Metroid's 25th Anniversary

It's Everybody's Favorite Bounty Hunter

      
        I'm a little bit late on this, but whatever. This month (yesterday to be exact) marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the release of Metroid. Since Nintendo is too busy playing favorites and devoting all their celebrating to The Legend of Zelda, we fans have to pick up the slack. Now, I haven't had the opportunity to play all of the Metroid games, and I've only finished two of them, but I still feel like these games are important enough to me to type something up about them.  Here are some of the things that stick out to me the most in this legendary series.

        To start this off, let me tell you about the worst thing you could possibly run into in these games. In Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, Samus encounters these small drones called rezbits that have gone rouge due to the caretakers either having been killed or gone into stasis. This results in these things attacking anything that moves. Rezbits are probably the hardest thing to kill in Echoes because of its super shield that blocks almost everything and its super powerful attacks. Whenever it's done blasting you with is plasma beam or pummeling you with balls of energy, it morphs into a state that cannot be locked onto forcing the player to manually aim at this pest (which is an unnecessary challenge on the Gamecube). After that, it launches a virus that kills Samus's suit and you're left staring at static and blindly dodging attacks while you wait for the system to reboot. The best way to get rid of these guys is to stun them with the Dark Beam and put a few missiles into them, but it's a lot harder than you think. 

It doesn't look evil.

        You know what the most terrifying thing I've run into in the Metroid games is? The SA-X from Metroid Fusion. The SA-X is form of X Parasite that has all of the abilities as Samus. It seems like a fair fight except in Metriod Fusion, Samus can't fight it until she finds all of her suit upgrades. So whenever you just happen to come across a SA-X what do you do? Option A: Hide. Option B: Run! That's pretty much it. Later on in the game Samus runs out of Option A and has to resort to getting out as fast as possible which lead to some incredibly tense moments as the SA-X just happens to be really fast. Eventually you get to fight this demon spawn and defeat it, which is a glorious feeling after having to run from it the entire game. 

No pupils? No soul!

        

        The greatest thing about every Metroid game is the atmosphere and mystery that surrounds every world in every one of the games. In the Prime trilogy, there are always these vast worlds whose indigenous peoples have vanished somehow and it is always fascinating to look into a room and scan the objects and read about how the scenery came into being there, or to catch a glimpse at part of what drove the previous people away. I was reminded of this when I first explored the ancient ruins and forts in Oblivion or read old logs from a computer terminal in Fallout 3. It's and outstanding way to create a world that has its own feel and history. All the other Metroid games use this element and it is part of what makes the games so great, but I believe the Prime trilogy does it the best.

What lies ahead?

        Well, there you go. These are some of my favorite things about Metroid. Hopefully, we will get twenty-five more years of awesome Metroid games