Last week I made up my mind to face a demon of my childhood — the Metroid (1986) on the NES. Intimidating, not because I couldn’t finish it, but because of something I thought I’d never be able to do: finish the first playthrough in under an hour to get the best ending.
When I played Metroid as a child, I went in basically blind. I didn’t have maps or strategy guides, so I went about it in a trial-and-error kind of way. I think I tried to make my own map at some point, but that in and of itself was a huge project; before I had finished mapping the game, I think I had moved on to some other difficult game like Bionic Commando and couldn’t be bothered to actually put my map to good use.
I did eventually finish the game in my childhood, but I did so in probably the least efficient manner possible. Metroid shows one of five different ending images of the main character depending on how long it takes the player to finish the game. The grand prize among these is awarded when the game is beat within 60 minutes, and shows a scientifically unlikely image of Samus standing on the barren surface of a featureless planetoid in a bikini and a pair of boots, happily waving at the player (presumably right before she asphyxiates and dies).
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| Silver Star < Medal of Honor < THIS |
So Adult Me, now nearly 40 years old, went about re-creating the plan to achieve this ending. Normally I prefer visuals, i.e. maps, but Metroid’s world is so convoluted and repetitious, just looking at it in map form raises my blood pressure. In addition, having a map doesn’t really ensure the player will move through the game in the most time-efficient way possible. The non-linear nature of the game requires backtracking and allows flexibility, so even if you know where everything is, you still have to decide the order in which you do the tasks the game requires. So I decided to express my route through the game in the form of written steps.
My favored route changed a few times in the course of this preparation, always in favor of efficiency. For example, don’t ask me why, but at first I had it in my mind that I needed to pick up the long beam before the bombs. No particular reason, other than that was how I’d always done it back in the day. But at some point I realized there’d be less backtracking if I got the bombs first. This change shaved a couple of minutes off my clear time, as did several other changes like it along the way.
As is the case with all of my NES gameplay videos, I made my attempt using an emulator. Normally emulators offer advantages, the greatest being save states. I don’t like using save states because it diminishes from the desperation and drama that were integral to the gaming experience of the 8-bit era. So, in this case, I only saved my game state at the points where the password screen came up (an equivalent action to writing down and using the password).
This, combined with my concern about how long it would take to grind to full health after getting a game over, meant I would commit to starting over from the beginning if I died on the Kraid boss fight, which I did several times, in attempts not shown in this video. Without the wave beam (which is technically an optional item) or the varia suit, Kraid is easily the hardest fight in the game. But saving Kraid until after visiting Norfair to get the varia suit costs valuable time, so I went into that fight less ready than I would have been had I not been aiming for the best ending. Even on the attempt recorded here, I came within one hit of dying before I beat him.
Happily, after beating Kraid the whole game gets easier. In a way, Kraid is the Harvey Weinstein of Metroid. His defeat kicks off a veritable “me too” movement allowing Samus to prosecute all her abusers to the full extent of the law.
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| See? Literally the same. |
Yes, I did use the quick death input (the “up and A” trick) to jump to the password screen and save time while backtracking. In the end, I probably didn’t need to; my clear time (from selecting “START” to activating the final elevator, minus the time the game was paused) was about 48 minutes 40 seconds. I also abstained from using game-breaking glitches (like the “wall climb,” AKA the “door jump”) or sequence-breaking exploits (like crossing into Tourian without activating the bridge).
By the way, for all the advantages of using an emulator, there is one serious disadvantage. When Samus takes damage, she flickers. Because she flickers at a rate just slightly faster than the refresh rate of a 60 Hz monitor, she sometimes disappears completely after taking damage. When she takes a hit and falls into lava, this results in real frustration. Trying to guide an invisible Samus out of lava is like trying to flip an invisible 200-pound pancake while someone tickles you.
In the attempt that ended up in this video, there is a precarious period in the Norfair section of the game in which my health literally dropped to one, and stayed under 20 points for some time. (Apologies for the several minutes of low health warning alarm that resulted from this. That’s one of the most stress-inducing sounds in the history of video games.) But I wasn’t too worried about dying because, having recently gotten a password, I could have resumed play from right after having beaten Kraid and suffered no real setback. Luckily I enjoyed special treatment from the little "lava dragon" enemies, who unanimously agreed not to spit fireballs at me for some reason. Then I made it to the screw attack item, a major turning point for Samus’s offensive power, and reached the Miniboss Hideout II energy tank without dying. Finally, in Tourian, I had good luck in the form of one crucial missile drop from killing a metroid, which allowed me to survive the final room without running out of missiles.
Finally achieving Metroid's best ending made me want to revisit other tough games from my childhood. Bionic Commando, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Battletoads...games I cleared as a younger man, but have to muster up some patience to clear now. When I do, you can be sure I'll make videos.
If there's one thing for which I respect Japanese game publishers to no end, it's that they've got guts. You don't give a game a title that takes longer to say than it does to write unless you're reasonably sure the game will live up to its epic moniker. And in the case of Banpresto's