Ice Metal 1: Uninstall [Ver: 1.4.2]

[SpoOkyMagician]

I decided to play this second. I really had fun playing this one. I enjoy open world hacks. (Linear are somewhat annoying IMO.) Anyway, I found it started off pretty easy. I did notice one thing though when I was screwing around. (I had bombs, 2 energy tanks, and boost ball.) Using save states, I managed to jump/bomb jump up this spiked wall path. (I know I should of not went this way but, I wanted to try. I actually managed to damage boost up all the way up with the spikes/bombs. Took me like 100 reloads but, I got it.) I went straight to Spore Spawn and grabbed Supers. That was probably early but, whatever. It worked. :P After exploring a while, I got stuck. I had everything I needed except speed booster. I had to look online for a map. I had no clue where to go. After finding that, I got myself back on track and finished the hack. I didn't check the time sorry but, my percentage was 89.4%. (I collected a lot of stuff. :yay: ) I really enjoyed the hack for sure. I would rate it... :pwuh: *Thinks to self* 9/10. Excellent job Crys.

~ SpoOkyMagician

[Redhacker39]

Just beat Ice Metal last night. 5:27 with 75.0% (the missing items include spazer, screw attack, and 1 reserve tank).
I loved the graphics and all the cartoonized brick walls. The use of map rooms to reveal plot details was pretty unique, and the suit palettes were just... yes!

There was a point in which I gave up on the rom for a few months (stuck in the infamous deep steamfair) until I finally realized you could walljump in acid. The endgame was very engaging and difficult (although the hardest part for me was Draygon). I also loved the rate-of-fire of the ice-plasma beam.

[spoiler]The metroids were definitely harder than the vanilla metroids even though the rinkas are what does most of the damage. I found it odd that the charge beam was the final item but hey, at least it forced me to develop an anti-phantoon strategy.[/spoiler]

Great hack to play as relief after beating the nearly impossible Super Zero Mission hack.

[Lunaria]

In regards to charge beam:
[spoiler]It actually exists as an item somewhere else in the hack. However, should you miss it and get to the end, you're provided it before the golden torizo fight! ´:3[/spoiler]

I love to hear that people enjoy the hack, it made the development of it feel worthwhile, thanks for playing! ^^

[RealRed]

Uhh. I think I'm stuck.

I found two (or maybe three) mini-kraids, but the door on this reef surface I'm on is still locked. Nowhere to go, I would think.

[MetroidMst]

IIRC you have another Mini Kraid or two to find.

[personitis]

Went through that room roughly 30 minutes ago. Look for more mini-Kraids.

[Lunaria]

Hmm, yeah, it's a bit hidden, but there is a way in which you can progress in that room Blood.

[Lunaria]

I'm not going to push this to most places yet, since I may make more changes and I have no idea if anything broke.

But here it is, v1.4.2: [Download]

[spoiler=changelog]

*Made the path to upper deep Ice more memorable.
*Made some changes to the large room in uper surface in order to look less retarded and better reflect progression.
*Applied Bloodsonics pause screen suits patch.
*The megaball room in the surface has been modified to heavily encourage players to learn what the item actually does before leaving.
*Made the room with all the spikes in it that lies on the entry to kraid not look like total tosh.
*Made the fact that you can jump up further in the room with the mini kraids slightly more obvious.
*It should now be harder (if not impossible.) to get graphical glitches from entering the subterrain saveroom too fast.
*Beam stacking have been buffed, as following:
[spoiler=Stacking spoilers]
   Spazer/Wave now deals the same damage as Wave would alone. (It used to be half of Waves power)

   Spazer/Wave/Ice now deals the same damage as Spazer would alone. (This beam used to deal the same damage as Spazer/Wave did, but with the added benefit of having a charge attack that did the same amount as a regular shot.)

   Plasma/Wave regular shots now deal the same as Plasma would alone, charge shots deal half of what charge Plasma shots would. (This thing also used to be terrible.) Rate of fire has been boosted slightly too in order to go with the Plasma beams theme.

   Plasma/Wave/Ice Same as above, but the charged shots deal 75% of what Plasma did alone rather than 50%

   Ice the delay before you can fire after using a charged shot has been reduced by a decent amount.
[/spoiler]
These changes were made to balance the beams to not be terrible if you remain clueless about the stacking mechanics, while still rewarding experimentation.
For the curious, this is the order of power for unstacked beams:
[spoiler]
Power
Plasma* (Almost the same as Wave though.)  (*): Note that Plasma has higher rate of fire than other beams, and that it's charged shot is only topped by Ice beams.
Wave
Spazer
Ice*  (*): While Ice is way stronger than the other beams, it also has lower rate of fire.[/spoiler]


*Made the exit wall in the morphball "maze" up in the mountain Air instead of Bomb block as it was before.
*Palette changes:
   Made the poison point palette (pre-phantoom) a bit more interesting. (Won't be noticeable unless you compare the two next to one other.)
   Surface palette had some very minor changes, probably not noticeable.
   The deep Ice palette got some prominent changes: The tiles ripped from kirby and the amazing mirror have been made lighter in order to actually be visual, they have also been given a more purple hue. Furthermore, mostly everything has been fine tuned to look a bit better.
   The core got some slight CRE changes.
   
*Removed a secret screen in one of the rooms in deep Ice, it served no use in the first place and considering it caused map overlap it actively made the hack worse by being there.

[/spoiler]

[RealRed]

Welp.



Hm.



This is a pretty fucked situation.
I'm saved + stated outside of here, but I have to head back and look for charge beam and other thing. That's a little frustrating, because I came a long way to find this place.

[M1CR0H4CK3R]

*Applied Bloodsonics pause screen suits patch.

Say what? Am I missing something?

[Lunaria]

Bloodsonic is running 1.4 still.

This is what you can expect:

[personitis]

I think what Bloods is saying is that he's made it all the way to Ridley with low ammo counts and no Charge Beam which is a pretty shitty situation. Thank the heavens for saves (also let this be a lesson to any lurkers looking to hack)!

[Lunaria]

I was replying to M1CRO, person. And yeah, I got what BS meant, and that you can get down there with that loadout is intended. :p

[JAM]

Planet name still unchaged to Nerion III?
ARMOR tiles still looks compressed. Although there IS place to expand them.

I'm really diappointed...

[RealRed]

Okay I win!
2:52, 54.8%

This hack is somewhat of a mixed bag.
I'd say the difficulty was just about right. The "explore, go where ever you freakin' want" aspect is also probably something that only this hack has thus far. The open-ended-ness is good, but it's a little annoying that the terrain almost never sets you on one specific path. I mean, that's not always bad, but the map is incredibly vague, so it's very easy to find yourself in a spot where you're running around in a large area that you've already covered and can't find anything new. I think maybe some work on the pause menu map (new tiles showing doors, area name icons) would go a really long way.
I still have yet to find screw attack, speed booster, space jump, grapple beam, and every single beam other than wave, so I've definitely got some work left to do.

Levels-wise, it's a little bit disappointing. There were more than a few rooms that I immediately knew what they were in the original game. A lot of rooms are very clunky and claustrophobic, too. lots of crumble blocks and thin walls and just randomly placed obstacles that made the game feel a lot more like Lunaria's toybox rather than a mysterious foreign planet.

Since there's never gonna be an ice-metal 2, you've got plenty of time to go back and add some defining polish to the hack..!

[NightDriver]

I discovered this hack three days ago and I'm really enjoying it.  Have been trying to speedrun it to get faster times.  My best so far is 1:12 game time (using savestates) with 40.4% item collection, which collects early charge beam, 7 e tanks, a few reserve tanks, 65 missiles, 20 supers, 10 bombs and kills all bosses except crocomire.  The rate limiting factor seems to be having enough ammo to kill Ridley.  It's fun not knowing if picking up early charge beam is optimal strategy for speed running and not knowing if others have tried to beat this hack fast and what their times are.

[SlyPork]

And this is why I think we should have a community leaderboard for speedrunning hacks  :^_^:

[Elminster]

And this is why I think we should have a community leaderboard for speedrunning hacks  :^_^:

That would be pretty neat, there is a small community of Mario 64 romhack speedrunners that have been creating leaderboards and resources for that recently, but the runners of this game don't seem as interested. There are some hacks I'd like to run at some point just so a run of them exists, will take quite some time planning and practicing though. I know Hoandjzj has made TASes of a ton of hacks but I wish there were some more human performed runs to watch as well.

The rate limiting factor seems to be having enough ammo to kill Ridley.  It's fun not knowing if picking up early charge beam is optimal strategy for speed running and not knowing if others have tried to beat this hack fast and what their times are.

dcr has done a 1:19:32 run (00:37 game time). He doesn't get charge beam and I remember him complaining about Ridley as well. It can be risky depending on how much ammo you pick up since if you miss too many shots you have no way to damage him.

[LinkaMeister]

There is already a sort of leaderboard for Super Metroid Project Base.

[Lunaria]

Hmm, yeah that could be a good idea to look into if we can set up.

[Quietus]

There is already a sort of leaderboard for Super Metroid Project Base.

Is it updated each time the latest version if released?  It'd make sense to really only track times for completed hacks.

[NightDriver]

dcr has done a 1:19:32 run (00:37 game time). He doesn't get charge beam and I remember him complaining about Ridley as well. It can be risky depending on how much ammo you pick up since if you miss too many shots you have no way to damage him.

Thanks for the link.  Something to aspire towards!  I don't know where those 35 mins of game time went, probably some of it getting extra missiles and charge beam.  I've tried killing Ridley with 60 missiles, 20 supers and no charge beam but in several attempts couldn't get good enough accuracy and if his tail blocked a few shots or he was off screen you were toast.

[Redhacker39]

Any path variation ideas? I'm looking for a <50% challenge and this is indeed a worthy hack to do so in.

[Aran;Jaeger]

So, actually, due to some sophisticated item-randomizer analysis by me (that was quite time-consuming) in the past, for tool-assisted superplay (TAS) [but not the adaption/substitution for humans yet, mainly due to lack of interest by others aswell as lack of time and existence of more interesting Super Metroid projects on my side], almost all (mainly, recent R-Mode, Freeze-Walk and few Blue-Suit exploit applications are missing) inbounds options to traverse within the complete Ice Metal hack map (at least for one of the latest versions of it) are solved and with explained details explicitly given by my maps provided in this thread:
http://forum.metroidconstruction.com/index.php/topic,3211.25.html
I hope that helps. On another note, I could in principle make such maps for most of the existing hacks and then find (so far) optimal Low% solutions for humans or rather TAS in a similar manner as I have done this quite successfully for the original game (and for example, I could look into SM ERIS for Low% inbounds aswell, to see if the number of items that digitalMantra took is actually the (TAS-)minimum), but honestly, I simply do not have the time to do so, I guess. But maybe I will do that in the future for a few worthy hacks provided people show interest in that.

[Lazymoth]

Hey, I finished this a few days ago and it was the first hack of Super Metroid I ever played, and it was really magical. It was a great first hack to play too, because the true breadth of freedom is just amazing (it's a testament to this that people can get through it without finding Space Jump or Speed Booster.) I got the Mega Ball really early on, and it's such a fun item. I later found and was confused by an empty item room, so I took a quick look at a map and realized it was actually an alternate place to grab the Mega Ball, and then I thought about how different the game would have been when grabbing it so late.

Non-linearity is a really great thing, and the impressive scope of freedom here contrasts so starkly to the fundamentals of the original Super Metroid that it's surely one of the romhacks that has the most to say, figuratively. More linear hacks are closer to being SM in a different coat of paint (not to say that's a bad thing,) so the complexity this one has to offer is very meaningful and it's truly a different game.

I've still only played a handful of hacks, but this might be my very favorite. Thank you so much for making and sharing such a badass hack!