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

As much as the pipe creatures are doing damage to me that they really shouldn't be, I love subversions like this. You thought you had these guys all figured out, eh? Now they're working in formation! They're intelligent! Right now they're satisfied with controlling this room, but before long, it'll be the world. I suggest we nuke the planet from orbit as a countermeasure.


Continuing to the right, there is a power bomb block wall. And... we can get around it!? I found this entirely by accident. Awesome. I wonder what phat loot awaits us.


Another grapple beam pit of death. Let's try crossing it just to be sure.


Yeah, uh, not happening.


We're gradually being shunted down this route. After passing through a maze of twisty morph ball passages, all alike, we end up here, at a save point. Since Drewseph seems to be really sparse with save points so far, I wonder what's up ahead.


Oh god, this.

This part isn't too bad. It looks hard, but the ceiling acts like a loop-de-loop in sonic or a morph ball half-pipe in Prime, maintaining and redirecting your velocity, so pressing left just before a single bomb goes off lets you get across without having to do any weird diagonal bomb jump shenanigans or anything like that. You just need one bomb. But if this is here, then the next section is going to be...

whaaaaaaaaatttt. I knew he changed this, but this is...

Ok, kids, sit down, it's time for Grandpa to tell you a story.

Back in the days of yore, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I tried this hack for the first time. I got to this section, and I promptly cursed. And cursed, and cursed. Grandpa has a very naughty mouth. You see, this screenshot is not at all like what it was back in the day. Unlike this pansy obstacle, I had to deal with this.


There were no platforms on the sides! Just one spot in the center. I had to diagonal, yes, DIAGONAL bomb jump across the pit of the damned, full of demons snapping their jaws at me and the lost souls reaching out to drag me down with them. And what's here now?


A stroll. A stroll through a meadow in summertime, with fairies giving you honey and frolicking about. You kids, you don't know how easy you have it! Get off my lawn. Whippersnappers.

I didn't think he would crush it this thoroughly. I expected an optional diagonal bomb jump to a missile pack in the middle of the lake or something, with a long and boring alternate route that's convoluted simply for the sake of being convoluted (because you chose easy mode, of course). But this? Man, you don't even have to think. Just bomb repeatedly.

Not that this change is a bad thing by itself (I imagine the diagonal bj was a wall to a bunch of players), but this change is completely inconsistent with the rest of the game, you know?


The next room is a long horizontal room, with this at the end. After not killing the sidehopper and instead freezing it, I got enough height to midair morph past the statue. My reward is...


Well, this is nice, but is the room really a dead end?


Of course not. You have to find the correct block in the floor. This was actually more frustrating to me than the diagonal bomb jumps way back when - I fucking bombed that part of the room like five times, but I must have missed the correct block by pixels each time, because the super block never exposed itself. I kid you not, I was stuck in this room for an hour.


After going through this passage and another uneventful room, the music changes.

Specifically, it changes to this.


Holy crap, it's Crocomire!

This fight is significantly harder!


Watch as my missiles steadily deplete themselves.

For those of you who've never played Super (although, seriously, what are you doing on the Internet if you haven't played it? Go play it. Right now :P ), Crocomire's a cool fight. You don't deal damage to him in the traditional sense. Instead, by shooting him in the mouth with a charged shot or a missile, you push him back. And you keep doing this until... well, you'll see. But this fight's a lot harder now! As you can see, I am completely out of supers, my charge shot doesn't do fucking anything with only the ice beam, really, and neither do missiles. I lack any means of pushing him back very far at once. This was a long and arduous fight I actually thought I would lose.

Because, you see, when he opens his mouth, he either charges towards you immediatley afterwards (negating some of the progress you made), or fires some gunk balls out of his mouth. Without the spazer, it's really easy to accidentally miss and hit the top of his head or his arm when he yells, and the gunk balls block shit too. Long story short, he got to charge forwards a lot, steadily depleting my missiles in the process. And if I suck too much, he'll push me up against those spikes on the far side of the room.

Of course, when I say 'this fight is significantly harder', that doesn't mean much, as he was a complete pushover in Super. An awesome complete pushover, but still a pushover. Significantly harder than that is... not quite a pushover? I'm not sure. Regardless, despite completely forgetting that he was here in this hack (Seriously, I actually did say 'holy crap' when I entered this room. That wasn't artistic license), I beat him first try.


When I push him too far back, a bridge collapses under the poor dude, and he falls into boiling-hot acid.







Long story short, I've always wondered why Nintendo was for kiddies.

But despite having his face melted off, Crocomire's not done yet! See those bubbles in the acid?


"I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."


Oh.

He had a good run.

But fuck yeah, Crocomire.


As in the original game, an easily accessible set of Power Bombs are behind him. I've gotta say... it's about time.


Also like the original game, there's something over here in the acid he fell in. However, neither my intuition nor power bombs can snuff it out, and the acid kills me faster than it killed Croco, so I'm not going to try very hard. Knowing Drewseph, he took that old Green Chozo Room hoax and made it real.


Instead of bomb jumping through that stupid obstacle, I think I'll just take a short dip in the fiery pits of hell!


yes please

Green Chozo room? Never heard of it.

From what I can gather from that video, and checking Metroid2002's forums, it used to be an old rumor that someone made a prank video of?

But what was the original rumor? I've never come across it. Or is it one of those rumors that came about in the earlier days of the Internet where people claimed you could resurrect General Leo in FFVI and also get a 'Gamma Sword' by flying circles around Kefka's Tower?

Like that video implies, it was a made-up glitch that involved Shinesparking into the top-right corner of Crocomire's room (I don't think the mockball/speedball were even widely-known when this was proposed), which would somehow allow you to clip through a brick and end up in a garbled space with a green Chozo statue.


They are called Dessgeegas, and you will respect them.

Well, I am running away from it in that shot.

SpoonyBard: Kishi has the gist of it (although I don't know about it being a shinespark originally is true, but whatever). Some dude made a bunch of stuff up and got it posted on a classic metroid site, pretty much.

Anyways, since I can't remember where to go for the next update, I'm running around randomly and I'm finding eleventy billion additional dead ends and crap. Some are significant, so I'll be sure to include them (like the entrance to lower norfair, abrasively blocked off by a grey door), but others are... less so. How much detail do you guys want to see in terms of stuff like this? I'm pretty sure I could make an update or two with absolutely no real progress but a lot of map coverage, if that means anything to you.

I just realized this is probably a mis-romanization of a Japanese attempt at Deathgigas.

I was considering the same thing, but information as obscure as the names of Metroid enemies is either impossible or just too difficult to locate on the Japanese side of the Internet, so I can't look at the kana to make sure.

Yeah, they're supposed to be Deathgigas, but honestly the misromanized names in Metroid give it a sci-fi flavor rather than sounding Engrishy.

I have here a teaser for the next update. You're normally supposed to need the hi-jump there, but I had something to say about that.

Blame unchocolate for my pain, since he linked me to a nico vid showing a guy actually pulling off a swj. After that, I had to do it.

I'm going to have to disagree with that! Not that any of you take my thoughts about difficulty seriously anymore. >_>

You are some kind of mutant walljumping creature.

Oh, and about this...

These updates have been really entertaining so far, so I personally wouldn't mind a couple that were just wandering. I think they would still be fun to read.

You know I was thinking about this, and I think I've come up with a terrible and depressing scenario that should scare anybody off making difficult romhacks.

Imagine the world as we know it is destroyed or lost to time. Every physical copy of the original game is broken or too degraded to work anymore. And the only playable backup anyone can find... is your horrible romhack.
The future will never know how good the original game was. All they will have to go on is your hack. They may even believe your hack is the original game. Do you realize what you've done? Do you understand what this means? No! Because you're too busy adding spikes to everything.

So don't do it. Don't become a monster.

I love this thread.

This is intended as some sort of "intuition pump" for your unelicitable dislike of hard ROM hacks in general, I assume.

I feel it philosophically fails because you're running on the bogus assumption that a ROM hack is implicitly intended to displace its original. This seems to be borne from your conception of the physical act of creating the ROM hack - the injection of outside data into an original, "untainted" file, replacing it entirely. Personally, I think this hypothetical has no more merit than the hypothetical of every Mario game except SMB2j falling into the sun.

don't scare me like that

This is kind of relevant: on Brickroad's blog he says this about Super Metroid Resdesign and the Prime series:
I'm wondering how that's different from Super Metroid, and I'm hoping he explains it to me so I can be smarter.

In Super Metroid, instead of getting Item C after Item B, you can go off and get Items F, E, G, and D, or any other permutation you please. Varia Suit before Hi-Jump Boots? Power Bombs before Ice Beam? Wave Beam before any number of items you're "supposed" to get first? Grappling Beam never? All yes.

Oh, so that's what he meant.

It's the difference between exploring and following a series of roads, more or less.

It's also about how getting items in Super Metroid tends to open up new areas without as much backtracking, rather than having to go back and forth through old areas so much. I guess it's kind of like how Metroid II or Metroid Fusion set you on a path through new areas as you advance, except in Super Metroid you're not told what the new area is once you get your new abilities. With Redesign, I notice the tendency to cross over old ground too much before getting to the new areas for exploration.

Last update, we melted some faces. This update, we're going to go look for stuff to make it easier to melt faces in the future. It's a good plan, I swears. Draygon goes great with alfredo and noodles, and he fries easily. She just needs to stock up on a few more mini-nukes, since 3 is not enough by any standard, and I swear the game conspires to have her run out of them just before she reaches her intended destination.

We've got a long update ahead of us, so brace yourselves.


There's lots of random barriers like this all over Norfair, designed to funnel you towards the power bombs without letting you get back out. That rumor about Drewseph talking with someone from Retro? Lies. He talked to a pitcher plant.

This barrier is special because, as you can see from the map, it leads to an item. That item's probably just a missile, though. No, the noteworthy part is that the map continues on past the missile. It's genuine proof of a hidden passage and, potentially, our next key item.


Dum de dum.


I was right. And yeah, it only gives me two extra missiles.


This is what I'm talking about. I shot every block on the wall in front of us, but nothing. I guess it can only be revealed by bombs. And since I no longer have to freeze the lava hopper and bomb each block manually (and if I did, I'd probably kill the hopper, fall in, and die)...


Woot. The nuke kills the hopper, but no worries - the passage is a quick midair morph away.


This seems familiar somehow. Like I've seen it in another game. Hmm...


Well, there was something back here. This just goes to prove my pet theory, though: each time Drewseph adds in a grey door, God kills a kitten.

Get it? PET theory? I'm so clever.


Anyways, let's get the hell out of Norfair. We've been here for long enough, and now that we have power bombs, we can get past the billions of arbitrarily placed blocks in our way. Like these. And, really, the question we all want answered: what morph ball passage to the left of the Norfair elevator was Drewseph talking about in the readme?

Well, I suppose I should have seen that one coming.


Now that we have the ice beam and mini-nukes (mini-nukes magically become twice as powerful when you call them mini-nukes), we can get back to Brinstar proper. This, right here? This is us getting back to where we were supposed to have gone after getting the Super Missiles. Except I fell in a pipe and got eaten by the map itself, leaving this area sadly unvisited. But now that we can get up this room, we can change that. And the first thing we find...


Is this. A yellow, power-bomb-openable gate. Well, isn't this a great coincidence.


Now that we have the varia suit, we don't take one and a half etanks' worth of damage from these things. Nope, just slightly less than an etank. However, combined with the realization that rapid-firing missiles is a much better idea than supers, now that the fire rate of supers is twice as long... these Giygas are suddenly much more managable. Also, one of the two in this room dropped a nuke refill! I came out ahead, I think.


Except there's nothing in this damn room. Seriously. Nothing. I savestated and wasted 3 mini-nukes looking for stuff, I bombed the floor, the walls, everything. There's nothing here, so far as I can tell.


Except this. But this, so far as I can tell, just leads you back outside the room. I bombed the hell out of this too. I don't understand why...

wait.


That gate is multi-use. So... let me get this straight. This entire room is just a trap, predicated on us players deciding to use our newfound tactical nukes to wipe the giygas out instead of just shooting them in the face. And then, when we're done doing that, we're supposed to realize that, by using nukes to kill them, we locked ourselves in? And the passage is so we can't screw ourselves over with bad savestate usage, by providing a way back out?

Yeah, uh, no comment.


We've been in this room before! It had infinitely-spawning mini-giygas. Let's explore it more thoroughly, since a little dot on the map tells me something nice is to be had here.


Well, this wasn't on the map.

Our item is...


A missile expansion. Neat.

The way to get it is by going through this passage. The floor, however, is bombable, so we need to use missiles to take out the leeches instead of panic bombing. We get two extra missiles for our trouble.


And this door is no longer gray.


Unfortunately, we have no way to get up there. Unless...


We leave the room and come back in to get the enemies (which I destroyed at first) to respawn, and then I use the ice beam. The ice beam is a very (n)ice tool for these sort of situations.


I found this wall entirely by accident.


And within it is a combination of "well, this was hard to find, but I don't want to give you 10 missiles, so..." and "fuck, where do I put this last missile expansion, because otherwise I'll just add up to 99?"


Back outside the invisi-wall is a door that leads to more nukes. And if we keep heading up after getting them


We reach familiar territory. To Crateria!


Do my eyes deceive me, or is time actually passing? Neat.

Of course, the first thing we do now is check out that crazy chozo thing on the map.


We get our shiny new bombs and take a breather on the statue.


Once we settle down, it clutches us in its fingers (one of my favorite little details), the screen rumbles for a bit, and then we're notified that we picked up a Mandatory Plot Device. Progress! We're now... a 12th done with the game? I somehow don't think that's accurate, but ok, let's go with it.


Just below that statue is a morph ball passage heading right. With judicious application of the Nice Beam, we can finally make some progress along this vector.


Yay variety!


I don't think anything needs to be said about this when a video is worth ten thousand words.


As a reward for my pain, I get a super. That device in the ceiling is actually a green gate, too. I had to hit the green switch elsewhere in an earlier update. Maybe you remember it. (if not, don't go looking for it, it's not important)

The other walljumping section here is not single-wall-jumpable, as there's not a continuous section heading up and the gaps between walls are too large for Samus to jump without hi-jump boots. Besides, even if I could SWJ up it, I'd probably end up putting my fist through my monitor in disgust. That crap would take like 15 wall jumps in a row or something, and even I have limits.


Some of you may also remember me complaining about how this passage was just out of reach in the very second update of this LP! (well, it turns out that a well-placed SWJ+morph could have gotten me into it, but that's beside the point). We're up here now, and we get a new item! Yay!


If you guys haven't yet caught on to the fact that venerable item sphere, so useful a tool in the original game, is now nothing more than Drewseph's Dick Move button in action...


Further along, the passage grinds to a halt.


Also, now that we have nukes, we can go behind the chozo statue that gave us our first missiles and get more nukes.


This glitch freaks me out (look closely - I'm hovering above ground, immobile) and I have no idea how I caused it.


Back to Brinstar! We pick up one last nuke pack, right near where we got the Charge Beam.


Remember this pipe? I fell in this pipe by accident, and got locked out from entire sections of the map. I'm not quite so foolish this time.


I... can't actually tell if this is a Dick Move or not just by looking at it. Sure, it's an item sphere, but there's a chozo statue too...


Not that we can get to it yet, in any case. Unless you feel like trying to infinite bomb jump out of the water. Which I don't.

And, finally, we're back here. We can actually get to the tank now.


Of course, we're supposed to sequentially fish-jump our way up with the ice beam, but there's a better idea. One that involves killing those butt-ugly things.


We can effortlessly (but really, really slowly) climb our way up using nothing but this dude here. Thanks, dude.


Item get.


And despite the looks of things, this door is now flashing. For reference, we're just to the left of the energy tank, and that pipe in the ceiling is the pipe that ate me.


Maridia?


Maridia!


Not Maridia? Norfair?!

Well, regardless, there's only one thing to do.


Onwards! Into the breach!

NEXT TIME: I taunt the game viciously, find another Mandatory Plot Device, and finally, at the very end, figure out where exactly I'm supposed to be going. If you couldn't tell, I'm mostly just running around aimlessly right now.

Eh? What's wrong with the item spheres, now?


Oh, you...!

Guess what this is!

Guys, if you don't mind huge spoilers, this might interest you:
Drewseph played through Redesign recently, live. You can view the recorded results through that channel page with the confusingly named "on demand" feature.
What's funny is that sometimes he has trouble playing his own hack.

Watching this concurrently with every segment in this LP adds a whole new dimension to it.