Friday, July 4, 2014

Super Metroid emulation and inspiration



I felt a sudden urge to play Super Metroid two nights ago. All the pre-requisites were there: I was in a hotel room (on a business trip), had my personal laptop with me (running Ubuntu 12.04), internet access and I even had a Xbox 360 pad in my bag.


Which emulator to pick? ZSNES? Snes9x? After a quick search and a few unsuccessful attempts, I found this post on Reddit and managed to run Snes9x. (Note: There's an unofficial PPA for it, as I found out later) The game itself was quickly found at coolrom.com and I was good to go.
Update: After reading a bit more about emulators and accuracy, I wanted to mention another emulator as well: Higan (formerly known as "BSNES")

Super Metroid is really an incredible game. It came out 20 years ago and has held up incredibly well to this day. The level design and gameplay is simply incredible.
Most emulators can give the game a fresh, modern look through high-quality-pixel-scaling (hq4x), which I think looks quite nice.
The community around SM is still very active, as one can see through various speed-running videos on YouTube.

Here are a few articles on Gamasutra about Super Metroid:
- The invisible hand of Super Metroid
- Why Super Metroid's Hacking Community is Still Going Strong
- Super Metroid and The Exclusion of Control Mastery (I noticed there was a comment below the article by Thomas Happ, who's currently working on a game called Axiom Verge, which looks amazing so far)

I also looked into the other two 2D-Metroid games which were relased after Super: Fusion and Zero Mission. I definitely want to play those as well. I actually bought them used from GameStop a few years ago but never got around to sit down and devote time for them. I'm looking forward to running them through an emulator on a nice big screen. :)
VBA-M seems to be a good GBA emulator (it's cross-platform, unofficial PPA for Ubuntu here, found here).

I learned that there's a fan-project called "AM2R / Metroid 2 Remake" which has a demo out.
Here's a trailer:


2 comments:

  1. Thanks for another informative site. Where else could I get that type of information written in such a perfect method? I’ve a challenge that I am simply now working on, and I have been on the look out for such information.

    Harold Burton

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  2. This is mostly a bunch of chicken soup lists. Done based on facebook browsing. And not based on who actually played this games back in those days. Note: how they establish limiting rules on the Sega console games list reviews, meanwhile there's no such limit for Nintendo console games list reviews. Opinions are always subjective. But there is a lot of own foot shooting, on these lists.
    Still... Back in the day, I wouldn't sit and play any 16 bit graphics RPGs, nor boring platformers. That's why I've chosen to own an SMS rather then an NES. And later got bored of the N64 that I've bought later on. To make this listing better, you dudes should try understand the importance of a certain console or game, for the moment in witch they were played back in the days.
    Kelly Hubbard



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