Retro Reviews from Memory
Welcome to a new segment where I review my favorite childhood games from memory, go back and play the game. Then revise my opinion because, let’s face it, some of those games from the 80’s and 90’s just don’t hold up. The Score above is provisional. I’ll be back (probably, maybe, like… solid 25% chance)* after I play the game again and write a new review and link it to this post.
Enough of the preamble… on with the review!
I once earned $1000 playing this game. True story.
I played this game so much in high school that I could 100% it in under 3 hours and rescue all the little creatures. I mentioned this to my dorm buddy and he didn’t believe it. So next trip home I gathered up my snes and game. He brought a TV into my dorm room and word spread that I was doing something “impossible”. I’m not sure who started the betting pool or how they decided my cut, because I was too locked into the game. I didn’t even realize they were betting for real until I finished in 2hrs, 59 min 23 sec. Not my best time (pretty sure I had gotten under 2:50:00 at one point), but it earned me some food money so I didn’t complain. I was getting pretty tired of ramen that came in those 100 for $1 deals they had at the campus grocery store.
Too bad streaming didn’t exist back then, or that my reflexes weren’t slower today. I don’t even think I can get the timing of the bomb jump right and perfect bomb jump execution is required to get the best speed run time. Or at least it was back then. I’ve never watched any speed runs since youtube became a thing.
Other notable highlights:
The audio in the intro – “The last metroid is in captivity. The galaxy is at peace.” – was the best voice sound on any snes cart. Half of our friend group thought it was a waste of cartridge memory and the other half loved it. The argument against it was eventually proven invalid since the game was so packed full of new gadgets, interesting traversal methods, and certain environments that eventually no one even cared that the audio ate up a big part of the games memory.
This was the first Metroid game I played that I felt there was a clear “intended” path vs wandering aimlessly into areas you weren’t ready for. I never played the gameboy version, to which this was a direct sequel, so it may not have been the first in the series, but it was a welcome change from Metroid for the NES.
Given the previous, it was also the first game where discovering “sequence breaking” alternate paths became a fun pastime. Even my mom would suggest ideas as she watched me play.
Speaking of my mom, she found one of the best speedrun tricks in the game. Use super missiles (or maybe just normal missiles) on the nodes in the Meridia Boss room and they break open to emit sparks. If you have enough health, you can use the grappling beam to hook into one of them and electrocute the boss when it picks you up. To this my day it’s one of my favorite boss battles because it’s a well executed easter egg and my mom found it.
Combining the super bombs with various missiles and other upgrades was a great addition to the game. It was incredibly well balanced, making you feel OP when you needed them but without becoming a go-to “cheese” maneuver due to the number of resources it consumed.
Disclaimer(s)
*We should probably keep in mind that, when I was a kid, we didn’t have much money for games. Where others may have experienced the “rent before you buy” phenomena… that wasn’t really a thing in our house. I saved up babysitting money for an entire summer to buy the SNES. If we were doing well, I might get a single game for Christmas or my birthday, but they were almost always used from the swap meet or new from the discount bin. We didn’t have gamestop or many used game store options at the time. In any case, a LOT of my historical game memories are based on a rental window period that had to align with money, time (I had school, sports, occasionally a girlfriend, and a few part time jobs to juggle with my gaming habit), and whether my save file still existed when i rented the game a second time (assuming it was even available). Some games I didn’t play in their entirety until I got to college and had a tiny bit more money and a teensy bit fewer obligations. Which is to say, these reviews are patchwork at best. But let me know in the comments if you want me to replay any of these games and do a revised opinion review!
