Super Metroid - A Different Mission 1.2 Update

[Jasler7]

1.2 Update Changelog
Some rooms that were not shown what items you need have been changed.
Fixed that softlock in Maridia suitless Plasma Spark Room. (tbh, get high jump/spring ball/gravity before going to Maridia.)
Fixed that weird door at the elevator near Red Tower.
Also the ips file is created from the actual rom, so if it seems too big, then tough luck.
That'll be all, unless there's more problems.

[andlabs]

Locking your own topics immediately after opening them is poor etiquette. This criticism is against 1.0; I was already at 99% item collection when 1.1 was posted so I wasn't interested in playing the entire hack again, sorry.

There are a lot of serious design problems with this hack. Way too many places for potential permastucks, including an especially nasty one at the end of the game due to the arbitrary and extremely poor decision to not have Metroids drop any item refills when destroyed (that may not help 100% if the RNG is unkind to you that day, but would make this permastuck extremely less likely). Placing enemies in front of doors where you can't dodge them at all (Skrees) or deal with them if you're not shooting in the right direction on the first few frames (Metroids, other enemies) is just straight up cruel. There are specific rooms that are also cruel, like the one right before Spore Spawn, in which the random and pointless spike placement that was there so far suddenly turns into actively harmful and deadly spike placement.

Respawning grapple blocks respawn instantly, so any item that's protected by a grapple block in a 1x1 space that only the morph ball can get to is a potential permastuck. There are a handful of others, but I can only remember two. First, Maridia's main room: if you come in from the Wrecked Ship side before defeating Draygon, get eaten by the Yapping Maw, and don't have Speed Booster, then you're stuck because the only way out of the bottom of the main room is with Speed Booster. Second, what is the Plasma Beam room in the original game is a permastuck if you go there without either Plasma (which is somewhere different this time) or Charge.

Also several rooms have too many action blocks that the game gets confused. In particular, the Big Pink energy tank that's underwater and the Speed Boost tunnel in Norfair with Beetoms next to the first save room are both filled with Power Bomb blocks and the game simply cannot handle that many Power Bomb blocks in such a close area; you'll need to use multiple before it'll even clear some out of the way. This is especially annoying in the latter room because it destroys the usefulness of that room; it'd be easier to just go back around the long way.

The trap offscreen parts of the room after Ninja Pirates is extremely bad. I'm not sure if that's just improperly set up scrolling or intentionally meant to be offscreen and challenging, but I seriously hope it's not the latter. There are a few other rooms with weird scrolling bugs like that, including the saving-the-animals part of the escape. The room before Ninja Pirates and the room that was Spring Ball in the original game also have wonky scrolling.

Enemies on the noob bridge are also annoying especially since you don't have enough beam power to clear them with one shot the first few times you have to go across.

[Sickwood]

Quick question, did any of the below bugs get reported and/or ironed out in the updates?

1. Tiles missing from Vanilla Wave Beam door
2. Entering Wave Beam door via running in quickly caused a crash for me
3. OOB/scrolling error happened 2 times when mockballing from the left to right room transition under the Namihe in the "Volcano" Room near LN entrance
4. Lots of invisible enemies, not sure if it was already mentioned and/or if that was intended. If so, then disregard. 

I ended up finishing it and had a good time when all was said and done.  Getting PBs at Gauntlet relieved a lot of my frustration from the first time around, ie getting stuck outside of Plasma wandering around looking for PBs

[Noxus]

I thought this was a pretty good hack. I also thought the criticism above was a bit harsh. The 1x1 grapple block parts either have a little space to sit upright, to shoot the block again, or they're just things you wouldn't really need to roll into a ball to get. You'd actually have to be trying to get stuck. A lot of time and thought were put into this. I can see it does need some updating, but I didn't find many permastucks.

One is in the water pool room, 2 rooms to the right of the ship. If you don't have gravity suit you cannot get out of the water. The other was already mentioned, the Plasma Beam room. My advice would be to make it so you can't go to Maridia via the back way (through the wrecked ship), at least until they have Power bombs. It took awhile to actually find power bombs. My mind skipped over the trick where there's a hollow space you can get over, down by the charge beam. Like with the door with the massive attack of enemies right away, I know these are meant to be funny, but sometimes it's better to keep things simple. Also, having to quick charge to get out of the 'spring ball' room might throw some people off. Other than that I think it was a fun hack.  :cool:

[DonnyDonovan]

As noted above, I played right until I walked into a room in Brinstar and died before I even knew what hit me.  Don't do that.  More fixes and maybe someday I'll give it another go.