Super Metroid – Establishing the Doctrine

August 19th, 2010

The original Metroid may not be as sharp as Super Metroid, but it does have one trump over its SNES successor, being its initial assertion of exploration-driven gameplay. A year prior to Metroid‘s release, Super Mario Bros. had taught players that walking to the right-hand side of the screen would advance the game. Metroid, in a master stroke of studio-wide realization and subversion, did the exact opposite: it told players to go left. If the player walked left, instead of the assumed right, at the game’s onset, they would stumble upon Metroid‘s first power-up, the morph-ball, thereby allowing the player to bypass a stumbling block a few screens to the right. As with Super Mario Bros. and that first goomba, the player cannot progress until they have understood the fundamental principles of the game. In one fell swoop, Metroid succinctly communicated its doctrine of subversive exploration.

Super Metroid‘s takes a much less momentous approach but wisely integrates the morph-ball bomb technique, which becomes a crutch for exploration throughout the entire game. Early on in Super Metroid, after the player becomes acquainted with the basic controls, they’re lead through a cavern to a seemingly dead end. They’re as stuck and confused as anyone who’d just been lead down the wrong path would be. After some fumbling about, the player will likely go back to the wall, look around until they notice that at the bottom of the wall is a block with an unsuspecting texture which mildly stands out from the fungus growing around it. A short morph-ball bomb later and—voila!—the block evaporates and the game continues.

Right there, by raising the bar high in this initial instance, Super Metroid doesn’t just set a precedence for exploration but also demands the player learn the tools (morph-ball bomb) and adopt the observation techniques (out of place textures) required to explore properly. As put by co-creator Yoshio Sakamoto in an interview with RetroGamer magazine:

We wanted players to explore everything we’d made and then move on. That’s why we designed the maps in such a way that the player couldn’t escape without exploration, or in such a way that the player would end up back at a starting point before advancing. The player would be cornered/driven and would eventually be forced to stop and say, “Right, how should I think about this area?” That’s the essential point of Metroid’s map design.

Since such a significant chunk of exploration—namely in the first half of the game, but nonetheless throughout—is based around the morph-ball bomb technique, it can be argued that Super Metroid is simply more specific with what it teaches. This makes sense as Super Metroid scaffolds tutorials around the player continuously throughout the experience in the most minute and unnoticeable ways. The original Metroid, on the other hand, sets the player up briefly and then lets them loose on a massive environment with minimal help or suggestion.

Super Metroid – The Mental Map

August 16th, 2010

Game designers create rules, a system of challenges and a gateway into that challenge (tutorial). Players, through their participation of the game world, mutually agree on the terms set by the designers. Therefore, there is something of a student and mentor relationship at work between player and designer. (Mr. Miyamoto recently commented on this phenomena a little himself). The foundation of this relationship is that of the relevant skills required to defeat the game: the teacher wishes to teach these skills, the student wishes to learn them. In which case Metroid is a test in observation and a test in the application of tools (power-ups).

Metroid‘s challenges, its tests, if you will, are built into its environment in the form of realizing suspicious chunks of area and then devising a way on how to clear that area to make progress to the next planetary subsection. Sometimes you’ll have the means to make headway, and other times you’ll need to mentally bookmark or flag down the spot to return afterwards. On a wider level though, Metroid, keeping in fashion with its exploration roots, also challenges the player in a third test of skill: the skill of mapping out one’s exploration.

In terms of what the player is constructing in their head, Metroid is an array of these “hotspots” (suspicious rooms which may be mined for progress) linked together into coherent routes and mapped around save stations. These mental pathways are connected through distinct visual markers which define particular chunks of environment from one another. When we play a Metroid game, we visualize these mental maps, with support from the in-game map itself (of which doesn’t contain the information gathered from exploration), and, in accordance to this mental map, we pursue the next string of clues.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls5uo4xidwQ

Not only do we visualize these routes, often with aid from the map, but said routes are cross-checked against our current ability set as to whether they are viable or not to the area in question. Sometimes these clues lead us to undiscovered areas, sometimes these clues lead us to areas we’ve previously visited.
Most vividly we are concious of this play pattern right after we load the game up and begin at the last save point. It’s here that we gather our strategies and formulate a course of action, so at this point, the mental map is most relevant.

Keeping the Squeeze

Super Metroid, above all other games in the series, facilitates exploration management fantastically. The two most obvious reasons for this are the inclusion of an in-game map and the improved graphical capabilities over the original Metroid.

The in-game map works as a crutch for players to refresh their own mental map. Wisely, R&D1 chose to segment the main map away from the core gameplay by virtue of the pause screen, only offering a mini-map of surrounding rooms while the player navigates Samus. In this way, where pausing to check the map disrupts the flow of gameplay, players are persuaded into relying upon their established mental map.

With the added power of the SNES, environments – i.e. the visual markers which we use to identify and compress the landscape – are capable of being more distinct, hence making it easier for players to crystallize visual markers into their memory.

“Dead ends” – pathways that the player would preempetively follow before they receive the respective power upgrade necessary to progress in said area – from the original Metroid, now offer up minor weapon upgrades in Super Metroid, thereby decreasing player pitfalls and frustration while at the same time rewarding early curiosity.

Super Metroid is also a far more smartly segregated title than the original Metroid. The environments, while equally as large as the original Metroid, are focused into shorter, more succinct instances of play. Save points quarantine these instances of play that can later be mined for leads which allows for some dynamic threading of routes. Hub rooms, often near the entrance to a new area, take on a more skeletal structure with the purpose of each pathway conveyed more promptly. That is:

some areas are hard blocked with sealed doors, indicating a long delay before the player revisits with new power-ups;
some areas which require a currently-unavailable-but-soon-to-be-acquired power-up are softly marked, promptly too, as in the first room or so. Examples of these soft markers used to detract the player are a sudden absence of background music, flora and fauna met with apparent markers of essential-but-still-not-acquired weaponry (boost tracks, swinging junctions). These indicators, used to steer the player back on course, are made apparent in the first room or so (Metroid would often lead players down long corridors before confirming to players that they’re presence in the area was not currently required); and
areas that the designers wish the player to advance through are often backed up by the respective sub-terrain theme music, denser wildlife population and a more visually “alive” environment.

The fascinating thing about Super Metroid is how the maps begin by following this skeletal structure and then, as the player subsequently revists one area multiple times over, hidden divergences bleed into the map structure (ingeniously represented by a different colour on the pause-screen map). The maps therefore begin in cocoon-like states, allowing the player to build a foundation of the environment, then, once their mental map consolidates, the pathways blossom into one another as reliance on the in-game map fades.

With the bleeding of the map, cleaner visual markers, fewer dead ends, a more logical and directed conveyance of purpose within the environments, Super Metroid constantly feeds the player’s mental map and thereby continuously drills the emergent skill of exploration management.

Super Metroid – The Tenets of a Metroid Game

August 9th, 2010

The Tenets of a Metroid Game

Although Metroid can be categorized as a platforming shooter within a space-themed context, the franchise isn’t so much about the shooting or the jumping at all. Rather, Metroid is all about that misplaced bit of space rock. You know, the one with a little bit of extra fungus. The one that, after met with a morph ball bomb, will string you down a tiny alley to a small chamber containing the next power-up. Progression in Metroid hinges on the abilities granted by various power-ups which are connected to a string of environmental puzzles. It’s in the player’s ability to realize these puzzles through acute observation and then use their ability set to act upon their observations that Metroid reveals its true colors as a game of deep observation and multi-faceted problem solving. Metroid has always relished in being more than what it presents itself as, and series fans appreciate the franchise for valuing the deep implicit over the loud and overt. There’s a maturity in the series which has gone untarnished even as the franchise has evolved from two to three dimensions.

Metroid is also an innovator, but rarely proclaims its achievements on the back of the box. The Metroid games have not just defined but also realized a style of video game narrative that intertwines story with landscape. Oftentimes in a Metroid game, you’ll find yourself entering a world where events have long passed, and as the player you piece together story through the visual, audio and interactive pieces of the landscape (in the Metroid Prime sub-series text is also included). Through it’s environment Metroid builds a civilization and tasks the player as a defacto cultural architect. In this regard, many of the environmental puzzles, particularly those which require the use of machinery or are constituted with cultural relics, act as demonstrations of civil processes. Rarely do video games build lore this rich, or yet, so seamlessly into the fabric of the gameplay. Metroid is a narrative of few words, but with depth that many strive for.

Tense atmosphere and the sense of isolation felt by the player are also tenets of the Metroid franchise. In Super Metroid, the title screen with the baby metroid in the jar establishes an almost complete absence of life. Again, the setting, but, more correctly, the sound is used as a device to control mood. Where many other games opt for busy noise, Metroid instead opts for controlled instances of silence followed up crescendos which build and create tensions. Moments where little happens, but much is felt.

Since the atmosphere, narrative and overall framework for exploration are harmoniously built into the environment and therefore the gameplay, Metroid is a franchise that stands as a testament to good game design. As Metroid‘s design is very medium-centric, relying on the factors that define video games (interactivity, adaptive environments), the franchise excels at conveying atmosphere, narrative and challenge to the player.

More obvious to mainstream video games folk is the fact that Metroid, through protagonist Samus Aran, champions femininity without sexualization or even glorification of the empowerment of women. Metroid, particularly Super Metroid – the title in question – has been a standout title for speed running, the art of completing a game in the shortest time possible. Overall then, Metroid is an eminent video game series, a series which fosters exploration, harmonious narrative and gameplay, atmosphere, works against the grain of video game gender stereotypes, yet facilitates dedicated game communities through speed running. And for all this, in the sense of the games themselves, Metroid is modest about its achievements which makes it all the more a champion.

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