Why I love: Metroid (NES)

Source: inintendo.net

Ah Metroid, probably one of Nintendo's best game franchises besides Mario and Zelda. I was going to talk about the history of the Metroid series for this blog post, but there's plenty of those retrospectives on the internet anyway. Instead, I'm going to talk about the very first game in the series and why I love it.

Metroid was released for the NES (Famicom as it was known as in Japan) on August 6, 1986 in Japan, a year later in North America, and finally on January 15, 1988 in Europe. The game was later remade for the Game Boy Advance, under the title Zero Mission, in 2004. The original game was also ported to the Game Boy Advance in 2004/5.

It was published by Nintendo (obviously) and co-developed by their R&D1 and Intelligent Systems teams. At the time they were making Metorid, they were also developing another game for the NES/Famicom called Kid Icarus.

Here's an interesting fact. When the game was translated for North American and European audiences, the name of the planet was Zebeth, instead of Zebes. They obviously corrected the error in Metroid games that were released after the original.

You play as Samus Aran. What shocked a lot of players when the game was originally released was the fact that the character you play as turned out to be a woman. So this was the first game to use a female protagonist as the main character. If it wasn't for Samus, then we might never have characters like Lara Croft from the Tomb Raider series.

Metroid was heavily influenced from the Alien film series, particularly the original one from 1979. No wonder why Samus Aran's arch-enemy was named after the director Ridley Scott.

A big part of Metroid is the exploration. This made it the first game where you're able to go back. In games like Super Mario Bros., you couldn't do that. You had to keep going right. I think the exploration element is, without a shadow of a doubt, the main reason why I love the original Metroid.

As with any game, it does have some flaws. One of those flaws are that you can only shoot left, right, and up. Thankfully, this was fixed in the original Metroid's successors.

What I find a bit odd is that the sequel was released for the Game Boy. Home console owners had to wait till 1994 for their next fix of Metroid on the SNES.

You can get the original Metroid game on both the Wii and 3DS's Virtual Console services. It costs 500 points on the Wii, and £4.50/$4.99 on the 3DS. Why not try it? You might be surprised...