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

The Benny Hillifier is now my favorite thing ever.

Though, for it to be truly effective it would need to speed the video up a little bit too, alas.

It used to speed up the videos, but the note on the site says it's (temporarily?) incapable of that.

Now that's just plain silly.

I'm sorry, but Charlie Chaplin is no longer with us today. We'll revert to our normal operating parameters for now.

LAST WE LEFT OFF, Benny Hill was infecting us all. To counter his evil effects, I recommend playing this theme in the background as you partake of this fine, fine LP. Catharsis is good, guys. Also good is the irony of the title when contrasted to our current endeavor of delving as far into Norfair as possible.

Speaking of that!


To the right of our previous savepoint is a chokepoint that lets you snipe at a couple swoopers (if only Kishi was still around - then he could tell me what the silly things are called) without being in any danger. Dispatching them, we move on to a downward passage, which we take.


The door opens up into this, which will prove slightly, but only slightly, annoying on the way back out. The objective here is to use the grapple beam to swing up into the door in the ceiling. You can kinda see the door in the edge of the shot. If there was any doubt as to what key item we were heading towards, there ain't anymore.


Continuing onwards, we reach a dead end. Power bombs reveal nothing. What's the solution?


Just, uh, jump and hold left. By this point in the game, tricks like this are old hat to us psychos who can still trek onwards. Yes, us. Not just me. You're in on this too. I bet most of you guys could get pretty far in the game now, if you were so inclined (not that you ever will be, but the point stands).


You're end up facing the gigantic pit of lava again. More than once in the past has this pit stymied us. This is the last time we'll see it for a while, though, because there's a door in the floor and we have other things to do.


I don't know why Samus was turning around. Maybe it's meta. Maybe she's staring at us, begging for her misery to be ended.


We reach an area that looks almost exactly like where the previous save point was. The first thing I do is bomb that corner, but, alas, there is nothing. So we head right, past more crazy-weird platforms, and drop down another pit (which, incidentally, serves to telegraph yet again the presence of the grapple beam).

We reach an open sidehopper-infested room with bullet-faces on the right and energy/missile recharges on the far left. You know, that's one of the things I like about this hack -- missiles are actually worth using! In original SM, once you got more than 10 supers or so, and built up a couple additional beams' worth of native firepower, there was no fucking point to ever firing missiles ever again. In Redesign? You only have one beam, Supers are extremely limited in quantity and can't be rapid-fired anyways, and lots of things block regular beam shots entirely. Missiles are back in vogue, and that's why this recharge station is so nice.


The door onwards is in the upper-left corner of the room, and here's a screenshot of our progress thus far.

A save point and a makeshift recharge station? I'd posit that Crocomire was up ahead, but we already dealt with him. Let's take this very carefully.




RUN


wtf it's eating the floor! NOWHERE IS SAFE


I rest my case.

The first time I played through this game, that thing ate me alive. As it is, I still took far less damage than I deserved. A demonstration of the power of this thing is that, no matter what Samus tries (bombs, mininukes, whatever), she can't break the floor like it could just by hopping into it. That thing's a beast. actually, i'm pretty sure Drewseph made that floor like the sand in front of the spring ball in super, and gave the gigas the attributes of the spikebreaker, but what do i know


After that harrowing battle, you have to perform random ice beam shenanigans to climb up. And what do we find at the top?


A grey door. That's right: this is a 'kill all the enemies in the room' door, and even the fucking zoomers count. You have to wait for them to climb back up and kill them before you can progress.


Some mayhem and destruction later...


The door closes behind us, permanently.


I cannot express in words just how many pipes there are in this room, so I won't bother trying. We won't be going through that door either -- it leads to nowhere at the moment. We'll be there very soon, though.

Instead, we have to go through one of the pipes. No, checking them is not quite as tedious as it sounds.

To check one, you can just fire a shot down it. If it impacts something a little ways in, great! You've just ruled it off. If it gets to the edge of the screen before exploding...


It turns out that the correct exit stuck out like a sore thumb anyways.

The sky carriers (where's kishi damnit) sink when you're standing on them. To get across, you need to jump repeatedly so they can rise back up. Otherwise, you'll get dumped in lava.


Check the minimap! We're finally there!


The surprise was already ruined, but still. fuck yeah

Until next time.

Just reading this LP is exhausting. How the hell are you playing this thing?

Would you believe me if I told you that I'm going to be going through the next two-three updates much more quickly, because I got stuck on a particular part (SPOILERS: lost caverns)? And that I actually, legitimately want to play past it? But I can't go look stuff up in a faq or anything, because I need to inflict it on you all first?

Please don't commit me.

Oh, you're clearly insane, especially for being excited about getting the Grappling Beam. Grappling Beam + romhack is a surefire formula for horror.

Geruta!


Tripper!

wait, so did something happen to Kishi?

He's on vacation, I think.

The theme for this update is:

horror




Even with hands-down the second coolest item in the game (only behind the speed booster because of the shinespark, sadly), there's no time to waste. We've got... half? I have no idea... the game ahead of us. Pausing to check the obvious side path for an entrance (there isn't one), we head out and travel back the way we came.


Of course, 'back the way we came' can only get us so far. The entrance to the massive-collection-of-pipes room grayed out behind us as we came in, if you remember correctly. As such, it's time to go down the path I said we'd be going down very soon in the last update. We'll have to circle around and head through that gigantic room.


The entrance is a straightforwards drop to the bottom of the room.


One grapple beam jump later and we're on another platform. The minimap shows an item next to us - do we dare?


Totally worth it. The jump back to the previous platform is easy, too.


The next stage in scaling the room is swinging upside-down with the grapple and landing on this. Simple so far. What do we do next, though?

Ride a Ripper. This section clearly shows what a bad fucking idea changing Samus's physics were without a corresponding change in the grapple beam. Now that Samus drops like a stone, it's way too hard to grab onto another grapple point in midair, unless the whole ceiling is covered or something like that. Plus, grapple physics were never well-done in the first place; Super just had limited enough situations that you didn't notice. There was a reason Super didn't have giant middle-of-the-room physics puzzles, Drewseph. That's because, if something like the second shot happens, you take an acid bath through no fault of your own! Yes, that is Samus stuck in the wall, not Samus about to skip a couple steps and get onto a platform early. This doesn't even count the time where, later in the puzzle, I got stuck in a morph ball tunnel and the game vomited me out straight down into the fucking acid.

I don't even know why there was a morph ball tunnel there. It's not at all necessary to completion of this room. I don't ever plan on coming back here without the space jump, so...

And, of course, the next thing you do is ride a ripper again, and after that, you get some more-basic ceiling-mounted blocks.


Seriously, Drewseph, fuck you.


The next room is notable because it has a trap at the very beginning. If you fall in that particular pit (you can jump over it, but you wouldn't, because it looks like a bombable secret area and so you're conditioned to run to it first thing), you have another platforming challenge.


It's not quite as hard as it looks, becuase those stalactites are actually part of the background and can't stop you midjump. It's still just as annoying as it looks, though.

Once you get across (assuming you don't take the easy way out and just run through the lava), you get to where you would have been if you didn't fall in the trap. From there, jumping up and taking a grapple beam jaunt across the ceiling nets you a...


Free two-pack of missiles.


In the next room, you have to do some walljumps off grapple blocks. I honestly can't remember the exact way the physics worked in Super (hey, it's been years since I actually used the damn thing, cut me some slack), so you guys get an infodump!

The way walljumping works here is that, after letting go of fire and dropping the grapple, you get about half a second in which you can walljump while not spinjumping. Ideally in most cases, you would use the additional height to either land on your target or grapple the next block up. However, if you want, you can also eschew the walljump entirely and, by jumping while you're still holding fire, make a short two-block or so hop up. This works well for when you just want to go straight up. However, if you do this, you also need to move away from the wall horizontally a little, so Samus has enough room to do her "stick-feet-on-wall-and-brace-herself" animation. Otherwise, you'll just get pinned to the wall without being able to jump again, and you'll have no recourse but to let go of fire and fall all the way back down.

Anyways, you climb up the room somehow until you get to the top.


The top is stupid, because the grapple blocks at the top are almost completely out of sight, and you usually wind up trying to walljump up that for a good couple attempts or so before you realize that's doomed to failure and there's an easier way. GJ, drewseph.


We are now right here. At this point, I'm going to cut back on my comprehensiveness a little and only show a couple highlights. There's a lot I want to get through with this update, and the specific details of how I get out of this section of Norfair are not important.

This is worth noting, though! There seems to be an item over there that requires the wave beam, but walk away for a bit and check the map and HEY! There's a guardian over there too.


There's also a couple doors where you have to do this. Releasing the grapple beam as your tangent is pointed straight up (uh, think of a unit circle and your trigonometry class, heh) is the best way to get up in those doors.


The next key item is in western Norfair, so across this lake we go! This room is kinda clever - there's grapple blocks in the ceiling, but the easiest way is just to wait for this ripper to come across and use it instead. Otherwise, it'll probably fuck you up as you're trying to cross.


Our target is that room in the lower-right.


After crossing that prominent lake at the start of the unmapped section in the map pic, the beginning of the room has a tileset like this. I find this interesting, because was this type of pockmarked ground somewhere in Super? I honestly don't remember a spot like it. The ground looks like it got fucked up by something.


No, we're not about to enter Lower Norfair by mistake.


Near the bottom of the room is a one-way funnel, and the rest of the room is a smooth downwards slope. This is revealing! Can you guess what our next item is yet?


We have one more minor platforming challenge before we get to the key item. We've gotta bomb jump across these blocks. If you've gotten to this point in the game, it shouldn't be particularly hard: drop a bomb, move right a bit, and then hold right after you're in the air.


Eventually there is a one-way crumble block, but a quick inspection reveals our method of egress.


We grab the speed booster (fuck yeah), and the very first thing we have to do is shinespark left before the suddenly-rising lava catches up with us.

The very next thing we have to do is shinespark up! This is actually a harder spark than it seems, because of the geography:


I fail.


It may look like I succeeded, but guess what! This is also a failure.


Success - barely. Of course, you don't get any retries if you fail, because the lava will eat you alive. Did I mention?


The lava is still rising, by the way. It's actually weird - it rises at a very slow rate for the first... I dunno, 20 seconds or so. But once the game deems you've had enough of a chance, it suddenly starts rocketing up at about one screen's worth of height every two seconds, and if you haven't gotten a good spineshark first try and been doing exceptionally well at your platforming it'll eat you alive.

Because, after the under-lava physics take hold, you ain't going to be getting out of the room unless you're already at the door, pretty much.

Hope you didn't screw up your last savestate.


We're not done yet, though! It's time to get this item up here.


One easy shinespark later and we're up here. The left passage is a dead end, so we're heading right. There's one lame really-quick-falling gate that requires a mockball to get past? I think. But once we get through it:


fuck yeah


There's no need to mockball on the way back. Just bomb through.

We're not done yet, though!


We're not done yet, though!

There used to be power bomb blocks littering the floor around here, but we cleared them. Now that we've got the speed booster, we can make use of them. Let's do it:


uh

How about running right instead of left?


That's more like it. This is actually not a shinespark puzzle, but instead, a speed jump puzzle. You have to jump with relatively good timing over an obstacle and land on speed blocks. If you do, you eat through them. From there, a quick power bomb and a short walk right nets us...


fuck yeah


We test it out on the suspicous-looking block just outside, and we see something! So we bomb it and... end up nowhere special. Really, Drewseph?

But we're not done yet!


You may remember this shinespark path. I pointed it out a while ago. If not, don't worry. Suffice it to say, we finally spark up there and...


fuck yeah


Unlike our other two beams, the Spazer retains its rate of fire, making it spammable. Which makes it hands-down the best beam we have for general exploring right now, since it's not capped to one shot every second or something ridiculous like that.

We are finally done now, though.


yes please




Next up: I run around gathering as many expansions as I can, in hopes of gathering a few more etanks so I can try a particular sequence break I've been eying.

I ... missed something. Do the beams not stack in this hack? Or are you just not using the freeze beam for another reason?

Wow, I can't believe I forgot to mention that. Yeah, the beams don't stack. You have to pick one. Privileged knowledge tells me you eventually find an item that lets the beams stack again, but that's probably a ways away.

Man, that was a crap-load of equipment all at once there. Grappling hook really kind of breaks this game open, doesn't it. I guess it's the case now that you should be able to get almost anywhere, so it's just a matter of hunting down the requisite statues while gathering as many E-tanks and missiles as you think you need?

The theme for this update is: muladhara. But benny hill would work, too! Also, here is a quick video showing how to shinespark, if you're not familiar with it already.


Last we left off, we'd gotten a ridiculous amount of key items. It's time to put them to use. Item hunting, here we come!


The first item on our grocery list is, unsurprisingly, right above the ship. Without the hi-jump you can actually get up here via one well-placed single-walljump, but without the speed booster there's nothing up here.


Contrary to your first impression, what you have to do is make a stupid jump outside of the alcove and back on top of it. And, as stated earlier, there's nothing we can get to right now, what with that gray door. However, now that we have the speed booster, we can make a long jump over to the right, and we find...


Oh. That sucks.
What we have to do is start at the gray door and build a shinespark charge running right. From there, we store it, drop down, head back left through the morph ball passage shown a few shots earlier, and spark to the left.


That opens the gate and gives us our two-pack of missiles.


Our next item is this expansion right here. Or, rather, not right here, but just off the screen to the left, tempting us.


To get it, build a spark charge running along the bottom floor, and then jump up on this platform and spark up. The positioning is pretty precise -- you'll need to try a few times to figure out exactly where to spark.


And we get our missile.


One room to the right, we spy a super block in the floor. Getting another Super expansion is a simple matter of blowing it out and heading down in there.

There's also something in this room. You'll notice that dead end in the top-right of the room. You don't really believe that's there for show, do you?


One easy diagonal shinespark and a quick mini-nuke to clear away some rubble and we get another power bomb.


This next expansion is godawful painful, and I would not have gotten it at all if the xray scope didn't tell me it was an etank.

Something I haven't mentioned so far is that shinesparking has been reworked to be more like Fusion's and Zero Mission's. Now, if you're sparking left or right and hit a horizontal ledge that you could run open, Samus stops sparking and starts running at speed booster speed again. From there, you can hit down, charge a spark, and do it again and get to places that need sparks but don't give you enough room to charge them. The most infamous example of this is Fusion's Secret Message, although both games have a couple extra expansions you need to multi-spark to get.

Now, I'm not exactly sure on how the controls for this ability in Redesign actually work. In the other games, you just need to be holding left or right. In Redesign? There's some weird/stupid thing here where you need to be holding jump too? Or something. All I know is, I did not start running again and I ran into walls far too fucking often. I had to use slowdown and experiment to figure out how the fuck to do it, and I'm still not sure.

So yeah, that ate up a significant portion of the timeI spent trying to get this expansion, but do not let that make you think it's easy! This is the most pain-in-the-ass thing I've done in the game so far. Yes, that includes Hell's Run without savestates. It's an order of magnitude beyond that, actually.


You have to start running in the room to the right of this one. Eventually, you'll come out onto this terrain, and you charge the spark near the end. The timing is really painful, so you'll want to charge the spark very near the end. Which leads to way too many failed sparks like the above, since you'll be so close to the edge that your first instinct will be to jump before holding left -- which will accidentally start the spark.


A couple platforms to the left, you reach this. You have to spark right from the platform above Samus, that the zoomer's crawling on. However, because the timing's so damn tight, you'll be more likely to spark straight up instead (or, more likely, have the charge run out before you even get there). Let's not forget that the zoomer is positioned so it'll run straight into you if you don't kill it as you're jumping up! Thanks for making this even stupider, drewseph.


Sparking right leads you here. You charge your spark again on this platform. It's hard, since you don't have much room to run at high speeds. From there, you jump up with the charge, and...


This is the worst place for a savestate. Note that this zoomer is also timed to run into your path as you get here, and if you jump over it to dodge there's a skree on the ceiling above. If you manage to spark left, you charge your spark one more time and...


Fail repeatedly. Yes, all of those shots are from separate attempts. I did get it eventually, though! Keyword: eventually.

If you really want to see how much I hate getting this item, check my basic stock of photos. Now imagine each of those happening to you a trillion more times. Ok, not a trillion. Maybe a billion.

ANYWAYS

The last item to get for now in this section of Crateria is the power bomb in the maze. Now that we have the spring ball, we can navigate this damn thing. There's a couple tricks you can do here to exploit the spring ball, but I doubt we'll ever see them again and I'd trip over words trying to describe them, so I'll just say that we eventually get our item.


On our way back to the ship, I spot a weird texture in the floor. I check for the hell of it, and...


It's another useless tunnel. Heh.


Since we're already here, I climb up the wall jump shaft just to the left and grab a Super. If you're wondering why I didn't get this earlier, it's because the wall jump panels are too far apart to climb up without the hi-jump.


Also nearby is a second similar walljump shaft. We climb up it, then break through some speed blocks and get to a new section of Crateria.

A little ways in, there is a gray door that closes behind you. Of course, it's only after you enter the room and get locked in that you realize you need to charge up a spark in the previous room to break through some blocks. Thanks, Drewseph! I'll fast-forwards a bit to my return here.


I charge up said spark and get a power bomb for my trouble.

The passages in this area are pretty long and sparse. There's some interesting room designs and a red gate that we have to open from the other side, but the only really notable thing around is this.


This is a 10-pack, for some strange reason. I thought it was insanely obvious, with the way there's no visible ceiling there, but at the same time there's a wall. Maybe I'm just supposed to have a bunch of missiles or something.


Eventually you fall down a hi-jump shaft and reconnect with a section of Crateria that we already explored (the part that leads to (presumably) Tourian, where we're locked out if we haven't secured all 12 guardians).


There's also a semi-obvious trio of speed blocks in the wall here. There's no crazy shinespark puzzle this time, though: you just charge a spark on the long straightway a little ways up, drop down, and spark left. You get a power bomb for your trouble.


Also around here is a wave gate. Opening it nets us two missiles. On the map, it's the dot directly to the right of Samus's cursor.


This cavity in the wall piqued my interest, so I checked and saw this. Power bombing around leads me to a hole in a morph ball passage, with a missile as a present.

The last thing I can find in Crateria so far that I could theoretically get to is this Super. It looks to require a shinespark puzzle an order of magnitude worse than the one I was bitching about, though (or a mastery of the short charge... actually, fuck, I think I'll try that in a later update, sorry guys), so I won't be trying to get it.


So we head down to Brinstar to continue our hunt, and the very first thing we find is a hidden missile under the elevator. For some reason, this expansion really amuses me.


Brinstar seems to be picked pretty clean, actually. The next thing I can find (contrary to popular belief, I do not xray every single wall in the damn game) is all the way over here. There's no room anywhere nearby to build a spark charge, though...


Or is there? It seems we've finally discovered what the purpose of this crazy room is.


After killing the two giant dessgeegas and using their space to build up a charge, we walljump up and spark diagonally up+right (this is actually very generous in terms of positioning - anything in the general vicinity will do it).


Inside the room is a makeshift pipe-creature refill station. The door to the right leads to a missile, while heading up leads to a purple door (hence the pipe creatures) and a super.

So I went along xraying the floor around this passage because there's a giant blank spot on the map around here, and I see some weird... things. Are these hidden passages, or are they just visual artifacts?


I check harder and find this somewhere nearby.


DACHORA <3

And, of course, that wall on the right of the screen in the second shot is unbreakable by any art known to Samus. It's clear what we need to do: find the other gate switch to free the Dachora.


This was a hell of a lot further away than I thought it would be, but I found it. Dachora = free. Now to circle all the way back around...


Once free, the dachora runs right, breaking that wall, and sparks up, revealing another passage. I wonder if Drewseph actually had to change its behavior at all from the original Super? Regardless, in we go.


And I get eaten alive. As our reward, though, we find...

A chozo guardian, blocked by another gate.


This time, the secret passage leading to the gate is only a room back, on the far right of the dachora's track.


Before we go back to it, though, I need some health. Those dessgeegas are nasty.


3/12 disarmed!

And this seems like a good place to end the update.