Let's Break Super Metroid!

DOUBLE MEAT

QUADRUPLE MEAT



...am I doing it right?

I vote we space-time beam the living hell out of your E-tank and super missiles- having your health go off the Game file select screen from file C and glitched up super missile numbers/symbols is fun!

Since I'm not entirely sure how long the first segment will take me, I might as well take the time now to elaborate on the particulars of dying against Ridley in Ceres (Vorpal nailed the jist of it).

Ridley can hit you with three different attacks:
- Tail swipes (15 dmg)
- Body attacks (5 dmg)
- Fireballs (3 dmg)

Ridley leaves the arena when your HP is equal to or less than 29 points. When your health drops below this threshold you only have enough time to take one more hit. Thus, the only way to die is to get hit by Ridley's tail twice when your health is exactly 30.

Thus, before doing that, you need to lose exactly 69 HP. To do this:
- You must get hit by 3 fireballs.
-- If you get hit by any more fireballs after that (protip: don't), then they must amount to a multiple of 5 (ignoring the initial 3)
- If you get hit by any body attacks, they must amount to a multiple of 3.
- Don't get hit by the tail if your HP is less than 45.

One last note: before the final hits, try to make sure that Ridley is traveling downwards and/or is on the bottom half of the screen, or else he'll fly off the screen too quickly for you to get hit again.


If that makes any sense to you, then congratulations! Now you too can experience the frustration of pulling off an entirely useless trick!

I was going to link to a natural route playthrough in the opening post, like maybe this one, but for strange and unknowable reason didn't.

Ha ha! You sure do suck at this game! I'm already getting schooled!

Hi ther- nuts, I've been expected.

Not quite true! If you carefully count your hits against Ridley and time your 100th hit just before you drop below 30 health, it's easy enough to get hit two more times and thus die.

hmm. I can't think of anything else interesting to add about Ceres, outside of space/time beam shenanigans.

The opening segment of the game doesn't really provide many opportunities for fun, but we're gonna try to make this as interesting as we can. Got it? Good.



Those who watched the opening video would know that Samus met her untimely demise in Ceres. Fortunately, her ship comes equipped with a save station, so she doesn't need to worry about pithy things like life and death.



If you squint hard enough, you might notice a little collision detection quirk here. That door has a platform blocking it, and yet I was able to open it with a shot from above. The reason this works is because the game checks multiple points to see what the beam is colliding with. If one of these points happens to be air, the game decides to let the shot continue to live. A neat side effect of this is that it allows one shot to hit multiple blocks.
TODO: Check with Kejardon to see if that explanation is 100% correct.


And here we see another example of this little qwirk, after the most boring ~15 second strech of the game.



This room can be kinda fun if you try to go through it doing only one jump at the beginning. To get between the rest of the platforms, you need to run off the platform you're on, and then aim striaght down. When aiming straight down, your hitbox is dramatically shorter, so you'll be able to land on the next platform. To give you a idea of how much shorter it is, I took those second two pictures on consecutive frames.



Going down...



...and I get the Morph Ball (duh). And just because I can, I walljump out of it's little area.

Also, there's a glitchy column of pixels on the right side of the screen in the second picture. Weird.



There's that collision quirk again.



The point of this picture is to show you a Cool Little Detail: the height of Samus's arm cannon varies depending on whether she's standing or running.

Oh, and that I collected those missiles (duh).



Because I feel like it, I unload my missiles on this poor little door. It's not like it's that big of a deal though, since these space pirates are more than willing to provide free refills:

Anyways, since the enemies have now awakened, I'm going to take a little detour and backtrack a couple rooms.



You are about to witness the earliest sequence break in the game (exciting!). What we're going to be doing here is getting the E-Tank in the ceiling by damage boosting off of that... uh.. swooping thing.
oh man please don't kill me for not knowing every enemy's name


Took me a couple tries, but I did it.

...except for the whole "damage boosting" part. You can't tell in that picture, but I actually got the energy tank just through standard enemy knockback because I'm just that awesome and it totally wasn't an accident.

To do an actual damage boost you need to press and hold Jump + Back two frames before or two frames after getting hit, which means there's a 4 frame window of opportunity. You'll know you've successfully done it when you see this animation and get flung back about a screen-length (the height and distance can vary dramatically):


Click for animation

I suspect this move was inspired by the much (much) more obvious damage boost bug/move in Metroid II, but don't actually have any proof for that.



Anyways, back on track now. I usually walljump up the side of this shaft, but doing so usually results in me getting pirates to the face. I still do it even though I'm hopelessly inept at it because I helps me pretend that I'm a Pro Speenrunner ("it" being the walljumping, not the sucking).
IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN!


Here we are at the Torizo. Now I know it common knowledge right now that it's "possible" to skip this fight (see here), but I doubt most people know exactly how much precision is required to do it.

To do it, you'd need to (1) grab the bombs while being as far away from them possible (within a sub-pixel or two) (which requires you to spin jump facing away from them and have the game's check to see if a walljumpable surface is behind you make you "collide" with the block), (2) hit the ground the instant after grabbing the bombs, (3) run and "arm pump"* every single frame towards the door, (4) jump to the door at the last possible frame, and (5) turn away from the door at the last possible frame to have the Walljump Check say you hit the door. Even then, success is not guaranteed, because the frame counter for the door's closing oscillates between 41 and 42 before you collect the bombs. Because of all these contingencies, even TASers thought it was impossible, despite years of trying. In fact, the only reason that they even bothered trying is because, due to timing differences, the trick was humanly possible (!) in the PAL version.

Obviously, you can see that my "attempt" there was a bit less than successful.

*"Arm pumping" is a stupid (awesome) bug in some collision check (or something) where the game ends up incrementing your position by one pixel when running and changing the direction you're aiming. Doing this every frame is only possible under TAS conditions.



As for the boss itself, there's not much to say. Aim up, unload your missiles, shoot his (?) balls to reload, avoid his swipes (or not), and roll under him as necessary.

Oh, and he bleeds blood sweat when you expose his gut (gross). And um... if you kill him fast enough you can skip his last phase where his face gets blown off and he just walks around a lot unable to spit balls (which is easier to do if you have >5 missiles).

Really he's a pretty easy boss.



Here's a little speed trick I'm sure most of you have seen but had trouble replicating. Mid-air morphing itself is pretty simple: just press down twice in mid-air. So, you'd assume that's what you'd do here. However, that's not the case. What you need to do is to press down once immediately after walljumping, which results in you immediately morphing.

In addition to impressing my friends (lol j/k) and saving like 10 seconds, this trick can be useful in stupid romhacks that received no playtesting where one can end up getting stuck in an area where one needs the bombs to bombjump but doesn't have them yet (like that's ever happened).



My reward for doing this is a skree to the spine. How wonderful.



Now feels like as good of a time as any to save. Why? Because this




For reasons I'm to lazy to elaborate on, the remainder of this episode will be a short little experimental pseudo-ludographical depiction of me going to the next save room.



(Definitely not foreshadowing anything I plan on doing later.)



I try getting early super missiles now (just cuz) but fail. It's no loss, since *SPOILERS* that's what I'm going to be doing at the beginning of the next segment. *END SPOILERS*



And now we're done for today.

See you next episode!

I counted 3 things that I didn't know before (that the pull-up jump extend could be used there, differences in shot height, and only pressing down once for midair morphs after walljumps). This LP is hereby declared a success.

Sucking is most definitely part of a speedrunner repertoire too.

Also, you can pull off those two walljumps up to the gauntlet in one go (how many attempts did that take?), but you can't do the mockball consistently? Priorities, man, priorities >_>

I learned things about Super Metroid I did not know.

Huh, I knew about the beam collision thing (it's really easy to do in that room before the first missile pack), but I never understood how or why it happened. Nifty.

Also, sign me up for the 'Can Walljump Effortlessly But Can't Mockball on Command' club.

My standards are pretty low, but man doing the gauntlet that early impressed the hell out of me.

I concur with everything here. (Except the walljumping part. I can occasionally get a walljump or two in Super Metroid, but can't do it on command unless I'm playing one of the later versions - I guess they relaxed the standards a bit.)

Also, I think that since you died in the prologue the game over message should have been something about turning this game in for store credit and getting a Miracle Piano System instead or something.

Great LP'ing! Or Great Breaking! Great Something!

I can already tell that this LP is going to be A++ would read again.

Well, I'm officially impressed!

That walljump took me about, I dunno, 10-15 tries. I made a savestate after it because I didn't want to do it again, but I didn't feel guilty because I've done the early gauntlet thing on the real hardware multiple times (for the "Fun" Club even!). <_<

And yes I suck a mockballing, especially when I'm using a keyboard.

I counted 3 things I knew for this section that I didn't see here.
Yay, I get to be the annoying spoilsport for this Let's Play!

In all seriousness, I'm enjoying this too though, so if you want me to quite down or something feel free to say.

The walljump shortcut after the bombs definitely takes knowledge of the immediate morph-after-walljump thing. I discovered that trick practicing this part and think it's basically impossible if you're trying to morph by double tapping down. Anyway, here is my method:

- First walljump should be preformed as low as possible on the lowest outcropping.

- Second walljump should be preformed as low as possible on the second outcropping, too high and you'll bump your head instead of getting into the gap.

- Once in the gap you should be slightly patient, let Samus's jump peak and start to fall. When you are just about to leave the gap walljump off the LEFT wall, then immediately do a quarter circle right motion and hold right. You should smoothly morph immediately after the walljump and squeak into the passage.

It's perfectly reasonable to be able to do this every time with a little practice.

This is the best game ever.

that video was very cool. can someone explain what i saw and why everyone else is impressed?

I just watched the gauntlet video, your trick for getting both missile tanks in one go is really nice!

And how many attempts did it take you to jump up through those trap blocks as they were reforming?

I knew about the beam collision, the damage boost, and the mid-air morph thing, but never really put them to much practical use. Nice to see how far one can take them.

The section he went through (The Gauntlet, it's called) is a very challenging section and usually only attempted much later in the game. He had to pull some nice manuevers to just get there, and then getting through on one Energy Tank is extremely tough.

Also at the end, the trick to getting both missile tanks at once.

That was actually an accident. I was trying to jump off those trap blocks before falling down, but didn't.

Here's a map of the first area, Crateria, with some unimportant stuff removed:


You start the game off in that big room with your ship (the landing site), and the planet seems deserted. You then go down that very long shaft, which was part of Tourian in the original game, and then into an area of Brinstar from the first game. You collect the Morphing Ball and Missiles there. Once you return to Crateria you discover that the Space Pirates have detected your presence on the planet. Eventually you go to Point A on the map (which I marked), which is a tunnel you couldn't enter without the morph ball. In that area you collect the bombs.

Normally after this, you'd find that your bombs can destroy a wall at Point B (there's a map station that helps with this) and then go through a diagonal corridor with an Energy Tank at the end.

However, I chose to go Point C on the map, which leads to an area often referred to as the "Craterian Gauntlet". It's a very difficult area, so most people choose to do much later in the game when they have more suits, more ways to destroy the blocks (Speed Booster, Screw Attack, Power Bombs, etc.), and a whole bucketload of energy tanks.

The exit of the Gauntlet puts you right next to the Energy Tank I mentioned earlier, and also puts you on the path to the next area, new Brinstar.

awesome. very cool.

Such a good lunch-break read. I can definitely dig it.

Given that I can't pull off the wall jump in Super Metroid under even the best circumstances, I will now roll over submissively.

*roll*

I refuse to pee myself, however.

So, Kejardon was disappointed because I forgot to mention 3 things. Being the polite man he is, he informed me of these things. I, in the interest of audience satisfaction, have decided to share you these things.



1. The game automatically saves the game for you at three points during the introduction: (1) when you enter Ceres Station, (2) when the cutscene of Ceres exploding starts, and (3) when you land on Zebes. The first is useful if you want to make/copy a save file to skip the opening cutscene. The second is useful because if, for whatever reason, you were doing a speedrun and wanted to take a break after Ceres, you wouldn't receive the however-many-second penalty of the save-loading animation that #3 would result in.

I've actually known about this for a while, so I'm a bit embarrassed that I forgot to mention it (it would have been better than that silly joke I made).



2. For the face blocks in old Brinstar, the designers decided to make them sprite objects to make it so (they could easily make) their eyes glow and faces turn. There are a couple interesting things that result from this.



First off, if you wall-jump off the blocks, they wiggle back and forth. This is a pretty standard thing that applies to most stationary objects, like (IIRC) frozen enemies and Spore Spawn's corpse, but it's worth mentioning for its silliness.


Secondly, here's something you've probably never seen/noticed:



What's going on here is that the shot is hitting the geemer and killing it (duh). Normally, since I don't have the Plasma Beam, the beam would disappear right then. However, when the beam is touching the face block it specifically tells the game engine not to delete the beam, so it continues on its merry way. Pretty cool!



3. This space pirate is silly:



Don't worry, he's not trapped. He's just firing his lazor.

Wall-clinging space pirates are programmed to jump back and forth a specific distance between walls, ignoring everything in their way (the old Tourian escape shaft is very cluttered, you see), even if said thing is a solid brick wall. This is only instance of this in the game, but it's something you see an annoying amount of in shoddy romhacks.



And here's one last thing that I noticed (and thought was pretty cool) after making this episode. See if you can figure it out!

The entire row of blocks at ground level don't appear to be respawning?