Metroid: The Most Influential Shooter Ever
Since its Japanese launch in 1986, the Metroid franchise has distanced itself from genre conventions by offering a different type of gaming experienc
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Nintendo Zone: How to Improve Metroid, Kirby and Donkey Kong Country
Now that the Wii has matured and its eventual successor – the presumably titled Wii 2 – is no more than two years away, the current platform is g
This Metroid Glitch Is Scarier than Ridley
Have you been enjoying Metroid: Other M? Our own Matt Green found it to be quite good, but we're guessing he never ran into the game killing bug found in the above video. The glitch appears if players beat the area boss for the third time and then save the game before running through the door. In such a scenario the door turns red and players are unable to proceed. The only solution is to either reload a previous save or, if you don't have multiple save slots, restart the game from the beginning. Yikes. More past the break.
Metroid: Other M Review
When Samus Aran picks up a distress call from a Galactic Federation space facility known as the Bottle Ship, she investigates and becomes involved with a conspiracy that ties together 1994’s Super Metroid and 2002’s Metroid Fusion with just a dash of 1991’s Return of Samus in the Nintendo / Team Ninja co-production, Metroid: Other M. Reinventing itself yet again, the Metroid franchise leaves its Prime first-person exploration phase behind to become an intriguing 2D/3D hybrid with both third-person and first-person elements. It’s all wrapped up with a divisive storyline that either brings closure to some of the events of Samus’s life or takes an unexpected left-turn into bizarre territory depending on one’s perspective. Are the aspects of Other M that inflame the angry fans that much of a dealbreaker?  Is Other M worthy of the Metroid lineage and, most importantly, is it fun to play?
Super Metroid - Open-ended Linearity
The original Metroid has a defining flaw that would later be rectified with its successor, Super Metroid. The open-ended environments are a composition of arbitrarily posted tile sets with little sense of direction. To put it frankly, the desolate planet Zebes is a maze. As a result, there's a certain sense of dread you often feel when playing Metroid, as it's very easy to lead yourself astray in the oxygen-less solitude and find yourself boxed in against an insurmountable tangle of similarly-looking tiles. Super Metroid avoids the confusion by providing sufficient scaffolding to lead players along without arousing their suspicion that the experience Super Metroid offers is a well managed, staged affair. In this way, it fools the player into discovering things for themselves, when in fact our exploration is preordained, and we love it all the more for it.
The Metroid Other M TV Spot will Blow Your Mind Hole
Nintendo doesn't often play "keeping up with the Joneses." All of the industry will move ahead in one direction and Nintendo says to that, "well, we're not gonna do that. We're gonna have a sandwich and play around with waggle controls." Which makes the television commercial for Metroid: Other M so different for the company. The TV spot looks as if Nintendo watched the high-budget Halo commercials and thought they could outdo Microsoft at their own game. Whether or not they succeeded will depend on personal taste, but the music alone has won us over. Get the video after the break.
Nintendo\'s Official Metroid Retrospective
 In preparation for Metroid: Other M, which will be released on August 31st in North America, Nintendo sent over a retrospective video.  The six minute long clip features Samus, spoken by the voice actor for Other M, giving a full continuity recap of the events leading up to the newest Metroid. A large emphasis for Other M has been placed on the value of its story and the presence it has in the title.  That's certainly not a misrepresentation on Nintendo's part.  Based on the opening hour of the game, which I personally had a chance to play through during my last trip to New York, this project has been steeped and stewed in its own story.  You can read that preview of the game here. The result is a deeper, more fleshed out campaign that opens itself up for even more discussion. Hit the break for more...
Super Metroid - Establishing the Doctrine
 Establishing the Doctrine The original Metroid may not be as sharp as Super Metroid, but it does have one trump over its SNES successor, being its initial assertion of exploration-driven gameplay. A year prior to Metroid's release, Super Mario Bros. had taught players that walking to the right-hand side of the screen would advance the game. Metroid, in a master stroke of studio-wide realization and subversion, did the exact opposite: it told players to go left. If the player walked left, instead of the assumed right, at the game's onset, they would stumble upon Metroid's first power-up, the morph-ball, thereby allowing the player to bypass a stumbling block a few screens to the right. As with Super Mario Bros. and that first goomba, the player cannot progress until they have understood the fundamental principles of the game. In one fell swoop, Metroid succinctly communicated its doctrine of subversive exploration.Â
Metroid: Other M Action Trailer Shows More Gameplay, Still No Story
   Metroid: Other M brings Samus back to the Wii, and a new trailer released on GameTrailers TV last week shows off more gameplay for the title. Samus's weapons, such as the Grapple and Wave Beams, are re-introduced, along with the return of the Speed Boost, last seen in Super Metroid. The game continues to look great, but there's only problem - anyone else find it weird that, with the title only two weeks away from release, that Nintendo hasn't released practically any story information on what is supposed to be the most story-driven Metroid to date?
Super Metroid – The Mental Map
 Game designers create rules, a system of challenges and a gateway into that challenge (tutorial). Players, through their participation of the game world, mutually agree on the terms set by the designers. Therefore, there is something of a student and mentor relationship at work between player and designer. (Mr. Miyamoto recently commented on this phenomena a little himself). The foundation of this relationship is that of the relevant skills required to defeat the game: the teacher wishes to teach these skills, the student wishes to learn them. In which case Metroid is a test in observation and a test in the application of tools (power-ups). Metroid's challenges, its tests, if you will, are built into its environment in the form of realizing suspicious chunks of area and then devising a way on how to clear that area to make progress to the next planetary subsection. Sometimes you'll have the means to make headway, and other times you'll need to mentally bookmark or flag down the spot to return afterwards. On a wider level though, Metroid, keeping in fashion with its exploration roots, also challenges the player in a third test of skill: the skill of mapping out one's exploration.Â
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John Doe