[SM] Retroid

[ProjectXIX]

It's Retroid. Play NEStroid without shitty physics and controls and whatnot.

Credits:
DSO: helped with/straight up did most of the ASM, cool guy
RealRed: bitchin' elevators and title screen tileset
Grime: stars in title screen tileset
Quote: all the neat HUD shit
Scyzer: everything to do with Mother Brain's jar
ProjectXVIII: pretty much everything else (I'm totally not him shhhhhhhhhhhhhh)
zephyrtronium: :yum:

Download

[zephyrtronium]

:yum:

[Steel Sparkle]

I actually beat this with a time of 1:38 and 34%.
I wanna give my thoughts in the spoiler.
[spoiler]The Good
*I love the concept of SM remake of Metroid.
*The level layouts are pretty faithful to the orignal for the most part.
*The Physics of SM make this a lot more playable though having ALL of it's features would have been nice but thats just a nit pick.

The Bad
*ridely is a pain.
*The music in SM is good but i feel a few tracks like Brinstar and the boss music should have been their respective tracks. Sadly the Classic zebes patch does not work :c Why are all the boss themes Spore spawn and Deep maridia?
*I forgot to mention the map in brinstar breaks when you leave the area and come back.

Anyways that is all i have to say about the hack. It's fun and the conecpt is great and i never came across any glitches. All in all i give it a 3/5. Would be higher if those issues were looked at.[/spoiler]

[ProjectXIX]

Most issues with Ridley should be fixed with this release (so if you downloaded it before this post redownload it or prepare to not have fun). At the time I was just tired of trying to figure out how to make my own smaller Ridley so I just threw the vanilla one in there without much consideration (or playtesting for that matter) about his health or his room.

[Steel Sparkle]

Most issues with Ridley should be fixed with this release (so if you downloaded it before this post redownload it or prepare to not have fun). At the time I was just tired of trying to figure out how to make my own smaller Ridley so I just threw the vanilla one in there without much consideration (or playtesting for that matter) about his health or his room.

Ah okay that's nice to hear. Also the map in brinstar breaks when you leave and come back. or is that fixed too?

[ProjectXIX]

No idea why that happens, I'd have to guess it has something to do with KejMap or elevators being automatic save stations, maybe both.

[PHOSPHOTiDYL]

Also the map in brinstar breaks when you leave and come back. or is that fixed too?

This is still a problem... :(

[PHOSPHOTiDYL]

So in the statue room, I fell into the lava before the blocks came up. Cool idea, though.

[PHOSPHOTiDYL]

It is possible to complete the game without ice beam, as long as you have screw attack, and have a really good run through the metroids. For speedrunning purposes, I guess.

[MollyAncalime]

Now this was a joy to play.
0:58:22 38%

[RealRed]

Hype!

Congratulations on the release, Project. Real life took over and I totally forgot about this. It's great to see that this is a complete thing now. You still finished miles ahead of tbolt and phazar, too...

Will play this tonight or tomorrow.

[RT-55J]

1:14 32%

Good job.

This hewed much closer to the original that I was expecting. I really admire that level restraint.

Minor issues:
[spoiler]
- It's possible to defeat Mother Brain without completely destroying her jar. This makes it kind of awkward to escape afterwards (you still have to destroy the thing.
- Some of Ridley's attacks do 80 damage with Varia. imo, that feels a tad excessive (or maybe I'm just a weeny).
- A couple rooms in Kraid were labeled as being in Brinstar.
- The map goes to shreds if you save/quit or die.
- Ridley's area has a conspicuous lack of lava.
[/spoiler]

[Derakon]

Beating Ridley with 4 E-tanks, Varia, both beams, and 40 missiles is a pain in the ass. Maybe I should have gone to Kraid first?

Ridley's AI doesn't cope well with the larger room. If you stand on the right side of the room, he'll hardly ever bother you. Of course, you'll have trouble hitting him from there, too.

[personitis]

Beating Ridley with 4 E-tanks, Varia, both beams, and 40 missiles is a pain in the ass. Maybe I should have gone to Kraid first?

6 E-Tanks and 90 missiles and the stupid pelican was still pretty rough. Something people should know is that Ridley is very likely going to rock your ship when you get to him. Using a modified a Ki-Hunter would've been much more suiting I feel.

Beyond that, about as enjoyable as NEStroid can get, just slightly better since Super Metroid's engine adds some quality of life things. The room containing a special enemy near Ice Beam was a nice surprise. Really hated that holding run kills your spin jump though, even if run doesn't do anything. Final stats: 1:30:33, 33%.

[spoiler="Cheating" out Mother Brain]
Break the glass enough so that you can shoot missiles in but don't break it all the way. Spinjump into the opening, at which point you should be crouched. Spam missiles, don't worry about Rinkas, win game. To unstuck either morph out or angle up/down and break the rest of the glass.
[/spoiler]

[Jordan5]

Ridley's AI doesn't cope well with the larger room. If you stand on the right side of the room, he'll hardly ever bother you. Of course, you'll have trouble hitting him from there, too.

You say that, but he decided he liked to pogo on the right a lot for me.
[spoiler]

[/spoiler]


Anyway, so I played this last night and here's my thoughts on it.
[spoiler]
So I was quite looking forward to this, I'm a fan of NEStroid and so the prospect of being able to play it without such annoying hardware limitations was quite exciting. There were, however, a few bad design choices which took this from a fun hack to a slightly tedious one.

I know it was mentioned before, but the lack of spin jump while holding run (or not being able to run at all) seemed like a backwards idea. Because of this, the horizontal movement in a spin jump was increased which seemed off, making platforming annoying for a while.

You can't mid air morph unless you roll off of something? why is this a thing? makes no sense.

You can't crouch (I know you can't in m1 but samus is only 2 tiles high in that) so that's kinda annoying, but it's worse that you designed a section where you had to spin jump to force a crouch. Why can samus crouch then but not normally? again, makes no sense.

Kraid is a walkover and ridley is arbitrarily hard, a better balance needs to be made.

The ridley statue is actually a kraid statue, not intuitive at all, especially as they were used for more than just the statue room.

Ice beam was removed from its popular spot and put in the one no one ever goes to, why.

I know only 1 missile could be on screen initially, but that was due to hardware limitations right? like I don't mind you slowing the firing speed down, but it makes no sense to be able to spam them if you're a couple pixels from their impact point.


There were many good bits too! Having a map, being able to shoot on an angle, the addition of a couple mini bosses, the graphics and palettes, being able to shoot zebs with your beam, rinkas give drops etc etc. It's a shame, because it seems like a few possible oversights have plagued the hack and stopped it being as fun as it could be.
[/spoiler]

[Derakon]

Okay, I've finished now. Overall thoughts:

[spoiler]It's a neat idea, imperfectly executed. The difficulty varies substantially, with most of the game being pretty trivial, but Ridley being a major difficulty spike, and the Mother Brain escape being incredibly frustrating due to the glass not breaking and the excessive Rinka spawn. Seriously, fix that glass. It shouldn't stick around after MB is dead.

I'm also not thrilled by hi-jump boots being moved into Kraid, since that means a lot of IBJing if you go to Ridley first. In the NES game you really did want to go Ridley first, both for upgrades and because Kraid and his lair are much more difficult than Ridley and his lair.

Agreed on the statue thing being confusing. I thought that if I wanted screw attack, I had to have killed Kraid first, for example, and it's only because of this thread that I realized otherwise.[/spoiler]

Overall I got a claimed 30% of items, which was
[spoiler]75 missiles, 7 E-tanks, ice/wave/autocharge beams, hi-jump, screw attack, morphball, bombs, varia.[/spoiler]
Did I miss anything interesting?

[DonnyDonovan]

It makes me feel better that I'm not the only one having serious Ridley difficulties. 

[squishy_ichigo]

[spoiler=1:29, 34%]
well, I guess the first thing to say is 'lol, people complaining about no midair morph, walljumping, crouching, etc'
next I guess I should say, I enjoyed this for the most part, there were several things that weren't polished, but all in all, it was pretty much what I expected it to be

problems that aren't that hard to fix:
-fixing boss drop locations, so that they drop their drops in the proper places
-ridley lava was missing, but I know he already fixed that
-lol kraid flying....
-ridley does too much damage, if this was reduced, the fight would be on par with the difficulty of the rest of the hack
-mother brains glass blocking you until you destroy it
-ridley statue
-title screen gradient
-as someone said, a few rooms in kraid are mapped in brinstar for whatever reason
-map deleting itself upon death, would that be fixed by just applying scyzer's map patch?

minor complaints that are just my opinion:
-I personally would have preferred you only spin jump with dash held down, ie. the reverse of how it is now
-long beam instead of charge beam, that shit is just overpowered.......
-statues blocking a few items seemed unnecessary, but I understand the balance reasons
-no fake kraid? or am I just blind.....
-missiles lose a bit of their worth when you have op wave+ice and even worse with charge

things I rather liked:
-autosaving
-rainbow jump

WELLPLAYED
WELLPLAYED
WELLPLAYED
WELLPLAYED
WELLPLAYED
WELLPLA-

* squishy_ichigo is banned for spamming

[/spoiler]

[ProjectXIX]

After careful consideration of how lazy I am, I decided to fix Ridley's everything. Also Scyzer fixed a bunch of Mother Brain things.

Retroid 1.01 (or you could just scroll up and click the one at the top)

[PHOSPHOTiDYL]

Totally just ran through mother brain after destroying the glass. Couldn't go back, still finished the game.

[Digital_Mantra]

1:29 33% was a cool take on M1 in SM. Only flaw was map garbling during area transitions and death,
with the repetitive design scheme loyal to the first it makes your map a must have so fix this.

[RealRed]

Wow! this is better than I thought it would be. I'm hooked! Not a lot of hacks can muster that strength.

+Fundamentally feels different from Super Metroid thanks to control changes. Fuck the complainers.
+Righteous level design that looks and feels like Metroid 1 while taking a solid step up with background/fog aesthetics.
+shitloads of little polished extras that I wouldn't have thought of myself (blue->red energy drops, bomb sounds, things like that)
+Autosaving!

I'm really happy with the levels. Very basic and still incredibly effective, Colorful, and varied.

-I think it would be worthwhile to make a few final changes... map functionality, map icons, changing the text of the game over screen, 'Metroid 3' on the intro... With the amount of effort to put in all of the little metroid 1 quirks, it really feels strange when something Super Metroid pops up. A hack so good deserves better!

Don't hold me to this but I'd be willing to work on your item screen. I wouldn't even need to ASM hax to change the look to 'remove' spazer/plasma, space/speed, gravity, reserve tanks. Easy tilemap. The only gap that takes more than no effort is springball.

[A Dummy]

Gave this one a playthrough, thought it was pretty fun actually.
I'm with RealRed on this one, I enjoyed seeing the Metroid 1 quirks worked into Super Metroid.

My complaints would be that the map route was rather limited compared to the original Metroid. (Having to pick up High-Jump before being able to walk into Norfair. The long way around to Kraid seemed to be removed from what I could tell, making me get Ice Beam before being able to face him.)

And there were still a few NEStroid quirks missing, like getting extra missiles after killing Kraid and Ridley, Space Jumping off of Bomb explosions, fake Kraid, we also need to be able to place bombs more quickly with the only limit being 3 on screen at a time, and no Long Beam either. (Although that one is a bit arbitrary, and the charge beam was really cool to have instead.)

I also feel like this could really do with the Metroid 1 music as well, hearing the ambient music used for when you first land on Zebes for the Brinstar music just didn't really do it for me. (On the flip-side, the boss music choices for Kraid and Ridley actually made sense to me, as that's what sounds closest to the music you hear for these fights in M1.)

The guns were also missing from Mother Brain's room. :(

Overall though I had fun playing this, it could just use some more polish, and could be made just a little more NEStroidy.
4/5

[Dark-SA-X]

Played your hack not really happy with it.

1.Why couldn't samus have her default yellow power suit color, you could haved used the varia color with the varia item.
2.The map system like a few others mentioned is screwed up, I could go through crateria go into kraids lair, get halfway down there and the map tracking is gone ?
3.In norfair the first room, why is there no lava on the bottom of the floor, the 3 bubbles in the blocks is supposed on top not beneath the tiles.
4.The layout of zebes is good however it does not stick to the original route.
5.The mini boss was a good choice, hell I wouldn't mind running into crocomire for a quick lava dip.
6.The ground speed of samus is what is really sad, I prefer to hit y when I want to long jump over enemies just to get to another spot.
7.The planet music could have had more variety, especially the bosses.
8.The weapons are spot on for tearing up zebes but half the time its easy other moments its not.
Nice hyperbeam you left in ther had to use it once for ridley to shut him down.
9.Yeah just like everyone else mention ridley was abit too hard.
Looked at your rom in smile 2.5 ridley second form when he is turning is 4690, I dropped it back down 1130.
Upped the missle damage from 04 to 06 upped the beams to 04, after that he was dead as you can see in my video.
10. Palettes look great, that mother brain enemie you designed was clever, I think smzm, did you study that rom to pull that off ?

Rating it I won't do that to you yet, however though you should keep working on it and release another update in the future.
I'm sure one of metaquaris music patches will work, try slipping it in to make sure it works and won't corrupt your hack.
Adding in a colored samus status will work however use yy-chr and copy the colored tiles from one from to another and adjust it with smile rf.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqwSAn3_zD0

[Derakon]

Frankly I am all for not using the original Metroid music. That stuff was awful, and having it in MZM was one of the worst things about that remake. Metroid music needs to be subtle. And also to take longer than 30 seconds before it loops.

No complaints about the controls here. It was a little counterintuitive to not hold run all the time, but once you figure that out the controls are fine. I found the lack of ducking kind of hilarious though.

Honestly my complaints (playing against your first version) are just the obvious bugs with the map, the "enforced" Kraid/Ridley order, and the difficulty of the Ridley fight. It should be reasonably feasible to do Ridley first. But other than that, I'm quite happy with this hack. Nice work, and thanks for sharing it with the community!