Set Side B

Lode Runner on the Web

This one is going back to my Metafilter posting history. In case you’re unfamiliar with Lode Runner, I really have to give a short history and primer.

Lode Runner was a game released in 1983 for the Apple II home computer, although ports for several other machines were soon developed and released. Created by the late Douglas E. Smith, it asked players to maneuver through 150 levels of caverns and structures, collecting all the gold (little boxes) on each level then ascending to the top of the screen.

150 levels sounds like a lot, and it really was, but amazingly the game keeps finding new ways to surprise with its small number of level parts and their implications. When player were done with those (or even if they weren’t), Lode Runner included a level editor that player could use to make their own levels.

The ostensible subject of this post is a web recreation of Lode Runner that includes hundreds of levels to play and learn and enjoy. But the site largely speaks for itself in that regard, I think, so here’s some musing on Lode Runner itself, and its history.

So, here is the link. If you’ve never played it before, it’s simple to get into, but very interesting to puzzle over. Every level can be completed, even if many of them seem like they can’t possibly be. Good luck!

Design

Each Lode Runner level is composed of only a small number of parts. There’s the player and the guards that pursue them, of course. There’s normal, “diggable” blocks, solid “undiggable” ground, ladders, overhead bars, trap doors that look like diggable blocks but cause the player to fall through them, gold boxes, and hidden ladders that only appear when the last gold box has been collected.

Diggable blocks, the ones that look like bricks, can be drilled into, leaving a hole, but only when standing next to them and they have nothing above them. That means absolutely nothing: a quirk of the game is that even a set of overhead bars or an invisible ladder in the space above a block will prevent it from being dug.

The obvious use for these holes is to trap guards. When one falls into a hole, it’s stuck for a few seconds until it can climb out. Holes close back up after a short while, and a guard in a hole when it closes up around it are killed, usually to respawn randomly near the top of the screen.

Digging layers down to reach buried gold

The inobvious use is to penetrate into the very walls of a level to collect gold that would otherwise be inaccessible. By digging out a whole layer of bricks, the player can jump into the excavated space and continue digging the next level down.

The other thing about Lode Runner is the AI of the guards. They’re run by a simple program, and are easy to manipulate, but they still have a way of keeping the player guessing when they function as obstacles. When used as tools though, learning how to manipulate them becomes essential. The player can stand on their heads, and because they fall faster than the guards, can even use them as momentary platforms during a fall, to quickly step to one side on the way down.

I don’t mean to dive too deeply into the pieces, their workings and their quirks. A lot of the fun of Lode Runner comes from discovering them for yourself, and being introduced, step by step through the game’s levels, to their implications.

Culture

Back in high school we had an Apple IIc in the back room that we could play with on breaks. I’m not sure what it was there for, I don’t think any educational software was ever run on it, but the copy of Lode Runner on it (already a few years old by that point) was put into heavy rotation, and students would bring their own disks to school to save levels on.

This is an aside, but it demands to be told: one such student saved a number of levels they had labored over to a disk and left it in the room one day. A friend of his, who had thought that student had erased his disk or saved over his own levels, physically cut their disk up with scissors and left it on their desk! It was all in error, but the two’s friendship was never the same after that. The moral: do not be quick to vengeance, theatricality gratifies only one’s self, and in any case, be sure of the facts first. More times in my life I’ve seen someone take drastic steps in error than in rightness. So, back to Lode Runner!

A number of classic Western computer games got a second life, sometimes one that far outstripped their beginnings, when they got ported to Japanese computers and game consoles. Lode Runner was first ported to an arcade cabinet by Irem, then converted to the Famicom by Hudson Soft, where as a prominent early title for that system it went on to sell over a million units, and became a part of Japanese popular culture. From there it reached a number of other systems, including a version for the PC Engine, called Battle Lode Runner, that much later would make it back to the US as an early Wii Virtual Console release. A few other game series that would become cultural fixtures in Japan, adding hundreds of thousands of sales beyond that of their U.S. editions, were Spelunker, Wizardry and Ultima.

Image from MyAnimeList, still kicking after 18 years

At the time Hudson Soft licensed an adaptation of their Adventure Island game, itself deserving of a long post, as an anime production, called Bug tte Honey, which I’m still not sure how to pronounce. It was a Captain N-style setting, where video game players were transported into the game world to have various adventures. It was used as a showcase for several Hudson properties, including Lode Runner.

Lode Runner is a timeless classic, something that we didn’t realize how good it was when we had it. I mean, we knew it was good, but we didn’t yet know how difficult it was to create something so elegant.

For a history of Lode Runner, publisher Tozai Games has a short retrospective and timeline that still survives on the web.

Lode Runner Total Recall

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Animal Crossing New Horizons (Lack Of Recent) Updates

This is a bit of an expansion over a couple of Mastodon posts I made yesterday. (On what account? Here!)

Animal Crossing New Horizons was an amazing hit for Nintendo. It hit right at the start of the pandemic, and so quickly became the second best-selling game on the system.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild? 27 million copies. Super Mario Odyssey? 23 million copies. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate? 29 million copies. These are all very high sales figures. Nintendo has made bank during the Switch era.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons? 40 million units sold. That’s over 2.4 billion dollars in gross revenue, and not even counting Nintendo Online subscriptions and the paid DLC! The only Switch game to surpass it has been Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, which has sold 47 million units.

You’d think a game like that would have a long support life, but you’d be wrong. Three years in and it’s been over a year since the last meaningful update. Nintendo has largely abandoned the audience of the most popular Animal Crossing game ever made, by a huge margin.

Why is this so strange? Most games don’t update after a couple of years, after all. There are games that have made a go of a long-lived, if no perpetual, update cycle. Team Fortress 2 famously went on for like a decade of frequent updates, and while Valve has cooled on it since it still sees a lot of play. Stardew Valley is still updated from time to time, and it’s an indie game, although one with a very low overhead.

Animal Crossing, however, has, from the beginning, been a form of gaming that almost demands to be played for a significant period of time. People have played the Gamecube version for many years, keeping their island alive through decades of real time.

Before consoles could connect to the internet, of course, they couldn’t even be updated. But with the introduction of the internet a lot of options became available. The possibilities for a game-as-service approach to Animal Crossing have been great and, in large part, unexplored.

The thing that really made this all visible is the New Year’s Arch item. The first year the game was released, they made available an archway, made of balloons, with the number 2021 set at the top of it. Then for 2022 they made another version of it, but notably, it didn’t involve hardly any new geometry; it was just the 2021 arch with different colors, and a 2 in place of the 1. It looked almost a if it had been auto-generated, like maybe the game itself had support to make arches programmatically. The item’s catalog description, which was identical for both arches, is even careful not to mention the year on the model: “An arch bearing the Gregorian calendar’s number for the new year.” Why be so elliptical about it if it wasn’t intended to be reused many times?

But no, that wasn’t the case. 2023 saw no new arch at all. The first two arches now stand out in the inventory as a stark reminder of that brief window of time when New Horizons saw active support. Ten years from now, people who come back to the game, or (heaven help them/us) never left it will still see only those two arches, mementos of the time when the game was new. It’s not like a new arch would be a huge addition: there’s obviously already a content pipeline that can be used to add new items fairly easily, and a 2023 arch made along the lines of the 2022 one would probably be about five minutes of work.

No one expects Nintendo to add new features indefinitely, or always for free, but the lack of a new arch, the lowest-effort update imaginable, makes it clear that absolutely no additions will be coming to the game, probably ever, not even extremely minor things like updated yearly items. ACNH updates were something that Nintendo could have comfortably milked for years. It’s not like we aren’t already paying them for online server access.

Animal Crossing is not like other games, but Nintendo doesn’t seem to realize that, has never really understood what the series is about. The archway is just another example. And it doesn’t make a fan of series want to buy any new versions if they know they’re going to be supported only for a brief period of the game’s lifetime.

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Sundry Sunday: Mort Strudel’s Tales of Dwarf Fortress

It doesn’t feel like that long ago that Dwarf Fortress tales were the toast of the internet. They made the viral rounds in a way few things had before, or since for that matter, partly because of the downfall of community sites, especially Something Awful, that had gathered them together. That energy seems to largely gone into social media, and we’re all poorer for it.

But there are people who are still doing Dwarf Fortress stories, and that game is still as wonderfully deep and weird as it has ever been. Youtuber Mort Strudel does video playthroughs, and while he doesn’t release them quickly or often, he is consistent, and his work is interesting.

In particular I’d like to point out the saga of Chantedfins, over three-and-a-half hours of dwarven weirdness in nine videos.

If you’d like to jump to specific chapters, here’s direct links to all nine, with general descriptions of what each contains:

Part 1 (30m), founding, undead siege
Part 2 (31m), underground caverns, necromancy
Part 3 (32m), undead werellama
Part 4 (31m), tantrum, forgotten beasts
Part 5 (31m), the Observatory
Part 6 (15m), the Cursed Year
Part 7 (16m), forays against the goblins
Part 8 (14m), the mayor’s backstory
Part 9 (14m), the new age

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PC Gamer’s Article on a WoW Ultra Rare Mount

It’s December 31st and our offices are empty for the end of the year. We’re kind of slacking off, so let me link to something out intrepid and gelatinous news reporter linked before. It’s a really great longform article from PC Gamer and is worth a look if you didn’t see it then.

In summary:

For a long long while, there have been ultrarare mounts in World of Warcraft. Most items, a 1% drop rate is as rare as they go, but a few mounts are generated much more rarely than that. People have spent years grinding for a specific mount and never gotten it. It was dropped by a world boss called “The Sha of Anger.” (Hey, I didn’t name it.)

One such ultrarare item is The Reins of the Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent, which allows the very lucky acquirer to summon a nifty glowing black-and-white flying dragon to ride. So popular, and rare, are these items that when they go up on auction they regularly go for the maximum supported price: 9,999,999 Gold.

Players had long rued the immensely high odds of acquiring this item, and others, but had put up with it because Blizzard was the kind of company to just rule things like that to happen, and what you gonna do? Go to City of Heroes?

Early in the item’s existence, however, players noticed that the item wasn’t just generating hardly ever, but in fact, entirely never. A bug in the game meant no one had gotten it. It was just so rare that everyone assumed they just hadn’t seen it yet. Oops!

Much more recently, however, due to another bug, the item became much more common to players of a certain race. The players who had discovered this faced conundrum: be responsible and report the bug to Blizzard, or hoard the knowledge to prevent Blizzard from knowing about it, keeping it off of forums as long as they could, which resulted in the greater player base not realizing it was possible, in order to allow the precious loophole to persist for as long as possible.

If this kind of thing is fascinating to you, and if it isn’t then I wonder why you’re reading this blog, it’s one of the best pieces of game reporting I’ve seen lately.

PC Gamer: How World of Warcraft’s new dragon race brought a 10-year-old loot system to its knees

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The Castlevaia Scroll Glitch

Castlevania is an old and much-examined game, but its world records have been moving again lately, due to the use of a very interesting glitch that takes advantage of the way it updates its screen in the invisible area outside the display’s area. The above video demonstrates this to remove a lengthy walking section from the fifth “block” of the game, and explains how it was done too. What follows is a text re-explanation of some of it.

Most NES games don’t update the display all at once, but take advantage of the fact that the system has a whole screen’s worth of area outside of the visible region to draw tiles into before they become visible. The NES doesn’t allow direct writing to PPU memory, so there’s only a small window of time in each frame in which screen tiles can be changed anyway.

Castlevania uses a system where, on specific frames, a block is drawn on the side of the screen the player is moving towards, in sequence, starting from the top and moving down on successive frames. It does this seven times, and repeatedly, for each column of tiles the player is moving towards.

However, it doesn’t reset the vertical column progress if the player changes direction! If the player instead moves backwards a small amount at a specific place, it’ll update the column on the other side of the screen instead, leaving the old data in the column the player had been moving towards.

Since multiple redundant passes are made, the player has to do this two or three times as they progress. It’s exacting, but if done correctly, they can cause arbitrary blocks of tiles to be left on-screen from whatever had been in video memory before.

When the player’s character climbs stairs, the game watches for ground tiles as a signal to exit climbing mode and resume walking. If there is no ground there, because it was never drawn there because of this glitch, then the character will continue climbing, up through the air, even through screen transitions, even through floors, until they reach the next bit of ground they can stand on.

Here’s the Reddit post that marked the first time this glitch was done in a non-TAS record. And here’s a Youtube video demonstrating its use in the last level to remove the wall that requires the player to descend into bird-and-fleaman hell before reaching the final door.

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It’s Zelda Day! (What is Zelda Day?)

Back in 2010, over on Metafilter, three posts on The Legend of Zelda went up on the same day, on the day after Christmas, December 26th. Since then, I’ve tried to commemorate the event by making a post there about The Legend of Zelda each year. I typically tag these posts with “zeldaday,” to make them easier to find.

Since we have Set Side B now, I figured I’d crosspost the main content of this year’s Zelda Day post here as well. Here it is!

GameSpot has a long series of interesting discoveries of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:

This is just the first video….

48 things you still didn’t know – 21 more – 31 more than that – 29 on top of those – and then still 28 more – and 30 additional – followed by another 33 – and then 27 – after that 25 – then, 26 – and 19 – and 20 – and 22 – and 18 – and 23 – and another 24 – and then, 16 – then ANOTHER 16 – then 12 – then 15, and then, finally 14 — as of this writing, that is. That’s 497 things in all, over nearly three hours! Here’s their playlist with the whole series.

The Youtube channel Looygi Bros. has done a couple of similar series, covering Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask:

15 cool things about Ocarina of Time – 10 more – then 13 – then another 13 – then 19 – then 7 – then 11 – then 11 more – then 10 after that – then 10 – and then 13. Then, later, another 10, another 8, yet another 10, and then 9, and 9, and 8, and at last another 8.

But there’s more, on Majora’s Mask! 11 cool things about Majora’s Mask – and then 10 – and then 9 – and then another 10 – then yet another 10 – and another 10 again – and another 10 once more – and 9 – and 7 – and 7 again – then 6, then 15, then 7, then 10, and then finally 7.

And now, a new series has started on the Wind Waker, with one video so far and 12 facts. Here is a playlist with all of them. All together, I count that’s 841 facts of Zelda esoterica to watch. I figure that’ll keep you going until Zelda Day 2023!

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Sundry Sunday: Christmas Nights Into Dreams

The Sega Saturn was one of the first consoles to feature a built-in real-time clock. Most systems now have one, so I’m kind of surprised that very few games make use of it. Animal Crossing does, sure, and some Pokemon titles have time-of-day features (which they had to include their own clocks in the cartridge hardware to support), but few other games bother reading the date.

One prominent example of a game that did was the Christmas demo version of Nights Into Dreams. Ordinarily just a single-level of the full game, the disk had a number of special modes that would crop up at different times. December was one of them, which triggered Christmas Nights mode, with special cutscenes and graphics. But it also had special events for playing during November or January (“Winter Nights”), New Year’s Day, and April Fools’ Day. Especially notable was an unlockable mode that allowed playing as Sonic the Hedgehog, in what is his first true 3D outing!

This video shows off all of Christmas Nights Into Dreams’ special modes, and you don’t have to fiddle with your computer’s clock to see them!

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Romhack Thursday: Zelda Ancient Dungeon

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

In the world of romhacks, the term “Ancient Dungeon” has a specific meaning.

Way back in the SNES days, there was the cult favorite JRPG Lufia and the Fortress of Doom, a.k.a. Estpolis Denki. While overloaded, and most agreed harmed, by its ludicrous encounter rate, it had a good number of interesting innovations. It had an end-of-game stat report and a kind of New Game Plus mode, called “Try Again,” which reset players to base level but increased player experience and gold earned by four times. It had hidden Dragon Eggs throughout the world that could be collected and redeemed for special advantages near the end of the game, whereupon they would be scattered throughout the game, and refound, for more advantages. The game also had “Forfeit Island,” a place full of shops where every item the player characters ever sold throughout the game would make their way, and could be re-purchased.

Its prequel, Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, had even more play innovations, including visible monsters and a Zelda-like system of items that could be put to various uses on the exploration screen. Another thing Lufia II expanded on was the first game’s “Ancient Cave,” which was a dungeon that only a single character could enter. It didn’t take up a large portion of the original game, but Lufia II expanded it greatly, turning it into its own alternate game mode, that could be accessed from the main menu after completing the game.

Probably inspired by the Mystery Dungeon games, this version of the Ancient Cave was a 100-level randomized dungeon that reset players to Level 1 and no equipment when they began. It’s a completely optional challenge in that game, but many players found it highly interesting.

In romhack circles, an “Ancient Dungeon” is a game that completely tears apart its original game and turns it into a randomized play experience like Lufia II’s Ancient Cave. A similar implementation is Mega Man 9 and 10’s “Endless Mode,” which has also been recreated in romhacks for other Mega Man games.

Most Ancient Dungeon hacks are for JRPGs, but now we have one for Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda, and you might find it worth checking out.

The Legend of Zelda: Ancient Dungeon takes its name literally, in that the whole game is just one dungeon. There are no overworld screens. Each room contains a number of enemies, sometimes easy, sometimes hard, sometimes few, sometimes many, and sometimes a boss. They still drop items when you kill them, so you can build up lost health if you’re careful.

The creator of the hack managed to include the overworld enemies in the dungeon rooms, and also include monsters who are not ordinarily found in the same dungeon in the same room, by dynamically loading monster graphics during room transitions. That’s a pretty decent technical trick!

The layout of the dungeon is completely random. Monsters are chosen dynamically as you go. Many Ancient Dungeon hacks are actually computer programs that do the random generation themselves, and write that layout to the rom, so if you play the same version multiple times you’ll get the same dungeon each time, but that does not happen here.

The game shuts the doors out of each room until all the enemies inside have been defeated. Sometimes when you clear a room, a random item will be left. Once in a while this will be one of the game’s major items, like a Sword or the Ladder. You often get Heart Containers or other major items from beating bosses. There are also rooms where an old man offers to sell you another item using the rupees that you find along the way.

This Ancient Dungeon hack doesn’t map logically. Often you’ll enter a room with one exit, which will lead to a different room than it was when you were there before. This doesn’t mean your choice of exit is completely meaningless though. You’ll still enter the next room out of the opposite side of the screen as you left the last room, which can be important if you’re expecting a boss in the next room.

One thing about this hack is that it ramps up pretty slowly. When Link has full hearts he can shoot his sword, which can make quick work of many screens of enemies. If you take even half a heart of damage, though, you’ll go to only short-ranged attacks until you can build it back up. Getting far demands a lot more care than normal Zelda. You might find Water of Life as you go, which you may have to make a difficult choice as to whether to use it quickly and get your sword back, or save it for when the monsters get tough.

In my first test play I mostly ruled at it. I’ve played a ton of Legend of Zelda over the years, and I even managed to-carefully-destroy a three-headed Gleeok with just five hearts, a Wooden Sword and a Blue Ring. But I still lost, on Room 155, when I was unexpected thrust into a room with three blue Darknuts and three blue Wizzrobes, not a pleasant sight when you only have those five hearts and Blue Ring.

The hack does not allow for saving your progress, and unless you cheat by using savestates you lose everything you’ve done when Link gets his ticket punched. 155 rooms is a long way to go to only have five hearts to show for your progress.

I don’t know if I’ll try it again. Zelda’s dungeon rooms sure get monotonous after awhile. It could use a lot more variety in graphics, and its colors don’t even change throughout all those rooms. But this hack was released very recently, and I look forward to seeing what creator arnpoly does with it in the future!

Youtuber LackAttack24 did a successful hour-long play of this hack, if you’d rather watch than try it yourself:

The Legend of Zelda: Ancient Dungeon, by arnpoly (romhacking.net)

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Pretendo

Pretendo is a recreation of the Nintendo Network, Nintendo’s online networking infrastructure for 3DS and Wii U software. It’s still under development, but when it’s fully operational it may even be able to resurrect lost and lamented services like Miiverse and Wii U Chat.

To help avoid legal entanglements it’s a clean-room reimplementation that doesn’t use Nintendo confidential documentation, which does slow their work, and users will have to make new accounts since they don’t have access to Nintendo’s account information (and wouldn’t want it if they did have access).

Even when Pretendo is usable by normal users, unless you’re playing using an emulator (Cemu is the only one that supports it), you’ll have to hack your system to use Pretendo’s servers. Currently the servers for some 3DS and Wii U games are still operational, but it’s only a matter of time before Nintendo shuts them down, just like they did with the Wii, despite its popularity. It is nice to know that people are working for replacement infrastructure for that eventuality.

A similar service, Wiimmfi, is in operation to replace the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection that Wii and DS games used.

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How Gravity Works in Super Mario Galaxy

Another Youtube video? Yeah I know. This one explains how gravity works in Super Mario Galaxy. It’s 29 minutes long. The basic gist is, there are eight kinds of invisible gravity field objects, based off of simple shapes, in the game, which are used in concert to create the various orientations that Mario switches to as he moves around: Parallel, Sphere, Cube, Disk, Torus, Cylinder, Wedge, Wire (basically an arbitrary path in space), and Cone, which is only used in two places.

An interesting fact from near the end of the video: gravity affects Mario’s shadow! Shadows point towards where Mario will fall, not according to how light strikes him, to give players a sense of where he is spatially in 3D space.

How Spherical Planets Bent the Rules in Super Mario Galaxy (Youtube, 30 minutes)

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Sundry Sunday: SIMPSONS PIXELS

It’s Sunday again! This time we have for you a seven-year-old fan-made pixel art version of the Simpsons opening. It’s gotten 27 million views since it was uploaded, but some of you must have missed it, right?

It’s loaded with jokes and in-jokes, and is so pitch-perfect that it got used on an actual episode of The Simpsons! It really needs to be paused frequently to catch every reference.

SIMPSONS PIXELS (Youtube, 1:52)

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Romhack Thursday: Metroid + Saving

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

What is the ultimate fate of the library of the NES? Right now a lot of people who played it in their childhood are still around. We won’t be around forever. Once we’re all gone, or even mostly, will anyone still care about them?

I don’t believe that game design goes obsolete, but novelty is a big driver of game enjoyment, and what was once popular can fuel a nostalgic appreciation. Once both of those things are gone, will NES games be able to win new generations of players to their side?

Metroid + Saving’s file select screen, showing collected items

I think there is reason to be hopeful in this area. After all, lots of speedrunners are focused on these games, and many of them are fairly young, not even having been born yet when the NES was new and Nintendo Power was in print. Still, there are some games that are a bit player unfriendly, viewed through modern eyes, and one of them is Metroid.

The original Metroid is a difficult game to enjoy now. It’s got a gigantic game world for a NES game, but no mapping option at all. To win the player must explore, find a lot of items necessary to winning, probably find some more that make winning viable to a non-expert, and fight countless monsters that can very quickly end the player’s session. While the player can continue as many times as they wish, they always resume at the entrance to the area they were in with only 30 health, so to survive long enough to resume their explorations they usually must spend a lot of time grinding for energy balls, a process that can take quite a lot of time.

Added is a basic wall jump feature! The time’s really tricky, but since the game was designed without one, it works out okay.

Nintendo generally doesn’t remake their older games, except occasionally with graphic upgrades, such as with Super Mario All Stars. The gameplay, however, they leave alone. But they did remake Metroid, as Metroid Zero Mission, which added a lot of the later niceties that Super Metroid introduced, has a much more logical game progression, and even has an expanded end game. It seems to indicate that even Nintendo thinks Metroid is a bit hard to get into.

The map reveals the layout of the whole game, but except for a few cases, you still have to search out important items.

There is a whole genre of romhacks devoted to fixing the more unfriendly aspects of older games, and one of the most successful of these hacks, in my opinion, is snarfblam’s Metroid + Saving. It’s recently gotten an unofficial update by SimplyDanny, which is slightly friendlier, but both are substantially more playable games to people who aren’t inured to classic Nintendo difficulty.

The first thing it does is get rid of passwords. People playing with savestates may not care, but there is a lot to be said for approaching these games as they were intended by their original makers. And Metroid’s first release, on the Famicom Disk System, did have save files! So the save functionality (if you’re playing on an emulator or supporting flash cart) isn’t a revision, it’s more of a restoration. You lose the JUSTIN BAILEY password, but it’s not like the original game isn’t still out there.

The door transitions have been made much faster!

But Metroid + Saving has a lot more going for it than just that. It has a map! In the original it appears when you pause, but SimplyDanny’s version also puts a small map inset in the upper-right corner of the screen. It’s not the first classic Metroid hack to add a map (that might be Parasyte’s Metroid Automap patch), but its inclusion here is well taken. It’s hard to express how helpful a map function is to new Metroid players. It changes the nature of the game, keeping a lot of its challenge, but reducing the frustration, and also helpfully providing hints as to where secret passages may lie.

Missile doors take fewer missiles to open!

The new unofficial addition also restores all your energy when you begin a new session, makes random health and missile drops more common, and makes the game subtly easier in a few other ways. The Ice Beam has been strengthened considerably, a change I don’t agree with (it seems too powerful now), but it does greatly reduce the number of shots you must pump into late game enemies.

If you tried out Metroid before and found it its diamond-hard surface too difficult to break, you should give this version a try. It’s still challenging, oh yes, but a lot more accommodating to newbies. It is a version of Metroid for the ages.

Metroid + Saving 0.3, made by snarfblam

Metroid + Saving 0.5.2, modified by SimplyDanny

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