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Top 1: Super Metroid
Posted by Swifto
Posted on 20 November, 2012 at 11:49PM ↑ 2 ↓ 0
Top 1: Super Metroid

Love and attention. A team that legitimately cares about the work as an end result. Driven by passion and a vision to make something extraordinairy.

While I would say that there needs to be more games with devteams like this, I'm realistic enough to admit that that's a hard bill to fill. Granted, indie games fill a nice niche where passion can prevail over the lack of polish that a company with lots of money can offer. Of course, getting an indie game to the point of being made and sold is tricky enough these days. But imagine how it was. Before the internet made information cheaper and easier, well, it was near-impossible to make a game and have it achieve any measure of success unless you dealt with a publisher and had a team of people to work under you. And yet, games made by large teams of people can't really achieve that level of devotion from everyone on the team; everyone has different idea's and opinions, and the more people you try to inspire, the less likely you're going to succeed at getting everyone to follow your vision.

Something special happened, however, in the Super Metroid development cycle. I direct you to the webseries All Your History for more of the exacts. It took a lot to get Super Metroid off the ground. The fact I can't ignore: Super Metroid got made, and it got made brilliantly.

In fact, it's for this game that I have developed an odd habit. If it's a piece of work that I truly enjoy and love, I will refrain from partaking in it for a long time, to give myself more time to forget the details about it. That way, when I inevitably go back to it, I'm experiencing it as close to new as I can.

To that end, I have not played Super Metroid in nearly eight years. I can barely remember anything about Maridia, or the ways that Ridley moved and dodged, the paths between all the areas... It's all a hidden little blur in my head.

And that's exactly how I want it. Whenever I believe is the time to return to it, it shall be amazing.

 

In conclusion, the SNES is a retro masterpiece. Even to my bias, I can't deny that it won the 16-bit era. It simply had too many good games made for it. While I may enjoy some of the individual games on other consoles more, as a whole... Well, the SNES has a titan of a game library to offer. You just can't stand up to that.

 


Tune in Sunday for the start of a new Top Ten.

Comments
Billy
21 November, 2012 at 4:21PM ↑ 0 ↓ 0

This game is woefully underplayed by the masses, in my opinion. Yes it's pretty popular among gamers (especially SNES fans), but even still, more people should play this damn game. I don't beat games very often, but for Super Metroid I had to. I had to see it through, no matter what. I did it... with a horrible time, haha. This was on a homebrew emulator on my wii, but I had to own it legitimately. Though, I got the Japanese version because it was cheaper. (This doesn't matter, since the ROMs within the carts are the exact same, and it's painfully easy to run Jap games on an American SNES)

I'd have to say yes, I agree that this is the best SNES game.

Swifto
21 November, 2012 at 5:03PM ↑ 0 ↓ 0

It's all opinion, of course. Many consider Chrono Trigger the best SNES game of all time. Others Yoshi's Island.

They all have their merits; Super Metroid is just my personal pick.


Glad you agree! =D

Lazlo Falconi
21 November, 2012 at 8:28PM ↑ 0 ↓ 0

Billy and I had this conversation a while ago, about Super Metroid versus Chrono Trigger. I had to tip it to Chrono Trigger just for the length of a single play-through, but Super Metroid is an intolerably close second. A masterfully crafted game.


And like Billy, the first time I beat it, my time was a whopping ten hours. But that's because I wanted to explore every little crevasse, to miss nothing. My fastest time was about 1:45, but I still take my time with this game, enjoying each nuance, the different areas, the sub-sections of Maridia, Brinstar, and even Crateria!

Super Metroid is just god awful good, and Billy, I'm more than a little disappointed with you that you didn't play it until after it came out on VC.

Swifto
21 November, 2012 at 8:39PM ↑ 0 ↓ 0

We all have youthful regrets, Laz.

He's learned since.

Billy
21 November, 2012 at 10:01PM ↑ 0 ↓ 0

I /technically/ played it when I was 9, but that hardly counts since I didn't really get very far. I decided to re-visit it years later.

Swifto
22 November, 2012 at 01:18AM ↑ 0 ↓ 0

Yeah, that’d be like me saying I played Doom when I was 12. I don't count that.

Gilgamesh
22 November, 2012 at 08:11AM ↑ 0 ↓ 0

I liked Super Metroid but it never really 'wowed' me as a kid. Years later I was shit this game is great. Similar to Vagrant Story in that I found it dull and uninteresting when I first played it and when I went back years later I was like 'wtf young me' and it's arguably my favourite game of all time.

It's sad that we've come from masterpieces like Super Metroid to atrocities like Other M. Friggin Castlevania does Metroid better than Metroid is doing Metroid these days.
Is a Metroid with minimal storytelling and no hand-holding too much to ask?

Swifto
22 November, 2012 at 6:43PM ↑ 0 ↓ 0

In this day and age?

Lazlo Falconi
22 November, 2012 at 8:44PM ↑ 0 ↓ 0

The Other M was a pretty good movie, I thought it was a great addition to the Metroid series.

Davrinsky sky
11 July, 2013 at 07:11AM ↑ 0 ↓ 0

the moment i started playing Super Metroid on my snes emulator, i couldn't stop. the same case was with chrono trigger, however. two very different games. due to the quick reloads i can do by a press of a button,i would accidentally make a remix of the songs of the levels in metroid. i would continuously reload at the press of a button after screwing up the same way at the same attempt in the exact same amount of time. i managed to record an area where this happened. i named the remix, samus jazz. very short capture, but a capture of my great fun of the game i had. its true that that game was the peak of the snes system and it battles the title with chrono.

GamersTavern
8 May, 2014 at 03:03AM ↑ 0 ↓ 0

Super Metroid is indeed one of the greatest games of all time and definitely one of the best on the SNES. The weird thing, though, is that it's not even one of the top ten best selling SNES games! That is a great injustice if I ever saw one.

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