7. Super Metroid
Takes the ideas introduced by
Metroid and refines them to a sharp edge. Arguably more influential
than the original game.
Published by Nintendo
Developed by Nintendo R&D 1
Designed by Gunpei Yokoi, Yoshio
Sakamoto and Makoto Kanoh
Platform: Super Famicom, SNES
Length: Medium
Of Note:
Super Metroid is widely regarded
as the best in the series, and one of the best games ever made. The
game is loaded with secrets of both the normal, find-the-powerup
variety, and of cleverer types. Even the bosses have secrets:
Phantoon is not overwhelmingly difficult to beat if normal missiles
are used, but hit it with a powerful super missile and it goes nuts,
flailing around the room invincible for some time. Draygon, the boss
of the Maridia area, has an amazing secret way to beat it: high up in
the room is an open electric relay with a stream of electricity
bridging the gap. Jump up and grab it with the Grapple Beam. Samus
will take some damage while attached, but when Draygon grabs her
he'll take far more, and die very rapidly!
Also of note, the game plays out, in
large part, as a labor of love for fans of the original game. One of
the first areas the player explores is the opening Brinstar areas of
Metroid, which haven't been made over to reflect the more
powerful system; while the rest of Zebes has received a tremendous
graphical makeover, the areas that are supposed to represent the
original game have boxy, low-color tiles similar to those on the NES.
The game's final sequences play out a lot like they do on the NES,
too....
The Game:
Super Metroid is a game many
people rave over, but few do a good job of explaining what it is
about it that's cool. It's like they play it, and they know.
But what is it that fascinates them? I've yet to see someone
convincingly put it into words. Well, here goes.
Super Metroid, if not the very
first, was among the first open world games to offer a mapping
facility to the player. Before this it was mostly a feature used by
particular forward-thinking RPGs like Might & Magic.
Automaps in exploration games are common now, and every
Metroid-inspired Castlevania provides one. Super Metroid's
shows the outlines of the rooms, the locations of save rooms and
refills, and even provides dots showing the locations of items. But
it doesn't show everything. Not coincidentally, the displayed
borders of the rooms matches up with the visible walls of that area,
often coinciding with scrolling boundries. If a secret passage
extends through the wall to a hidden chamber in a corner of the room,
the screen often won't scroll into the chamber until the passage has
been found, and only once the room has been entered will it appear on
the map.
The developers also learned important
lessons, concerning frustrating secret areas and stuck players, from
the original game. Now there are many types of special block other
than just destroyable. There are shot blocks, missile blocks, super
missile blocks, bomb blocks, power bomb blocks and speed booster
blocks.
In the hands of lesser designers each
block type would simply be equivalent to a lock, with its proper
means of destruction being its key, but they saw the shallowness of
that approach. Instead, "low" level types, like missile
blocks and bomb blocks, can also be destroyed by their high-powered
counterparts, and many passages (especially speed booster ones) are
hidden in ways that make them difficult to be broken with their
matching weapon. This idea would be improved upon in Metroid Zero
Mission to great effect. Special block types are normally not
visible, but using bombs, super bombs or the X-Ray Scope can reveal
them.
Finally, there's the matter of
graphics. Open world games place special stress on their graphics,
since each area must seem unique if the player isn't to get them
confused. The sameness of the passages in some areas of the original
Metroid is probably one of its greatest flaws, although it is likely
an unavoidable one considering the time it was made. And a lot of
the fun in any adventure is the mere thrill of seeing new things,
especially if they were difficult to reach or feel like they aren't
supposed to be there. Urban explorers get the same kick out of
abandoned buildings and sewer systems. Super Metroid's graphics are
more than adequate for this task.
But the space between bosses and
powerups never feels like empty graphics. Lots of ordinary rooms are
still quite challenging, many areas contain secrets to find,
interesting one-shot enemies are scattered around, sub-bosses like
the infamous Crocomire are interesting both to fight and to look at,
and the maze itself is an interesting enough puzzle. When people
play a game like this and complain about "getting lost,"
they may consider that a flaw in the design instead of a puzzle
intended to challenge them. Is it really good design or bad? The
answer lies, perhaps, in the expectations the game sets up in the
player's mind.
What does it do well?
Providing a large, varied, interesting
world, riddled with secret areas and tricky puzzles: these things are
the essence of an exploration game, and while it didn't create the
genre, Super Metroid provided necessary refinements that brought it
forward. The Metroid Prime games, although taking place in three
dimensions instead of two, all arguably take more after Super
Metroid, with its purposeful rooms and caverns, boss reward areas,
and point-to-point travel, than the far-less-linear Metroid.
Design Lessons:
Exploration games live or die, not by
their boss fights or powerups, but by how fun the game makes the mere
act of navigating corridors and seeing the sights. If you don't
think such things are entertaining then you may not want to develop
one.
The design of an automap can make or
break these games. If the player can see everything he needs to know
without going there and looking, then a large portion of the
incentive for exploration is gone, even if the player has to go there
to obtain them. Open world games work best, by far, when the world
isn't just space between powerups and bosses. I can't emphasize this
enough: make exploring the world interesting for its own sake!
But how to do that? Well, I can't tell
you everything.
Links:
Wikipedia
GameFAQs
Speed Demos Archive
8. Castlevania: Symphony of the
Night
The beginning of a massive revision
of the series, and still possibly the best Castlevania game we've
seen.
Developed by Konami
(Find designer and developer)
Platform: Playstation, Xbox 360 (Xbox
Live Arcade), PSP (Rondo of Blood)
Length: Medium
Of Note:
Symphony of the Night didn't just
introduce the Metroid paradigm to Castlevania games, complete with
automap and horizon-expanding powerups, it also introduced the series
tradition of having a "fake" ending, found after beating an
apparent final boss, and a "true" one, obtained by
performing some trick before beating it, which reveals a second
portion of the game.
The GBA and DS Castlevanias make
varying amounts of hay over this feature, but it was Symphony, way
back on the original Playstation, that took it to extremes, offering
an entire second castle to explore.
The Game:
Symphony of the Night is still regarded
by many as the high-point of the series. Its clever sprite-work,
intricate map design, imaginative abilities, and use-once puzzles and
tricks are also found in the DS games, and are still excellent, but
their impact is less since we've seen their like before by now. And
for some reason, Symphony seems to have a super-abundance of
these things.
The atmosphere is also unsurpassed in
this installment. The games are called Castlevania after all,
and ever since the first game, with its progress-plotting map between
levels, the series has striven to make the castle itself seem like an
actual place instead of just a sequence of rooms. The object of the
game is not to defeat Dracula, who is just the head of the beast; it
is to defeat the castle. That's why the ending always shows
it crumbling! When the series made the transition to free-roaming
exploration that essential fact became much more prominent. The
castle seems more like a real place when you can travel through its
corridors at will instead of being forced through in sequence.
In recent installments the developers
seem to have tired of designing gothic corridors and staircases over
and over, and have attempted livening it up with, for example, the
painting worlds in Portrait of Ruin. This could be seen as a
mistake. Exploring an European city, a circus, or a rustic mansion
may have been fit into the story by the scenario writer, but they
suffer from discarding the game's strong sense of place. The result
was that, while the castle still has a few puzzles and secrets to
find, it seems like a greatly reduced world with the emphasis placed
on the paintings.
The castle in Symphony of the Night,
on the other hand, is among the most interesting of the whole series.
It's laid out believably, its crumbling sections hide an interesting
array of objects to use, and there's also the interesting sense that
the player is returning to it. His character is Alucard, the
half-vampire son of Dracula himself, who not only has lived here
before but also fought against it in an earlier game. Perhaps that
makes it fitting that this is the first game to permit its free
travel: Alucard has come home.
What does it do well?
As far as game secrets goes, the game's
second castle ranks high up there, fully the size of the whole first
part of the game! The decision to make it just like the first but
upside-down is a masterstroke. It's economical in that
art assets for the second half didn't need to be created, nor does it
take up any more CD space as the flipped tiles can be made with a
simple hardware effect. Yet it's still interesting to explore
because, as with many open world games, the first trip through tends
to be cursory. And since "down," the one direction with
any special meaning in a side-scroller due to gravity, is flipped,
exploring the areas provides interesting new challenges, as do the
different monsters in the inverted castle.
Design Lessons:
Action games are about fighting, and
the maps are a setting for the fighting to happen. Exploration games
are about place, with the fighting being what you do there.
Let us meditate on this wisdom now... ommmm....
Links:
Wikipedia
Speed Demos Archive
Fansite Castlevania Dungeon's page on
the game