This game is awesome, guys! I'll prove it. Let's Play Super Metroid (Redesign)!

Yeah, that was a really clever touch on Drewseph's part. Say what you will about the difficulty and obtuseness of the game, but you have to admit he's great at creating just the right atmosphere for these places.

I actually was being kind of serious when I said I liked that bit...

Welcome, welcome! We're back, it's been a while, but we're back, and have I got something for you. I'm going to pick up this pen and twirl it around madly, and while I do, I present to you a mini-part of this classic Redesign LP. Given that I've pretty much absconded from metroid2002 in general and the super metroid community in particular (especially after... well, long story), it took me a while to hear about this. "A while" is of course relative, given that it was released this July. But enough people raved about it with Redesign-like vigour -- seriously, Redesign is by romhackers to be high art -- that I eventually became aware of it through a neogaf topic. It was a stroke of luck, as I don't usually read neogaf. But that doesn't matter. No, this is what matters.

With a description like that, how could I not play it? Without further adieu, I present to you

Let's Not Play: Super Metroid Eris


Brought to you by Digital Mantra, aka Dmantra, aka a dolt who got his ass banned from m2k2.


The game starts off without any exposition, without the monologue, without "The galaxy is at peace", without Ceres station entirely. You hit start and immediately you're standing over Samus's ship on Eris, which is presumably a planet. Immediately you'll notice what I think sets this hack apart from all the other hacks: the tilesets are massively altered. This isn't a rearranged Crateria like in Redesign, this simply isn't Crateria at all. Even the electric spark effect on Samus's suit when she loads has been changed. I'm not going to mince words: this hack is beautiful. The question is, can the rest of the game support it? And before anyone asks, unlike Redesign, the physics are not changed, you can walljump right off the bat and from any surface, etc.


A few rooms in, you enter this room. A gate closes behind you, but hell if I know why - you can just shoot it open. That red thing in the second shot is a Metroid, but I managed to catch it when the green shell was flickering.


The first thing you should know about Metroids is that there's always more than one of them. SURPRISE


This is the first thing that happens in the game. The ending screen is kind of neat -- the zombified pacman thing there opens and closes its mouth to the same beat that the Metroid pulsated to in the original game over screen. I've seen it far too much, however.

If we don't head towards the metroid trap, we immediately reach a branch in the path, and woe betide you if you choose the wrong one. Or if you choose the right one, but don't find the morph ball two rooms in and go look in the other path. What do I mean? Well, you quickly come to a hole in the floor, which drops you down into an underground lake. That's right... the game throws crazy interia underwater platforming at you less than two minutes into the game.


And those skullfish take out half your health with a touch.


And then there's a gauntlet of beefed-up zoomers just to spite you.


And then there's a fucking save point. This wouldn't be so bad later in the game, when you, you know, had means to fucking explore, but right now this save point is pretty much a trap, and to get back and go get the morph ball you have to scale underwater ledges allllll the way back out. Thanks for your consideration, Dmantra. Honestly, it's easier to just delete your save data and restart, since there's no intro and you haven't done anything yet anyways.

But let's enjoy what we can while we're down here. I'm going to reiterate again: this place is amazingly beautiful. It looks better than any single locale in Super (yes, I went there), aside from maybe green brinstar or the introductory parts of Maridia. It makes me want to play further.


This isn't a maze or anything -- all those things are in the foreground, and Samus passes behind them, with the exception of the turtles and what she's standing on. The turtles on the left are actually, afaik, a new sprite, and they function exactly the same as the yellow lifting platforms in original Super, complete with the silly elevator sound effect. The one on the right, though?


Thats its momma, and if you shoot a baby turtle (or even just nudge it gently with your foot), it gets pissed off and starts spinning around, like in Super. I spent like half an hour trying to interact with these turtles, and get them to do something useful, but to no avail. The morph ball isn't here.


And further on is a dead end. Once you finally give up on the turtles, you realize you have to get back out. And doing so is a chore. Underwater platforming, combined with enemies, combined with no etanks. And at the end, there's a section where you have to jump across platforms that fall if you stand on them. There is, of course, a catch. These platforms are near the water line, so if you jump too early you hit the water line, which kills your velocity and makes your jump inadequate. No, you have to let it fall for a while, then jump at exactly the right time after building up some running speed. This is harder than it might sound - the window is pretty small and I initially didn't think it was possible, as I kept missing by a half-block.

That guy who said this hack didn't need precision jumping? He's a fucking liar.

So we go down that other path I mentioned before. This room holds the morph ball, but I initially dismissed it letting you walk and run across the water because I thought Dmantra was showing off. Nope -- turns out there's invisible shootable blocks, and you shoot the water to break them, in what appears to be a second-grade understanding of water tension.


Morph ball get.

The next item is mercifully nearby. Right after this room is the giant room you saw at the top of the neogaf thread. I'll repost the picture here.


From this perspective, the exit out is obvious -- that morph ball passage on the right wall. You may be wondering how to get through it without bombs, but this hack doesn't pull Redesign-level bullshit: you can actually unmorph in the tunnel and jump, and midair morph. There's a couple other cool things in this room too. That tree in the center is in the foreground, as a nice touch to a barren, empty room. I mean, look at it... Dmantra understands visual design, at least. Also, that niche in the lower-left is filled with conveyer belts, for some odd reason. They keep pushing you back to the right. No idea what's over there.


For all of the alluring locales of this hack, it doesn't really understand how to stage an effective scene transition. Like World of Warcraft, actually. *rimshot*


As cool as this homage to Super is (eye-camera to the left of the first elevator), I wish romhacks wouldn't pay so much tribute to the damn game. You're making your own game; stop trying to recreate someone else's. This gets annoying and predictable. It doesn't help that the Spore Spawn music is playing in this area, either. You'd think that, after completely replacing the game's graphics, he could conjure up a new tune or two for the game, or get someone else to do it, but nah. You're just left feeling completely out of place for the duration. [edit] apparently he did write his own soundtrack, but was unable to get it in the game. huh.


Anyways, you go down another elevator and shoot a thing to reveal a missile pack, and so on. There's a nice improvement here: you can skip past the text box and keep playing immediately, without waiting for five seconds and without skipping the item get jingle.


Anyways, back to the Metroid Trap room. What you do here is lure the Metroid around, and then take the path in the upper-right of the room.


And so we meet our first space pirates. These are, of course, only vulnerable to missiles, of which we only have two. Not at full health right now? Well, I hope you don't mind going back and forth farming missiles to use on respawnable enemies! They sometimes drop health instead of missiles.


Eventually we find some sort of warp pad, which takes us all the way down here (note: Eris's map is said to be smaller than the original's, unlike Redesign's, which is twice the size). Anyways, we quickly enter the chozo ruins.

Along the way, there's this room. Technically it's pretty neat -- like that one dumb mechanic in Magic: The Gathering, the enemies phase in and out. If you keep going away from this room traditionally, you hit the underwater area with the turtles, in one big circular loop of obnoxiousness. I normally wouldn't mind maps like this, but the more you make me play underwater without the gravity suit the more and more I hate you. The only thing you get for going back there so far is a missile pack, hidden in an obscure but not entirely hintless manner (which I haven't gotten on this playthrough, so my max missile count is still 2). Fortunately, I was lucky and, entirely by accident, discovered that this wall was not a wall. Nope -- the only thing solid there is that one block. In one of the most idiotic, dumb, and stupid puzzle solutions I've ever seen... you just roll under it. And doing so brings you to the Chozo Mess Hall.


This counteracts all of the goodwill Dmantra bought with his design earlier in the game. This place is fucking ugly. It looks like something out of a third-rate castlevania game. And wtf did the chozos have against Dachoras?


That freize on the wall on the right of the last pic is not a wall, but you kinda expect that at this point. The next room then pulls the trick again, using the same freize. Guess it wanted to make sure you were paying attention?


Hey, it's that useless red geemer that only appears outside the wrecked ship in the original. Bet it does something this time... yep. And we get the bombs. And speaking of predictability... you know what's coming next.

And that's the game so far. We've got four items (five, if you count the one I didn't collect this time around). Wait, four, you say? I only showed you three! Where'd that extra energy tank come from!

Well, this is Super Metroid Fucking Eris, a game about atmosphere and exploration! You don't expect me to just hand you the location on a silver platter, do you? Go find it yourself, you lazy bum. Don't worry, I gave you a hint, and you can see its location if you look for it carefully.

So yeah. I'll probably play further into this on my own time, but really, Redesign still lies uncompleted and I believe that's more than enough obtuseness to satisfy you guys for a long, long while. :X I hope you enjoyed this look into the hidden society of romhackers, full of people who confuse obtuseness with challenge, and challenge with fun. Seriously, don't trust them. Ever.

Now, if you want a real successor to Super Metroid, I'd recommend Shadow of the Colossus. Yes, that Shadow of the Colossus. It's secretly a very minimalist (no red doors or artificial barriers, all of the upgrades are completely optional, high emphasis on willful exploration) Super in 3d. The only reason it seems linear is because the rest of it is so nonlinear. But most of you have played that, so why don't you guys try this awesome little gem instead? It's freeware for Windows, and it's one of the best games I played last year. And if you like that, the other two games on that page also kick tremendous amounts of ass, so you'll be set for a while.

And now I return you to your daily scheduled programming.

Nope, they were in the original game as well. You find them in a secret room in the center of Maridia with its momma, which would spin jump you up to (I think) a Missile Tank at the top of the room.

Anyway interesting stuff, this game. Nice graphics, but none of the gameplay to tie it all together,

I know about the turtles in Super. I'm fairly certain the small turtles didn't function as platforms. :P

The mother is actually different, too. Even if you trigger her and stand on her, she'll only rise a couple inches. I guess it's because that room's ceiling is pretty low. Her hitbox is still as big as ever, though. And you only have 99 energy...

Ah! Sorry, so you did say. ^^; Feel free to ignore me then.

It's good to see this back, but not so good to see that people still don't quite understand how to make a decent game.

Honestly, every area you've shown looks like a sludge of miscolored, mismatched tiles.

Are... are those Buzzy Beetles?

I've internalized that they're a reference to Koopas. And the big one is Bowser (and Gamera).

I know you like the visual design, but it all looks a little monochrome to me. Guy doesn't like too many distinct colors in one place, it seems.

And it's good to see this back.

Glad to see you back! Since our LPs` started at the same time I always felt there was an unspoken rivalry that bonded our works together. First one to rescue a princess wins?

- Eddie

I've been watching this LP for quite some time, mostly because I actually like Redesign (shock, awe) so reading the comments here gives me some sort of perverse satisfaction ("Hey! That's almost how I felt when I first played."). For some reason this latest update convinced to me to join and make a few comments. I'll try to be terse (:fake-edit: Whoopsie!).

Great. Now I feel like I should know you (I don't), and you've made me feel guilty already (m2k2er here). :S

That's because compared 95% of the hacks out there, it is. That, and it the thing that convinced most SM hackers to become SM hackers in the first place, so naturally fetishization of it followed suit (thus also leading to my first point).

Actually, to be technical, he said that failure in platforming would never result in instant death. :3

While Nintendo's SNES music format is surprisingly well-documented, nobody has gotten around to finishing a user-friendly/flexible editor for it.

I actually thought it was more "fiendishly clever" than "stupid", mostly on account of the fact that the solution is literally given away 6 blocks to the right. I spent who-knows-how-many-hours traveling around that accursed loop and searching every nook and cranny for some hint of progress. When I finally solved that "puzzle" I had to pick my jaw up from off the floor, mostly on account of how obvious-seeming it was in retrospect.

Eye of the beholder, dude. Some people enjoy this kind of stuff (and no, it's more like being a victim of spousal abuse than child molestation (as implied earlier in this thread (*is not entirely sure what the metaphor means*))), though I'll admit I'm not as into that kind of stuff as some of the other people (the "popular" hack Cliffhanger (Cliffhanger) made me ragequit).

Oh, and if by some chance you're willing to trust me, I recommend the hack Stardust. I pretty much think of it as the antithesis to Eris in most respects, such as difficulty, linearity, and (sadly) overall polish/aesthetic beauty. Still pretty decent fun (that's the most common word (possibly) in its reviews!). (Just keep in mind the lack of save points (save your state!).)

(Sadly, the new fancy-schmancy open-beta Web 2.0 forum software over there doesn't allow guests to download attachments. I could set up a mirror if you're really that interested.)

You may know me as Maur. If not, it's no big deal, I was never really a major figure in the community to begin with. Once #supermetroid died (waaaay back, before m2k2 existed and while deskjockey_ was still deskjockey_), I kinda started drifting away, and prime 2 sealed the deal. I didn't pull an ekard if that's what you were thinking. But man... this really was a while ago.

So, talking about romhacks:

I kinda feel that they're screwed no matter what they do. It comes with the audience. I mean, why do we all praise Super itself? There's a checklist of stuff. Nonlinearity, atmosphere, graphics, music, the practice of easing the player into sequence breaking... that last one's the biggie. Easing the player into sequence breaking, huh?

That's impossible with a romhack. Everybody who plays hacks is self-selected to be among the best of the best. We can walljump on command, know how to spark, all that stuff. We can't be eased into sequence breaking (hereafter known as seqbing, because I find it funny), because we will naturally do it first thing. This by itself eliminates a large amount of replay value from the game. And most people who make hacks know this on some level, so they don't even bother to make seqbing possible, or if it is it's really really hard. Look at Redesign for an example. Sure, you could infinite bomb jump up to the Varia... but where would Hell's Run be? Playing through the game normally is a good thing the first time around; you don't want to seqb until later playthroughs. But that's hard for us to conceive of, and even harder to enforce.

It's basically damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you do include a world like SM, the only people who play your hack won't really notice it, since they can't be mindwiped and have walljumping, etc removed from their brain. If you make it more linear, like Eris (apparently?), you lose a large part of what made SM great to begin with. Sure, you could try modifying this formula a bit -- Drewseph recognized this to some extent, and so he changed the physics and everything. He failed, though, because even with the changed physics, the game is still linear and still plays in exactly the same way, just with a different value for jump height. And let's not even get into the difficulty issues caused by catering to us elites. Different strokes for different folks, I know, but shit like that underwater save point in Eris and a bunch of stuff in Redesign is just fake difficulty, consistent of dick moves that really shouldn't be there. It's far too easy to resort to those, just because of the player base, and apparently almost nobody wants to make easy hacks. Which is sad, because as far as I'm concerned excessive difficulty hinders exploration aspects of the game.

And hell, look at your post.

I've never played it, and I'm almost certainly misconstruing what you said, but...

This all leads to my own personal conclusion that, if I ever make a game, even if it is intended to be Super Metroid 2 (which it wouldn't be), it absolutely cannot be a romhack. It would just be antithetical to what I was trying to do. To really start off fresh, you'd need an entirely new batch of players and an entirely new set of physics and moves and stuff for the protagonist, and romhacks can't (or at least don't -- Kejardon's Fishing Line is the lone exception that I know of, and even it looks fiendishly hard to use) provide either.

Which is why I will reiterate what I said earlier. Guys, go fucking play Knytt.

Here's a nice encapsulation of the romhack community, from the Stardust thread just linked to (emphasis mine):

"The difficulty of this hack is kinda on the low end, so if you want more of a challenge let me know, I might make a harder version."

"Tricks required to beat the game: Mid-air Morph, Double Bomb Jump, Infinite Single Walljumping"

For me, the double bomb-jump is harder than wall-jumping up a single surface (which is trivial).

I agree with this.

I've only played through Super Metroid once, and the first time I tried to single-wall-jump I did so successfully. The timing for multiple bomb jumps eluded me, though.

The double bomb jump is orders of magnitude harder. Wall jumping is rather easy, and you get lots of practice in naturally because it's fun. Doing the single (slow) bomb jump is not really that hard either, once you happen upon the correct timing and do it continuously for a few minuets to cement it in your mind. But that double one is incredibly subtle.

Ah. I remember you, though I'll admit that I never noticed your absence. >_>

Despite the open-ended nature of Eris's game world, the acquisition order of the main items (ignoring the Spazer) is completely linear until you collect the Power Bombs (the 8th key item). Coincidentally, that's when the hack becomes much better and the difficulty takes a pseudo-Kid Icarus style nosedive. (Stardust, on the other hand, makes almost no effort to enforce a sequence, probably because the creator is a lazy (?) pothead (true story).)

While this is (mostly) true, it's not the entire problem. Designing a "proper" challenge is a challenge in itself, since people tend to underestimate the difficulty of their work (because creators already know the "solutions" and are often quite skilled). This problem is especially egregious when combined with play-testers who use save states and an audience that eats it up anyway.

Believe it or not, Redesign was (at one point in its development) significantly harder. It wasn't until he talked to an employee at Retro (as mentioned earlier in the thread), who mentioned to him the point I just reiterated, that he decided to tone the difficult down to it's current tough though largely manageable state (and no, the hack's Prime-esque aspects are a result of him actually liking Prime, not that discussion with some Retro employee).

Kejardon's a pretty interesting guy. He pretty much knows everything about Super Metroid and how it works under-the-hood (proof: he discovered this), and has been working on a hack (called "Insanity") for quite some time. He's been keeping it under-wraps, but judging from some teasers and comments he's made, we're (hopefully) in for a treat (if he ever finishes it).

Anyways, the reason ROM hacks typically lack major gameplay modifications is because most/many "ROM hackers" aren't really hackers at all. They're just (allegedly) normal people enthralled by the prospect of their favorite game having a level editor. Most don't know a lick of assembly (or any programming language), so they aren't really able to make any non-trivial modifications to the game without help.

Anyways, I generally agree with your sentiment of ROM hacks, or at least ROM-hacks-as-games.

I second this recommendation. You guys have no excuse for not playing this.

If by Knytt you mean its sequel Knytt Stories, then yes, play it. It's got incredibly tight platformin' physics, actual gameplay, and the easiest level editor in the universe.

(In a few days I should have something more important to say about this.)

Too tight, really. I frequently get killed by the fact that the character has no inertia at all.


Knytt offers an enormous and somber world to explore, sprinkled with curious details, like Ico or Shadow of the Colossus. I don't think one should really begrudge it this.

All platformin' physics is unique. You must get used to the character before you can let muscle memory take over.

Almost every platforming character ever has some kind of inertia, though, and it's just more intuitive that they would.

She's got as much inertia as Mega Man, though perhaps it seems less because she is six pixels wide and proportionally much faster.

Just spent a couple of days reading the entirety of the thread and I have enjoyed it immensely. Keep up the good work, Vorpal. The Rom Hack community is endlessly fascinating and I love seeing games pushed to their breaking points.

Next, do a single segment speedrun of Rebuild.

I'm actively working on this again. Have been for the past couple days. I restarted the whole game because I wanted to switch emulators... and because there was something I didn't do last time. I was too much of a wimp. But I'm going to man up, you see.

stay tuned.