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![]() ![]() Most arcade games have trained players to walk to the right – in Metroid, you can only proceed a few screens before reaching an impassable area, a tunnel which Samus is unable to squeeze into. However, the game subtly teaches you in the way that you must hunt and upgrade your powers in order to fully explore Zebes. You have an incredibly short-range bullet attack…and that’s it. These can be bred into weapons of biological war, so it’s of upmost importance that Samus is able to stop them.Īt the outset of the game, Samus is actually incredibly underequipped, despite being the last hope of the Galactic Federation. This hostile world is the home base of a group known as the Space Pirates, who have stolen samples of a mysterious (and incredibly dangerous) creature called a Metroid. The game stars Samus Aran, an intergalactic bounty hunter wearing a cybernetic suit, exploring the underground caverns of the planet Zebes. The developers didn’t know it at the time, of course, but Metroid (along with Zelda) codified many genre conventions, and its influences can be felt decades later. (It was also coincidentally released in the summer of 1986, around the same time as James Cameron’s Aliens sequel. While the open-ended adventuring spirit was similar to Shigeru Miyamoto’s Zelda, it differed in two major ways: first, it used a side-scrolling perspective, and second, it featured a science-fiction theme, heavily inspired by Ridley Scott’s 1979 movie Alien. Other team members including Hirofumi Matsuoka, a graphic designer who later went on to direct Mario Paint Hiroji Kiyotake, the artist credited with all of the original designs and Makoto Kanou, the scenario writer. Much of the design of the game is attributed to Yoshio Sakamoto, who had previously worked on Donkey Kong Jr., as well as Balloon Fight, and Wrecking Crew with Okada. One of the other most popular was Metroid, directed by Satoru Okada, who previously worked on Balloon Fight and Wrecking Crew, and later went on to helm Kid Icarus, Famicom Wars, the first Famicom Detective Club game, and Super Mario Land. Obviously Nintendo needed more than one title to sell its system, so they worked on developing a few other titles that also played to the capabilities of the system. The headlining title was The Legend of Zelda, the seminal game that combined fantasy role-playing with colorful characters and huge worlds. Early Famicom releases tended to be pretty simple arcade-type games, but the expanded storage capability and ability to save games allowed for more complex titles, similar to what could be found on home computers. In March 1986, Nintendo released the Famicom Disk System, as a way to get around of the technical limitations of ROM cartridges. ![]()
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