Metroid
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Warning: This Article contains the spoiler that Samus is a girl. |
| Metroid | |
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 Given the success of the Metroid Prime games in particular, some have suggested that Samus Aran should be Nintendo's new mascot. | |
| Developer(s) | Nintendo Retro Studios Team Ninja |
| Publisher(s) | Nintendo |
| Release date | 1986–present |
| Genre | Action, adventure, platforming, first-person shooter, third-person shooter, pinball, zombie apocalypse simulator, softcore striptease |
| Platform(s) | Every Nintendo system except the Nintendo 64, Virtual Boy, and Wii U |
| Platform of origin | NES |
| Rating | High for the Metroid Prime series, but declining since Metroid: Other M |
Metroid is one of the many video game franchises to be created by Nintendo. It involves a bounty-hunter-space-pirate-killing-galactic-federation-helping-metroid-hunting woman named Samus Aran. Boss.
Gameplay[edit]
Metroid immerses gamers in a hyper-realistic world of jumping, shooting, and exploring really creepy dungeons in outer space. Gameplay involves backtracking through surreal levels, followed by more backtracking, and even more, all the while fighting off bizarre monsters that apparently have nothing better to do than crawl/fly around in the same preordained pattern for eternity. There's also a very annoying pattern where you start the game off in what seems like it could be a suit of total win, but one slight bump causes you to lose every single ability. Thankfully, this is mostly present in the Prime series, which even fewer people play than the other ones. You must then spend 50+ hours recovering said abilities, so that you can use three of them on the final boss.
Metroid is in no way similar to any other games, perhaps being one of the most immerse and creative games out there. For instance, it has been widely acclaimed for letting gamers roll into a ball, thereby getting to live out their latent fantasies of being a hedgehog. It is also known for its shooting from the arm-cannon feature, not to mention the ability to charge up blasts, among hundreds of other upgrades. Recently, the series has abandoned the rolling, jumping, shooting, and mass genocide approach to gaming and gone decisively into hardcore sex, raising concern and ire from various U.S. politicians who have nothing better to do except support more jumping, shooting, and mass genocide overseas. In the upcoming game Super Smash Bros.: Xtreme Beach Volleyball, Samus will participate in a mass orgy along with other characters from Nintendo and Solid Snake. Exact details haven't been given, but the orgy will be shown on June 9 of whichever year the game exits development hell.
Characters[edit]
Samus Aran[edit]
Also known as "Metroid" by people who've never played the games. She is the main protagonist of the Metroid series, a human-Chozo-Metroid-X-parasite-Phazon hybrid. Despite being the "protagonist", Samus is seen engaging in systematic desecration of religious sites, widespread genocide, destruction of indigenous species, and other loathsome crimes, and apparently getting paid to do so. Despite being able to kick your ass, she also has time to clip her eyebrows and keep her hair in a huge ponytail underneath her helmet, like some sort of turban. Oh yeah, did we mention she was raised by birds? In the early years of the franchise, her gender and sex appeal was not a huge selling point, but things took a drastic turn ever since Metroid: Zero Mission and its introduction of the skintight Zero Suit, a now-essential component in recent Metroid games and the various fan works.
Ridley[edit]
A huge dragon who Samus fights at least once every game because he has no friends, appearing often for no real reason other than to wreck everything and trigger the self-destruct sequence of whatever area you happen to be fighting in. He is the leader of the Space Pirates and responsible for the destruction of Samus's home colony, not even leaving her a kitchen to be in. In Metroid: Other M, he starts off as a Furby, but later evolves and scares the living shit out of Samus.
Kraid[edit]
The other major Space Pirate commander besides Ridley that Samus fights. Despite being considered an iconic character, he was only able to appear in the original Metroid and Super Metroid, not counting the Metroid: Zero Mission remake of the former and his very own Mini Me sidekick also appearing in the latter. Kraid made a guest appearance in Super Smash Bros. Melee as part of an advertising deal, but passed away before he could appear in Metroid Prime due to obesity-related health issues. His signature moves in battle include flinging his own fingernails, shooting spikes out of his belly, and impersonating Godzilla.
Space Pirates[edit]
The main race of antagonists in the Metroid series, the Space Pirates are notorious for being amongst the dumbest video game characters ever created. Their sole purpose in the games seems to be to build their bases in such a way that makes it as easy as possible for Samus to get through. Their efforts towards this goal include installing doors that open only after being hit with certain beams, installing map, ammo, and health dispensers that can only be accessed via a cannon arm, and connecting all of the rooms through an enormous series of Morph Ball-sized tubes. While the Space Pirates themselves have no apparent means of using any of this, Samus can use all of it, nicely allowing her to continually destroy all of their shit...again and again and again.
Mother Brain[edit]
Mother Brain is the evil mastermind behind the events of the first Metroid game on the NES and Super Metroid, which is fairly obvious after just one look at her. The official manga released alongside Metroid: Zero Mission explains that the all-knowing Chozo built her to take over all the hard work thinking about stuff, and she joined the Space Pirates at the first chance she got since they were more exciting to be around. Furthermore, Samus' Chozo DNA donor accuses her of being jealous of Samus, presumably because Samus has boobs while Mother Brain does not. Unfortunately, not many gamers know these things since Nintendo never officially told anyone outside of Japan about the manga's existence in the first place.
The first time Samus and Mother Brain square off, the latter is content to sit in a glass jar while using remote-controlled turrets to try and make the game into a bullet hell. Samus blows her up by shooting a ton of missiles directly into Mother Brain's sole eye, which in turn causes the whole base to explode after a mandatory escape sequence with a conveniently-set timer. The second time they meet in Super Metroid, Samus apparently kills Mother Brain again in the exact same manner, until Mother Brain reveals that she has foreseen this and used her psychic powers to grow a whole body, and even a mouth for roaring. This lets her fire rainbows at Samus, which are her only known weakness, until the Baby Metroid steals this power and gives it to Samus. Samus permanently defeats Mother Brain, as rainbows are her only known weakness too, and again goes through a mandatory escape sequence with a conveniently-set timer.
Mother Brain enjoys temporary reincarnation in Metroid: Other M as the lazily-named "MB", and has a much less epic death there now that she finally has boobs like Samus'. Mother Brain retired from the Metroid series after her career-ending mistake of appearing in this game, and now works in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U / 3DS as a recurring cameo.
List of games[edit]
Here is a complete list of all the games released in the series so far. Nintendo may release more if it can be determined that the cash cow still has milk left in it.
Metroid (NES)[edit]
The first game in the Metroid series, released in 1986 to compete with Pong. The plot revolves around Samus Aran, who decides to visit the planet Zebes to destroy various alien creatures simply minding their own business, the metroids, Mother Brain, and the finally the whole planet, in that exact order. She also assassinates Kraid and Ridley along the way, because they owed her money for previous bounty hunting missions.
The game tanked on retail shelves, once people realized it had terrible graphics, tinny music and sound effects, sloppy controls, and uninspired level design featuring miles of repeated tunnel sections and hiding upgrades inside walls as a gimmick. It was also full of glitches, probably because the programmers lazily copied the code for Kid Icarus and just changed the sprites.
The game series should have died right then and there. However, the deep and intriguing plot created a cult following, leading some gamers to beg Nintendo afterwards for a new 2D Halo clone like the original. Above all else, Metroid single-handedly emasculated an entire generation of gamers by showing them at the end of the game that the cool space bounty hunter guy they were playing as was actually a sexy woman.
Metroid II: The Return of Samus[edit]
The second game in the Metroid series, released on the Game Boy in 1991 to commemorate the fall of the Soviet Union. In this game, Samus is asked by the future United States government to travel to planet SR388 and wipe out all the metroids there to eliminate any remaining traces of the Soviet Union. After she kills the Queen Metroid (revealed to be the reincarnation of Vladimir Lenin), she finds one last baby Metroid, which hatches before her and is promptly adopted.
Metroid II also sold poorly, even worse than the first game on the NES. It shared all of the same design flaws and even more copied Kid Icarus code, but was now also in black and white in order to save money on artwork. However, the cult following for Metroid continued to grow.
Super Metroid[edit]
Released in 1994 for the Super Nintendo. Samus drops off the baby Metroid at a research station after realizing she couldn't afford canned food for it. However, Ridley steals the Metroid, and Samus chases him back to Zebes, since he apparently still owed her money. Once there, the game becomes an exact replica of the original Metroid game, except with something finally resembling decent graphics. The baby Metroid nearly eats Samus before Mother Brain saves her, which Samus repays in kind via rainbow-lasers to the eye. Zebes blows up (again) and Samus flies off to go on vacation.
The mainstream gaming market briefly took notice, but by this point not even the fact that a brand-new game engine containing no Kid Icarus code could save the series from its struggling sales. Nintendo, famous for listening to input from fans, quickly rushed out Virtual Boy into mass production, touting its "futuristic three-dimensional gameplay." Sadly, the Virtual Boy did not include a Metroid title, and the platform was doomed from the get-go. When a Metroid title failed to appear on the wildly popular Nintendo 64, fanboys attacked Nintendo of America headquarters with homemade lightsabers, until they were escorted away by security. Goldeneye 007 came around instead, and Nintendo decided to shelve the Metroid series until nobody could remember how terrible it was.
Metroid Prime[edit]
After the dawn of the new millennium, the combined prayers of the Metroid cultists had finally been realized. Nintendo gave the little-missed series a reboot in the Prime series. In the first Metroid Prime, Samus tracks down Ridley again to the planet Tallon IV (not that he still owed her any money; she just hated him by now). While there, Samus explores a interactive museum of alien natural history, and also kills some more space pirates. She kills Ridley again, and defeats Metroid Prime itself.
Gamers showed massive interest in this entry into the series, because they wanted to see Samus' boobs in 3D at long last. However, she only takes off her helmet at the end of the game, leading some to accuse Nintendo of false advertising in order to drive up sales. Metroid Prime could also be seen as Nintendo's attempt to cash in on the first-person shooter fad started by Halo, which this game was a near-complete copy of. Nevertheless, Metroid was now earning Nintendo money, prompting the development of obligatory sequels and spinoffs. This game and Super Smash Bros. Melee were the only things keeping the GameCube console afloat.
Ever since Metroid Prime was released, Halo fans have accused the Metroid series of being a ripoff of their series. This is all despite the fact that Metroid started in 1986, fifteen years before Halo. Ever since this game was released, Halo fans have accused Metroid of being a ripoff of their series. This is despite the fact that Metroid started in 1986 and Halo in 2001.
Metroid Fusion[edit]
Released at the same time as Metroid Prime so players could unlock a hideous extra suit in the former if they also bought a Game Boy Advance and special link cable. Taking place after Super Metroid, Samus gets an alien infection, but then is injected with Metroid cells, which somehow changes her DNA and lets her eat the infection. She then must go to a research station filled with infected creatures, where she regains her abilities, takes on a doppelganger and blows up the station, this time supposedly killing off (for real) the Metroids for good, which could have prevented the problem in the first place.
After having a taste of Metroid Prime, gamers simply couldn't be bothered to return to the 2D games, and Metroid Fusion did not sell well. No new 2D Metroid games were released by Nintendo until Metroid: Samus Returns (see below).
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes[edit]
Using what they learned from trial and error up until this point, Nintendo finally understood that modern gamers wanted first-person shooters. Thus, they released Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, in which Samus thinks she is going to planet Aether to save some Federation troopers on a camping trip gone awry, but instead must take on a series of clichés. These include such staples as a light/dark world for twice the backtracking, an evil twin, and Samus losing all of her powerups yet again at the start of the game.
Metroid Prime Pinball[edit]
An unremarkable pinball game made for the Nintendo DS, despite the fact that it could have been implemented just as easily as an actual pinball table in an arcade somewhere and probably would have made more money. It was meant to be used with the Rumble Pak, which has since persuaded Nintendo to never again include an expansion or peripheral port on any future DS handhelds out of its sheer uselessness. For some reason, however, it proved to be quite popular with female gamers. Reportedly this game was "too scary" for the majority of its six players.
Metroid Prime: Hunters[edit]
Another spinoff from the main Metroid Prime series. Samus must collect eight octoliths by fighting the same two bosses over and over, and also periodically promote feminism by defeating rival bounty hunters, all of which are male. The single-player mode somehow managed to suck worse than the 2D Metroid games, which is an incredible achievement on Nintendo's part and would not be topped until the release of Metroid: Other M later. The real draw is the multiplayer, which has the distinction of being the ultimate online glitchfest, with the winner being whoever is using a Game Shark or knows the most ways to hide inside walls. Few players were leet enough to remain by the time Nintendo finally shut down the DS online play servers, when it was as if a handful of voices cried out from their moms' basements, and were suddenly silenced.
Metroid: Zero Mission[edit]
A Game Boy Advance remake of the original Metroid for the NES, with the primary concern of crappy graphics better addressed. A few fans bought this game when they heard about the extra part added at the end where Zero Suit Samus is playable, but were disappointed that the pixelated 2D graphics still didn't provide them the boob jiggling they secretly hoped for. For the most part, this game has since faded into obscurity, as it brought nothing new to the series.
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption[edit]
Metroid fans were done with filler by now, so the third game installment released on the Wii. Dark Samus is recycled as the primary threat from Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, and three new bounty hunters were introduced in this game: one with the best music, one with the most forgettable music, and one which was a gymnastic lesbian constantly trying to rape Samus during her boss fight. They all get infected with some glowing blue chemical, which provided the art team the excuse they needed to overuse the color blue and bloom lighting effects. Samus finally finds the planet where the color blue comes from, then defeats Dark Samus and the Mother Brain ripoff she possesses once and for all.
By this point, many fans started to feel that the Metroid Prime series had gone stale, and Nintendo agreed. They needed a new game which would do better justice for the old 2D "classics", and they secretly set to work on their masterpiece.
Metroid: Other M[edit]
The critically-acclaimed game which many felt was the best Metroid title ever. Samus receives a distress call from the "Bottle Ship", which is yet another mismanaged biological research station. Upon arrival, she meets her father figure/lover Adam Malkovich, some token black guy who remembers Samus from a previous life, and an android with Mother Brain's programming and severe PMS. The secret connection between Ridley and Furbies is also revealed, further deepening the story.
Critics and fans alike praised the magnificently-written plot, which Nintendo brought William Shakespeare back from the dead for specifically to write on minimum wage and a tight deadline. Samus in particular was praised for finally being portrayed as a strong, compelling character with excellent voice acting. The gameplay, which constantly shifted between a 2.5D shooter and a "Where's Waldo?" first-person mode, was heralded as revolutionary. Many complained that the previous entries of the franchise relied too much on non-linear exploration, and praised the fact that Other M was a lot more straightforward, complementing on how the game basically gives you every item necessary to beat it without having to do any work to deserve it. Given how hard this game was going to be to top, Nintendo is taking its time trying to come up with an even better sequel for the Nintendo 3DS.
Metroid Prime: Federation Force[edit]
The aforementioned cash cow did start to run out of milk, so Nintendo desperately mutated it with some leftover Phazon. According to the Space Pirate scientists overseeing the experiment, Nintendo went all-out on making sure Metroid: Other M is not the series' most memorable moment. Nintendo's design goals for the title included combining the worst gameplay elements of all the previous titles, re-animating the multiplayer component, and adding some new abominations (and fewer aliens), then wrapping them all up in the artistically-creative style of a Nintendo 64 game in 3D. Metroid Prime: Federation Force aimed to provide Nintendo 3DS owners the best excuse yet to stick to Super Smash Bros. 3DS, Pokémon X/Y or even Mii Plaza for their gaming enjoyment.
Nintendo's R&D department notably spent most of development trying to figure out how they could compress even more shit into the memory space of a single 3DS game card than ever before; their goal to achieve maximum capacity before the game's 2016 release succeeded magnificently, as their dismal sales figures indicated. It is for this reason that some critics felt the game could potentially gain a cult following, as it represented a stunning technical masterpiece despite commercial failure.
Metroid: Samus Returns[edit]
Nintendo sat on the Metroid series for a while as they struggled to come up with ideas for another game. Eventually, some Spanish developers high on mercury fumes pitched an idea for remaking that one Game Boy title nobody remembered anymore, and try to pass it off as a brand-new adventure. Not quite sure how to ruin the games next, Nintendo gave them the go-ahead.
Around the time development started, the developers sobered up from their mercury high just long enough to realize that none of them actually knew how to develop a video game. Fortuitously, the team became aware of the AM2R fan game, which was the best Metroid game of all time since it was free. They "borrowed" most of the game's code, while Nintendo sued AM2R's developers out of existence to cover their tracks. With a splash of 2.5D paint and an aggressive marketing campaign, Nintendo unleashed the game to the masses.
To everyone's surprise, Metroid: Samus Returns sold exceptionally well. This was despite criticism from longtime fans of the series, who complained that no genuine Kid Icarus code was left in the game's stolen engine. Critics especially liked the new Amiibo features, which required players to buy cheap plastic toys just to unlock hand-holding upgrades and a cosmetic upgrade to Samus' suit before using them to collect dust.
Metroid Prime 4 (in development)[edit]
Roughly a decade after the last release in the original Prime trilogy series, Nintendo decided to announce a new game in the first-person shooter sub-series by showing a glowing logo in a trailer on YouTube, preceded by an unrelated video ad of roughly the same length. Metroid fans cried for joy at seeing the logo, with some calling it the "most beautiful thing [they've] ever experienced", and "the essence of Metroid, perfectly distilled into a single typographical work of art". The logo video was so well received, Nintendo is planning to simply release Nintendo Switch cartridges containing only the video in portable HD to be replayed over and over again to fans' content. A late 2018 release date for the video cartridge is planned with no actual accompanying game, although some fear it could end up becoming vaporware like Duke Nukem Forever.
History[edit]
Samus Is a Girl[edit]
Metroid was originally designed in 1986 to train Japanese youths in the way of mass extermination of foolish Americans, but sold poorly in this category. In 1987, it was rebranded for the American market as a game that focused on the mindless destruction of a flying jellyfish that ate people's brains (this brain-eating has been the subject of gamers' debates over whether Metroid is a zombie apocalypse simulator). This time, it was a rousing success.
Perhaps most of all, the star of the game, Samus Aran, was a girl. It is rumored that she was intended to be the typical cocky male hero who attracts cocky male gamers because they can imagine they are as jerkass as all that, but a courageous, computer geek female gamer (identity unknown) broke into Nintendo and changed the last scene so that Samus was a girl in the final credits. Nintendo, of course, didn't care that the reign of chauvinism in gaming was over — all they cared about was dancing dollar signs in their eyes.
Samus was received well by the public (even if it was by sexually charged teenage boys and weird old men), and was also the main reason that Nintendo decided to acknowledge female gamers, instead of just throwing them into the Black Hole of Calcutta for a century or two whilst continuing to make Game Boys, like they were used to. It appears as though Nintendo received brain cells for a few seconds whilst the idea of Samus Aran was conceived and decided to act on it, if only to have some fun staring at her chest during the animation times and using the excuse that, "They don't look right, dude. Maybe if I saw them without the Power Suit...".
The Sexy Secret of Metroid[edit]
Developer Nintendo raised some eyebrows (not to mention dropped some monocles from the more well-heeled amongst the video gaming community) when they included a crude scene of Samus doffing her armor and getting hot wax dripped on her by a lecherous metroid as a reward to the gamer for finishing the game in under ten seconds. Titillated by both the 8-bit rendition of run-of-the-mill sexual sadism and the revelation that the ass-kicking, shooting, jumping hero they had been shooting with and rolling into balls as was, in reality, a woman (albeit an 8-bit woman), gamers everywhere developed an obsessive and irrational love for Metroid. These sexually challenged trolls hoped, erroneously, that future games would include further five-second clips of a heavily pixelated woman doing it with a space-jellyfish-thing, but would remain disappointed for a very long time.
Although Samus was a breakthrough for female gamers sick and tired of playing a dude, by 2004 it seemed Nintendo wanted to get back to the straight male demographic, and so they introduced the Zero Suit — a form-fitting, somewhat-demeaning bodysuit that lies under her kickass Power Suit — as a selling point of the new game, Metroid: Zero Mission. This transformed her from a somewhat-pleasuring character into an object of intense sexual desire among nerds. Ever since Samus first strut around in the Zero Suit, everyone found the suit super-hot-'n-cool, and every cosplayer, female or male, wanted one. Nintendo double-dipped-down on this with the exclusive GameCube release, Gang Bangin' in the Meroid Lane, which backfired when the game was widely criticized as containing nothing but sticky, hardcore sex, and not so much the shooting, jumping, and ball-rolling action that had previously defined the series.
Parents' Groups, Hillary Clinton, and "Joltin' Joe" Lieberman React and Save the Chillins[edit]
With the controversial 2004 release of Gang Bangin' in Da 'Troid Lane, Washington finally took notice of what dateless losers across the world had known for 20 years: there was a woman under the armor, but she wasn't as strong nor independent as once believed, and did indeed needed at least three men at the same time to help her through "hard times". Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT), after playing the game for a week straight in his closed chambers, emerged looking rumpled, a bit sweaty, and definitely shaken. Said Lieberman:
| “ | Truly, if this game is purchased by children, children will be treated to some of the roughest, stickiest, hardest digital sex commercially available, making such virtual sex standards as Virtual Vixen, Sexy Beach 2, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Hot Coffee Mod look like Peek-a-Boo Poker. This cannot happen, and I look forward to examining more Metroid titles in the future, so I can think of some good legislation to pass. For the childrens. | ” |
Parents groups, such as MAVVGASSIVGTNNBSG (Mothers Against Violent Video Games and Sexual Situations in Video Games Though Not Necessarily Both in the Same Game), when questioned about the possible negative effects of the raw human sexuality epitomized by the latest entry in the Metroid series, started shrieking incoherently and banging on iron pots with wooden spoons to get their point across, though what their point was is unclear at this moment.
Lean years and near-death[edit]
Upon the 2010 release of Metroid: Other M, fans anticipated the return of triumphant return of old Samus, the tough, stoic, badass Queen Bitch. Unfortunately, they ended up with an oversensitive, overdramatic, whiny, cowardly girl who let herself to be pushed around by her former commanding officer/daddy figure. Instead of blowing up stuff and being cool, Samus did nothing but cry and spill her emotions.
For the next few yeas, prospects of another Metroid game looked weary, due to the series not getting mentioned by Nintendo during its 15th anniversary. Then came E3 2015, when Nintendo announced Metroid Prime: Federation Force. The fanboys' cheers of joy quickly faded into stunned silence, as the game was not to feature Samus, but rather a bunch of Federation marine chibi dudebros. Despite not being released yet, the game instantly garnered the unbridled nerd rage of a thousand screaming virgins. A Google search for "Metroid Prime: Federation Force" returns a Change.org petition to get Nintendo to "cancel the game" as one of the first results.
A series that used to be on top of the world has now been reduced to a laughingstock, just like Sonic the Hedgehog. Metroid is dead, unless the galaxy is invaded by the "other Metroid". Fans are recommended to "pray for a true peace in the [sic] space" (or Sylux's restraining order to expire in time for a fourth Metroid Prime installment).
Reception[edit]
Metroid earned widespread acclaim and went on to become an international video game sensation. In the series, there is nearly a score of non-chronologically-ordered games, comic books, manga adaptations, soundtrack audio cassettes, mugs, fridge magnets, potted plants, designer bags, panties, flamethrowers, and Zero Suit ecchi, all of which have sold millions of copies.
Bungie attempted to cash in on the series' wild success with their rival series Halo, starring Samus's male counterpart the Master Chief, but they could not attain the same level of quality nor popularity as Metroid.
See also[edit]
- Super Smash Bros.
- Dead Space
- Unreal Tournament
- Halo – Metroid except Samus is a guy.
- Castlevania – Metroid in a mansion.
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