Metroid's music is some of the best ever in a video game. The opening credits music was running through my head as I was rehearsing Verdi's Requiem last week! Ridley's lair music is especially good, at times resembling Sibelius' Tapiola. Freaky as hell. The only problem with it is that there isn't enough of it. The loops are short by today's standards, and there are but a few tracks. But one cannot blame it for raising the bar so little.
Oh yeah - and the play is really good too. It was rare that a dodge or shot is impossible, but is often difficult (so skill makes a difference). After a short linear phase in which one finds the basic adventuring equipment, one gains a great deal of freedom, much like in The Legend of Zelda. There is a lot of territory for which there is no good reason to ever go there except for your being totally lost. It is not hard to get totally lost in the depths of Norfair, or Ridley's lair, or especially Kraid's lair.
If you are just beginning, there are a few things you will need to do before you find this massive freedom. Here is a beginning walkthrough. This is just a list of directions - the early part of the game where you can't do much of anything is the only potentially boring part, and this helps you get through it with a sense of purpose rather than blind frustration.
- Get the maru-mari, aka morphing ball. Go left about one screen. It's the glowing ball sitting on the pedestal.
- Get some missiles , five of which are needed to open red doors. Go right until you can't go right any longer. At this point, you will be in a blue vertical passage. Go up until you come to a door heading right. Take it, passing through an airlock kind of thing, and enter a golden vertical passage. Head down. Near the bottom, there is a door. Take it, heading right. After some time you will find three floating pedestals, and the middle one has a missile tank containing five missile capacity on top. Be careful not to fall into the sand as you pick up the missiles! Go back the way you came. At the airlock kind of thing, you have some options.
- At this point you can grab a useful but not necessary item. I'll leave finding it as an exercise for the reader.
- Get bombs, which can attack enemies on the ground and open up many more secret passages. To get them, go back to the airlock kind of thing. Go right all the way (through a corridor of blue bubbles with sand), then up this second golden vertical passage until you find another door, then left. Once again, you will need 5 missiles to open this door.
- Get freeze beam. Proceeding back along the path you took to get here, there are two short passages. Both have a block in the floor which can be bombed. If you bomb the the first one you come to returning from the bomb room, you will open up the passage to the freeze beam. DO NOT bomb the other one, it is a trap. Note that to get out of the freeze beam area you will need to shoot the block you bombed to get in, then jump up and be at the apex of your jump just as the block rematerializes. Try different jumping rhythms if it doesn't work immediately.
Now you are ready to go just about anywhere!
General tips:
- You enter a spinning jump (later converted into screw attack) when you jump while running. This spinning jump has faster in-air motion, but you can't stop moving laterally. To open up your jump, shoot. You will stand up and be able to stabilize. This is very important for jumping accurately above sand, especially where you pick up the first missiles. It is VERY important if you have screw attack and want to land on a frozen enemy (as you often will).
- Note that even if you have screw attack, it loses its power once you are below the height at which you started.
- Enemies which rapidly respawn from a specific location (from 'bug pots', as I call them) will not respawn if its predecessor left a powerup which is still onscreen. So, you can silence a 'bug pot' for a while by killing it and NOT picking up the missiles or energy. And of course you can just freeze them. Also, this means if you're camping a bug pot for powerups, make sure not to kill the big above the pot, or it'll spawn into you when you pick up the powerup. Ouch.
- Each room can either scroll vertically or horizontally - never both. Horizontally scrolling rooms NEVER have vertical exits. Also, the only horizontal exits from vertically scrolling passages are doors. This will greatly ease your treasure hunt.
- If you enter a short passage room with doors on either side of the screen, and a floor and ceiling - essentially, a short simple corridor - be VERY suspicious. There are very few such rooms that are as simple as they look (the airlock is one, and there is one each in Norfair and Ridley's lair. I can't think of any others).
- Metroids give energy and missiles in very large quantity. They are the fastest way to get back to full heath and armament - if you can avoid getting eaten.
- If you pass through a door, any metroid sucking on you will be peeled off. Aside from that, the only way to bust free is bombs, and I still don't know how to do that reliably.
This game is a classic. The controls leave obvious glaring gaps, its graphics and effects are laughable by today's standards, and its story is similarly pretty silly. But seventeen years later, it is still capable of entertaining, and even capturing new fans: my daughter, too little to play it herself, had a lot of fun navigating me. And I had a lot of fun trying to survive Kraid's lair without the freeze beam - something I wouldn't normally try!
A turn-based game based on Metroid, Meteoid, appears in the Kingdom of Loathing.