A Maze of Murderscapes: Metroid II | Hacker News Reader

A Maze of Murderscapes: Metroid II

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148 pointsblackhole35 comments

OT: This is a throwaway comment in a caption near the end:

> Samus’ underwear are a reference to what Ellen Ripley wears at the end of Alien, but Alien had a reason for it.

A little OT, but I believe Alien and Aliens may be the only popular movies we'll ever get in which the heroine whose gender isn't treated as anything more than a matter of fact. In both movies, she has nearly zero amount of dialogue relating to romantic interest, and acts and is treated as just someone, not specifically a woman, on the crew...which makes sense given that the character was originally written for a man. Even her climactic victories arise organically from her character background, not in a cartoonish let's-see-women-kick-some-ass, as with the Bride in the Kill Bill series...Early on in Aliens, she is shown proficiently operating a Power Loader because of her past work experience, which foreshadows the final confrontation...in fact, it's funny that Ripley is sometimes referred to as a kickass gunslinger, when it is her inept use of flamethrowers and grenades that inadvertently lead to the final fight.

Anyway, this is just a long way of saying that Alien and Aliens are still not only two of the best action/sci-fi movies out there, but perhaps the only times in a major movie in which the woman is so asexual (the closest comparison I can think of is Marge Gunderson in Fargo)...So when that she does appear in her underwear at the end of both movies...it feels logical (she's getting into the cyrochamber), and not as a contrived way to capitalize off the sexiness of the actress. I guess it was "cool" that Samus was revealed to be a woman at the end, but the race to beat the game to see more of her underwear was an unnecessary bit of game design, IMO.

Sure, if you ignore the mother/daughter relationship between Ripley and Newt in Aliens, and the clearly-hinted-at-but-never-really-acted-upon romantic connection with Colonel Hicks.

But for Alien, I would agree.

Minor point, Hicks is a private in Aliens.

My understanding was that Ripley was originally written as male. From IMDB's trivia page:

"All of the names of the main characters were changed multiple times by Walter Hill and David Giler during revisions of the original script by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett. The script by O'Bannon and Shusett also had a clause indicating that all of the characters are "unisex", meaning they could be cast with male or female actors; consequently, all of the characters are only referred to by their last name (Dallas, Kane, Ripley, Ash, Lambert, Parker, and Brett), and the few gender-specific pronouns (he/she) were corrected after casting. However, Shusett and O'Bannon never thought of casting Ripley as a female character."

The comment you're replying to already mentioned this.

>In both movies, she has nearly zero amount of dialogue relating to romantic interest, and acts and is treated as just someone, not specifically a woman, on the crew...which makes sense given that the character was originally written for a man.

I'll add 'commenting to HN' to the list of things I'm not allowed to do until the first coffee has managed to saturate my brain... goes to stare at wall.

The fact that all the characters were written as unisex is interesting, so thanks for that. :)

having an all male crew do not make it impervious to romantic interest.

I think it is unfair to say that Aliens ignores the gender of the main protagonist. Rather, it makes great use of it. Ripley assumes a maternal role with Newt, the little girl survivor, which is something foreshadowed by the scene at the beginning when she learns that her daughter died while she was in stasis. Unfortunately, this scene was cut from the original theatrical release of the film but it is preserved in the special edition. They say Sigourney Weaver was furious that the scene was cut, and rightfully so, as it frames her character's relationship with Newt.

Yeah you can actually take it further and see Aliens as a struggle between two mothers, Ripley and the queen alien, fighting over the child Newt.

It's also interesting that the strongest characters in the movie are women. Ripley is the strongest civilian, Newt the strongest colonist (the only survivor actually), Vazquez the strongest marine (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYkxCzBszOQ), and the queen alien is the strongest xenomorph.

> Imagine a game where Samus’ goal is less about killing and more about exploration. She befriends the fauna and they help one another. Regardless of the designers’ intent, Metroid II ends on a promising note that implies murder mazes aren’t the future of videogames. Regrettably, the bulk of the game is still a maze where Samus does her murderscaping.

You know, this sentence made me realize that the game Waking Mars is essentially Metroid without the murder. Quite the opposite in fact: you are bringing an ecosystem back to life.

http://www.tigerstylegames.com/wakingmars/

Good point.

As an aside, Waking Mars is one of few games[1] that I actually enjoyed playing on mobile. It works well with touch and has a nice atmosphere to it that makes exploration fun.

[1] Tower defence games are the only others I sometimes play on mobile.

This is a beautiful piece about a wonderful, wonderful game. As much as I love Super Metroid (which, despite her criticisms, I think is superior in gameplay and puzzle-platforming), she is spot-on about the ham-fisting of the story.

We should all write like this about video games from our past that made us feel something special.

> Samus’ motives in keeping the last metroid alive are unclear: are they purely utilitarian, or has she had a change of heart? The game’s rules, possibly mirroring Samus’ wishes, don’t allow for the metroid baby to be killed—bullets seem to barely miss or pass through the metroid. Of course, killing the metroid would doom Samus to a slow death deep underground, but this is not immediately apparent.

I didn't ever think about that until just now!

Ditto. One of her complaints is about the doors in Super Metroid, and I can understand it. Thinking back, I think they may have been going for 'someone's already been here' (which is done masterfully in Uru). But it's so relentless, that it never sets in. Eventually you just gotta blame the goofy space pirates. (In fact, I think this is lampshaded in Metroid Double Prime where the pirate logs make note of how inconvenient the door mechanisms are.)

But especially in the two Primes, it feels contrived. I absolutely adored the two games, but there's a feeling the whole thing is a setup for the character. Too many special circumstances in the ice or rock that somehow awaited Samus showing up at just the right time with the right weapon. The earlier games don't have that, I think, and I can see how Super Metroid starts the trend.

I've long suspected that Super Metroid is my favorite--and I think this logic applies for many other video game series--because it's not only the first one that I played, but the first one that I beat. I find myself nodding along to every criticism of the game, but there is just something special about that first play through. That incredible sense of simultaneous delight, fear, wonder, confusion, and suspense is still a really vivid memory for me two decades later.

Believe it or not, I have never played any of the Primes.

If you have a Wii u, all three are on sale for $10 in the EStore. They're great games, though I can't say the wiimote control scheme holds up.

I don't own a Wii U and I don't unfortunately have any plans to get one. That sale is popping up all over the Internet though, so I guess this is the first time it's been offered on the Wii U as a bundle?

Metroid Prime Trilogy had a limited run and this is the first time it's been offered digitally. It's also one of the first three Wii games released on the Wii U that don't require you to go into Wii Mode first to play. (basically, booting up a virtual Wii inside of which you launch your game)

http://www.polygon.com/2015/1/29/7946129/metroid-prime-trilo...

It's less fun with the wiimote that with the original GCN controller IMO.

Totally understood. I feel that way about the first Prime: I'm slightly embarrassed to say it was the first Metroid game I really played (the original Metroid was just too much for little kid me). But I played it to full completion; it's possibly one of the first things I ever really finished in my life up to that point. I played MP at a friend's house, a couple hours at a time, utterly losing myself in the graphical beauty of the game (dude you can see her gun hand's gesture in X-ray mode!) and the calm exploration music. It was soothing, and I appreciated it a lot. The friend was an older disabled gentleman who kept his home open for the neighborhood kids to have a safe place to hang out; I knew him from church and wasn't a part of any real social group, but he thought I might enjoy it. And so I rode my bike over and played and left in the cool evening. Often he'd be tidying up his Animal Crossing dailies before or after.

I wish I was as eloquent as the OP in describing the experience, since I would love to have that feeling again. Oh well.

The circumstances of a good game well played can burn in and amplify the experience. So I consider myself lucky, since quite few games feel that much deeper given the state of my life while playing them. I can see and agree with all sorts of flaws in the games, but they'll remain special simply because at the time, they were.

> I can see and agree with all sorts of flaws in the games, but they'll remain special simply because at the time, they were.

I don't really have much to add to that, except that this is a really succinct way of describing, I think, what you, the author, and I are trying to say.

I do wonder if the doors—at least at first—were more supposed to be metaphor than prop; given that you have to blast them open, perhaps they were just an indication of passibility to the player, where Samus would just see rubble or rock walls or rust-frozen mechanisms needed to be blast-cleaned, etc. One visual symbol standing in for many scenarios.

They're a necessity.

The original Metroid needed them for expensive loading transitions between areas, as palettes and the scroll buffer were swapped out. Interestingly, they also serve that purpose in Prime... If you've ever shot a door and had it change color to show it unlatched but refuse to open for several seconds, that's the console stalling on loading the area behind the door.

This almost makes Metroid II seem as good as Link's Awakening: The story that asks the player to destroy a whole world despite almost every character in the game telling you how terrible that would be for them. And why? Simply because the game mechanics reward you for it. Kill everything in the name of adventure...

I've beat Link's Awakening several times, and the ending "cinematic" always brought a tear to my eye.

RandomCode (dead comment): yeah, me too. I just lose interest in games so easily any more, and with so many other priorities fighting for my time, game playing seems needlessly wasteful. I just can't enjoy it unless it's a social event with a bunch of people, which you see less and less after 30. But I do remember spending hours obsessed with games like Metroid, and love the nostalgia posts like this evoke.

Well probably 90% of games are just brainless mass entertainment productions and it's quite pointless playing them anyways. But a few games are true works of arts and playing them, just like going through an insightful book/movie, gives you a lot. This might be the most convincing reason if I were to keep playing certain games.

> Metroids are a constantly exploited species that are incapable of interplanetary travel, but they’re frequently treated within the Metroid series as some sort of galactic threat. This is bullshit.

I disagree. Metroids are presented as ready-made bundles of destruction, whom an enemy send across the interplanetary gulf to a target planet.

The risk is not their agency, but their use as weapons. Their lack of spaceflight is a bonus to those who might exploit them, making it easier to use them against only the desired targets.

This mentions the killing aspects of games multiple times, and does make me wonder if we can make more games that aren't about overt violence.

I know a lot exist, but it feels like if a game has some "story-ness" to it (so not a God game, but something with a narrative), and it has more than a minimum of mechanics (unlike puzzle/adventure games) , the mechanics end up having to be about violence. Maybe I'm wanting to come to this conclusion

Well, after all most games are commercial projects using which you have to feed a lot of people(investors, programmers, designers, composers etc.). Therefore you cannot expect them to present really serious and deep stories, in the way authors are able to do personally in literature. Therefore trying to interpret too much into the story/taking them too seriously mostly won't get you anywhere. There might be occasional strokes of excellence but in general storywriters for games were just rushing to meet deadlines. In this case, bringing back the last Meteor could be a touching story, however for the sake of commercial production they couldn't really produce a coherent narrative for it across all Meteor series games, and in the end Samus just ended up being a self-conflicting and basically brainless and senseless character. Yeah, games played at certain stages might bring deep nostalgia, but those most likely come from personal experiences instead of the stories themselves.

By the way, quite a remarkable story in terms of personal experience.

I'm about to buy a Gameboy Pocket just due to this post. http://www.developingandstuff.com/2015/02/lets-play-some-gam...

Honestly this is great. I just played through Super Metroid and I felt so strongly about how we need a new Metroid that is 2D and has the same aesthetic. There is no comparison to how clean and slick and original that game feels.

Try the ROM hacks. Redesign (hard), Golden Age (fun) and Phazon (cool art) are all great.

Very good article.

Having played the Metroid games, but not II, reading this explained a lot about the exact inspiration for REDDER (http://auntiepixelante.com/?p=540).

This one[1] in the same vein is pretty amazing, too.

[1]: http://www.kongregate.com/games/CosmicMaher/after-years-in-d...

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