Metroid

For the start of such a popular series, it might be difficult to see what the appeal was to the original Metroid on the NES. Compared to later games in the series, it’s a massive technical step backwards, to the point where Samus cannot even aim downwards, much less diagonally. This game lacks a map, most of the weapon upgrades that were found later in the series, and features a difficulty level so punishing that it might cause some players to quit before they manage to finish what can actually be a rather short game if you know where you’re going.

Knowing where you’re going is a huge problem, by the way. Unless you want to look up a map online and maybe print it out, you’re going to spend an awful lot of time aimlessly wandering through a bunch of rooms that all look identical to each other. The game gives you absolutely no indication of where to go or what you have to do next. Making things worse, sometimes the only way to make progress is to test every surface of a room to see if there’s an invisible passageway ready to open up when you drop a bomb next to it. Admittedly, later games in the series used this same trick, but they were much better at adding variety to the underground caverns and subtly pointing you in whatever direction your next goal was.

Eventually you might notice that all of the environments and many of the enemies are really just palate-swaps of each other. Sure, Norfair is supposed to be a volcanic area filled with deadly orange-colored water that is supposed to be lava, but Brinstar has the exact same lava-colored water that does damage and Norfair lacks any other feature to distinguish itself other than differently-colored walls. Usually areas have an enemy that crawls along walls and ceilings, one that endlessly emerges from a hive, and one somewhat stronger enemy that swoops down at you from the ceiling. Your reward for plowing through all of this normally comes in the form of more missiles to make reloading less of a pain, or one of the extremely rare energy tanks that are scattered around the planet.

With all of the complaining about technical limitations of the NES and whatnot, Metroid at least feels somewhat like later games in the series. If you know where you’re going and are ready to cope with the higher difficulty level that results partially from the strange limits on Samus’ attacks and partially from the severely weakened state that you begin the game in, you might have a fun time playing through it. Metroid is really more of a curiosity at this point. The idea of a fully-formed side-scrolling world isn’t new at all these days, and the gameplay is so dated that it can get boring after a few hours. Still, five bucks is a fair enough entry point, so this makes a good cheap way to kill an afternoon or an evening.