up in the sky or Dr. Robotnik came at him with some kind of machine.

No, Metroid can have story, but it should be coincidental to the player actions and in my opinion (nothing humble about it) be revealed partially through elements of the environment as you're passing through it.

I also have to disagree with Master Yoshi on the characterization they've given Samus. I picture her more as a hardened veteran who is used to isolation and dealing with threats with all the tools in her arsenal at her discretion, and also as the sort of being to point her gun at anyone who tries to interdict the terms of her mission.

NOT as someone who stands by and lets a bunch of soldiers run up on her objective and point their machine guns at her--Samus doesn't take that shit. If you point your gun at her you'd better mean to pull the trigger immediately.

[Overflow]

Games like Metroid can have story, but it shouldn't interrupt the gameplay for ten minutes at a time, and I also have to agree that someone who's faced the same nemesis multiple times over the course of her career should not under any stretch of the imagination be freezing up at the sight of him. It'd be like Sonic having a panic attack every time the Egg Carrier showed up in the sky or Dr. Robotnik came at him with some kind of machine.

Try telling that to the veterans who STILL can't stand the sight or smell of a BBQ, years after they watched someone burn to death in the war.

And if Dr. Robotnik killed Sonic's family in front of him while he was still a child and kept coming back even after the PLANET he was on blew up, I think Sonic would have a panic attack.

Actually:

Oh, and regarding the Ridley scene. Ridley was never an insect. He brought her to the brink of death EVERY time (unless you are uber leet, but work with me here.) If I killed your family in front of you, then threatened to kill you, and no amount of gas, bullets, melting, explosions, dismemberment, acid, atomization, or whatever gruesome death you could think of stopped me from trying to kill you too, do you think that would be cool? You'd be okay to just say "Yup, I'll just squash you." Oh wait, YOU'VE DONE THAT 5 OTHER TIMES!!! Or however many ridley deaths there have been. If the one thing that haunts your nightmares just does NOT stay down don't you think that having a freezeup moment would be appropriate?

Add onto the fact that you are a nigh-invicible badass that destroys ordinary monsters during a liesurely stroll, who sees a near-useless survival stun gun as the ticket out of a completely hostile and hopeless situation. If you have the power to destroy planets and end civilizations, don't you think that having one goddamn dragon lizard never stop coming back to kill you no matter what you do would fuck you up hardcore?

The only person who would be able to handle that kind of stress without showing any weakness is a psychopath - aka someone without emotion. And that is a horrible protagonist.

Yeah, she has a moment of weakness due to that, but she gets over it and kicks ass! She doesn't freeze up and need someone to rescue her and make the monsters go away while she cries. She bucks up, gets over her fear, and does what has to be done. That's real courage and awesomess right there.

Yeah.

On top of all that, I think there was some hidden brilliance in the whole Ridley thing in Other M, that I hadn't noticed before someone here pointed it out: Ridley had the opportunity to kill Samus when she was a child, but didn't, because she wasn't a threat. And once she grew up, you'd better believe that he wished he had killed her.

In the same way, when Samus saw Little Birdie she didn't kill it; it was no threat. To realize that THAT was Ridley all along, and that history just repeated itself, I think would freak anyone out.

[The Author]

That's the thing: this game broke the isolation, and threw the main character in a nostalgia spiral. Once you keep going back to your past, some of it seeps back into you. Heck, Samus voluntarily shut down some of her upgrades just because she was back with an old friend. That the foe that she'd least expect to make a come back (Keep in mind, the corpse was left in the depth of an exploding planet with the remnants of the organisation that usually revived him), at a moment when she was doubting herself for thinking Anthony would shoot her, and that is after some unsettling finds about the federation, all of this combined into a mind fuck.

How likely was she to run into Ridley there? How likely that the federation's bio weapons would include Ridley?

That whole game was a mindfuck really. Samus might have been ready to face Ridley in other missions (she would have prepared herself before the two Zebes missions as it was obvious she would face him then). This time, he came out of nowhere, and while little birdy and scorpion-chameleon may have phoned it in a bit for us if we paid attention, we players are not the same as the characters.

Also, at this point I am curious as to how you would present the plot other than the cutscenes? This game was plot intensive, but it wasn't really a flaw to have a plot. If they had simply done a "run around get upgrades in this station you're all alone in for some reason" game, I would have been disappointed. Metroid can be a lot more than just another soulless platformer. Super Metroid was good, but that's about 17 years ago, videogames as a medium have evolved beyond that. Yes they could have done cutscenes in the SNES era, but they didn't. It just wasn't done.

(Someone pointed Ninja Gaiden, but Metroid has never been "level based" and including the cutscenes in a non-linear game could have been tricky.)

For this game they could have remade Super Metroid, but then there would be other complaints. So yeah, ultimately, you have to take in the good with the bad and see how the game stands on its own. And the story is solid, even if some cutscenes are too long, but the exposition was needed and for fuck's sake don't make us scan the whole god damn universe like the fucking primes, so that we can get a semblance of plot. (Dunno if you can tell, but I hated scanning, I hated the fact that you needed to scan every inch to get 100% and I hated the fact that if you failed to scan a boss you were screwed (such as scanning every phase of an annoying boss in Prime 2)).

The gameplay in Other M was very much metroid, the plot made sense (although none of you seem to get annoyed at the presence of the Nightmare, which was much much more annoying to me than Samus freezing), and it was a gorgeous game.

What else do you want? Fellatio during gameplay?

[Overflow]

I agree with the above post.

And on another note:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/2015-Metroid-Other-M

We all knew it was coming.

[BardicKnowledge]

I agree with the above post.

And on another note:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/2015-Metroid-Other-M

We all knew it was coming.

Hahaha yes! Can't watch it from the office but will check when I get home for sure.

[The Author]

Suffice to say that if this game has been on the PS2, Yahtzee would have loved it. He's getting on my nerves at this point, his blatant hatred for the Wii is not that funny.

[Bleck]

It'd be like Sonic having a panic attack every time the Egg Carrier showed up in the sky or Dr. Robotnik came at him with some kind of machine.

I am imagining this and it is hilarious

Try telling that to the veterans who STILL can't stand the sight or smell of a BBQ, years after they watched someone burn to death in the war.

this has

nothing

to do with anything

[Calpis]

Your argument, Bleck, about how Sakamoto should have done all this from the get-go isn't realistic. Just because you say that it was 'FULLY POSSIBLE' to implement a couple frames doesn't mean that it's true.

How many games at the time of Super Metroid's development had cutscenes like you were describing? Not many, and the ones that did (Ninja Gaiden, for example) used it as a selling point on their list of game features, because to be able to make a cinematic like that was extra work because (I imagine) full-on scripting engines weren't normally built into games. At least, not to the extent that they are now. Several frames such as the ones you were describing would have been more work than it was worth, and games weren't made or thought of the same way 20 years ago than they are now. Cutscenes weren't the norm because of team size, budget, and time limitations. I know from experience that integrating a dynamic scripting engine for a game, while keeping the main engine together is a daunting task. And that doesn't even go into the challenges of creating that scene with ROM size, color pallete, and RAM limitations in mind.

However, this is (again) conjecture, but I imagine that dev tools now include built in classes that aid in the development of scripted events. Not to mention that telling the game to load up a video file, as opposed to using the script engine to act out a scene, is much easier to implement.

[Toadofsky]

Subjective.

I'll just go in agreement that that's solely my opinion. I've said enough about this game, it's not very good to me, at all. All this thread has boiled into is of ones who somehow think the story was good in this game (granted, it had SOME good ELEMENTS), and others who think it wasn't necessary.

I've said my peace on it. I'm just waiting for this thread to get locked up if it keeps spiraling like I think it will.

[Bleck]

How many games at the time of Super Metroid's development had cutscenes like you were describing? Not many, and the ones that did (Ninja Gaiden, for example) used it as a selling point on their list of game features, because to be able to make a cinematic like that was extra work because (I imagine) full-on scripting engines weren't normally built into games.

have

have you ever played super metroid

[Calpis]

I do Super Metroid speed runs at least once a month. So yes. SM doesn't include what you were describing. There's a technical difference between the kind of stuff that was in SM and your description.

[EC2151]

I actually really enjoyed the inclusion of nightmare.

Remember, when you fight it in Fusion, the thing is all beaten to hell and half-broken.

And of course, at the end of the game, his corpse (as well as Ridley's) are missing from the Bottle Ship.

[The Phalanx]

Samus Aran is one of the video game heroines that is hardest to find hentai of.

What.

What.

Dude, I can go on rule34, gelbooru/danbooru, fucking GOOGLE, and find several dozens worth of pictures and manga of exactly that.

[EC2151]

Yeah unfortunately some folks just don't share that respectful love.

Which in ways is understandable when Team Ninja gives Sammy such a fine ass.

[KyleJCrb]

It would seem Team Ninja based their model of Samus on the REIQ version.

Not that I can really blame them.

[The Mutericator]

Suffice to say that if this game has been on the PS2, Yahtzee would have loved it. He's getting on my nerves at this point, his blatant hatred for the Wii is not that funny.

Too bad that never came up. There was NO Wii bashing here, none. He never once made mention of console inferiority in the video, only how terrible the game is (hint: it would have been terrible on any console, except maybe the Nunchuck issue because that never would have been an option).

From now on when people want to learn what I think of Other M, I'm just going to post a link to this video, because Yahtzee pretty well sums up everything I hate about it.

('Cept maybe the Team Ninja blaming, since, you know, most of that shit wasn't their fault.)

[Schwaltzvald]

What.

What.

Dude, I can go on rule34, gelbooru/danbooru, fucking GOOGLE, and find several dozens worth of pictures and manga of exactly that.

There's a pretty good one of her going through a "ganguro" phase and everything that entails it. Some nice text dialogue to go with the image as well.

But since I can't post that I'll show something kid friendly...

[The Author]

Too bad that never came up. There was NO Wii bashing here, none. He never once made mention of console inferiority in the video, only how terrible the game is (hint: it would have been terrible on any console, except maybe the Nunchuck issue because that never would have been an option).

From now on when people want to learn what I think of Other M, I'm just going to post a link to this video, because Yahtzee pretty well sums up everything I hate about it.

('Cept maybe the Team Ninja blaming, since, you know, most of that shit wasn't their fault.)

I've watched every one of his videos, and his negative bias towards the Wii is obvious. For one thing, he never reviews any game for it with positive comments at all. Many reviews have a "well it blew up in my face but it looked nice" comment. Nintendo games never get any such slack. Every game on the Wii is the worse ever, and when he can't attack the game, he attacks the Series (such as mario games).

[RDX]

you gotta be kidding me. have you only watched wii game reviews? yahtzee hates everything, that's the whole point.

[The Author]

you gotta be kidding me. have you only watched wii game reviews? yahtzee hates everything, that's the whole point.

Obviously you can't understand sentences, as my post outlines how many videos I've watched and the extent of my criticism.