ERIS 2012

[Digital_Mantra]

This is Eris 2012, a better version of Eris 2009. That sums it up.
Thanks to everyone that helped here at Metroid Construction.

Download (Headered):
http://dmantra.blackops.net/eris/

Thanks for playing!

edit: several fixes were made, and the patch is now headered.

[advancedpillow]

Wow. Just...wow. Thank you. Diving in tonight!

...Dude. And an original soundtrack?! *Standing ovation*

[Charmander106]

I just quited playing the old version of this hack. Now I have to play it again!  :stern:

[passarbye]

FINALLY!!!!

I WILL POST REVIEW LATER!

[Prime Hunter]

Played this up to around Speed Booster before stopping for the night. Lots of interesting little changes that modify the flow of the game more than you'd first expect, such as when certain expansions become available. Seeing as items are everything in Eris this can be both a blessing and a curse at times, but overall I feel about as powerful as I normally did so I might just be getting lucky with the ones I can gain access to at this point in time. I was kinda surprised that Spore Spawn was really easy for me now, but I can sort of understand that based on some of the other changes I've seen so far.

[spoiler]Really threw me off when I couldn't get to Evasion yet since I was fearing that Spore Spawn was still the same. He gave me a ton of trouble the first time I played this since I went in without it and got extremely frustrated with his room and the conditions of the fight. Of course now I'm wondering how much the main item progression might change down the road since I don't have that yet but could get Ice Beam a lot earlier than normal. [/spoiler]

Looking forward to seeing what other surprises this version has in store for me. I've seen a lot of new expansions laying around too which has me intrigued. Always a good sign.

[Quote58]

This is awesome. And it's the little things, not just item progression. Things like having beams no longer blink, respin, HUD tweaks,  etc, make me want to play this all the way through. It just seems to flow better. And the changes in level design that I've seen so far are good.
It's looking great, and when I finish it, I will post a review.

[advancedpillow]

I just finished Eris 2012. Although, not 100% complete. 3:15 was my time. 86% was my item collection percentage.

Please allow me to post some stream of conscience thoughts and feelings about Eris2012... And forgive the randomness of it all. Warning for those who havn't beaten the game yet, MANY MANY SPOILERS!!!

[spoiler]I'm going to have to echo some of the others' comments about the flow, or pacing. This time around it was nearly flawless. And this adjusted pacing helped ease the player into the game, while getting harder as one progresses deeper into the planet. (Not allowing players to collect Evasion as early as before was a huge factor in this.)

I applaud the perfect balance of difficulty of the bosses. I died numerous times on all of the bosses (except Spore Spawn) just because I was playing sloppy, taking hits continuously, without a care in the world--as I play the original SM and other hacks. But in Eris2012, you created each boss battle in such a way that demands careful strategy and rewards patience. The final battle is intense. I died the most times there, as I should--it's the finale; I was missing only 1 energy and I was down to 12 life when I finally bested the beast. It was an epic battle and I havn't had any epicness in a SM game in a while. Nice work.

I loved all the new puzzles to get items, instead of just stumbling on them. Some of them stumped me; but I'll get those eventually. And the new speed booster puzzles. I love smashing blocks with the speed booster, it was fun getting to use it more than in the previous version. Nice work.

The changes and tweaks to the room were simply gorgeous. Not too many drastic differences, but what was there originally and what is there now are some of the best graphics I've ever seen in a SM game, or any SNES game for that matter. The new item locations are, for the most part, awesome. (Toss this up with my comments about the pacing.) Blocking paths and requiring certain items to progress is smart and removes the "where the fuck am I" moments of being lost that can happen when one doesn't want to follow a map. I appreciated that.

The new room with the Metroids and the open egg sacks was gorgeous, and pretty creepy. That homage to Alien, and the Easter Egg (it seems) transmission mentioning Weyland, bridges a gap quite nicely between the Alien franchise and the Metroid universe. Personally, I want to see more of this crossover because I think they fit really well together. If ther were more new rooms, I didn't find them yet.

The opening graphical changes, to the intro of the game, are great. I love your name up there instead of Nintendo. The title screen, classy, awesome. I can tell this was a labor of love.

Adding the respin jump was a smart move. The beams look really awesome. Is that because you got rid of their flickering, like someone posted earlier? That's such a small change with a huge effect.

Question: Plasma beam. Did you get rid of that? I couldn't find it. When I got to where it usually is and found an energy tank. Right then and there I began to dread the Ridley fight, in a good way! i knew it would be challenging. But I defeated him. And I thought I'd eventually run into the Plasma beam. I thought maybe you switched it into the room with the Last Transmission. Is it gone? Don't tell me where it is, but I just want to know I'm not on a wild goose chase. Of course, the fact that I didn't have plasma probably made the final battle even harder than usual. Now that I think about it, perhaps the plasma beam is in the Metroid egg room?.... There was a grey door in there that didn't unlock when I killed all the metroids. Perhaps it does after I kill all Croco...?

The soundtrack you've made is above and beyond what I was expecting from you in this release. I listened to the first 4 tracks. I can feel Eris through the "soundscapes", if you will, that you've composed. If only this soundtrack could play during gameplay. I will be listening to this for a while.

I noticed a couple things I'd like to ask you about.
The first:

Am I supposed to have to IBJ to get up here after I collect the speed booster? This (the block isn't pictured) used to be a shot block but it doesn't break when shot—only bombed or Evasion-ed. This could definitely be just a design choice since you can leave the way you came, after the speed booster. And this would then just be the exit after getting the Chozen Armor. Anyway, just thought it was curious.

And this picture:

This door needs to be gray, right? The other side of it is a red missle door, as I'm sure you're aware. And shooting it had no effect. Was it always blue? I can't remember.

Please excuse my shitty iphone pics. Sorry about the quality.
[/spoiler]

Anyway, Eris has always been one of my fav games of all time since I first stumbled upon it years ago. Please excuse the hyperbole/fanboy-ism, but this truly is a stellar game. And you've definitely made it even better. Thank you for all your hard work on this.

Edit: Oh, and I love the new HUD!
Edit2: I just replayed a bit and found the plasma beam room and adjoining corridors. Wow. Just blew me away. I don't know how you made that sound (not to mention many other awesome things along the way to that beam!). If you got plasma you know what sound I'm referring to.

Standing ovation from me. Again, thank you for Eris 2012.

[squishy_ichigo]

4:49, 72%

[spoiler]I spent WAY to long forgetting where space jump was.... I even had chozo armor before I found it. (hi jump + spike jumping = ftw)
I was a bit disappointed with the space jockey area tbh. It didn't live up to the great level design the rest of the hack has.
Otherwise, everything else that was new seems great. The lack of the minimap didn't bug me nearly as much as I though it would.
All in all, good times. Can't say it beats out the original though.[/spoiler]

[Charmander106]

Time beaten: 4:03
Item Collection: 91%

Review:
I am really impressed with this release. You have managed to make this hack a million times better than the original. The path to the plasma beam, just... wow. I won't spoil it, you just have to find out for yourself. Overall, this revision made Eris a whole lot more complete that the previous release. Thank you Dman for making this amazing game!

[Qactis]

Will have to pause pokemon to get into this for a bit... I didn't know you were done yet! I'll edit this later when I finish the game

[advancedpillow]

This soundtrack you made is amazing, Dman. 76 songs, is so epic. The sound of the music make me feel like I'm on Eris. That's crazy.

[Prime Hunter]

Finished with a time of 3:06 and 78%. Before I post my own review I want to mention that this was the highest percentage I've ever gotten on Eris, which may have influenced the feeling of some things since I have never been as equipped as I was this time around.


Personally, I'm not sure where I stand on which version I like better. A lot of the smaller changes, such as room design and expansions, are much better this time around which ultimately improves the pacing of the game in a positive manner. But in some ways I feel like this sacrifices the challenge in order to do it, something Eris was known for back when it first came out from what I understand. Again, I don't know if that has to do with the fact that I was more powerful overall this time, if it is a direct result of the item order and when expansions become available, or just my experience with the game at this point, but for the most part I felt like Planet Eris wasn't as deadly as in the past.

[spoiler]Being able to get beam upgrades earlier combined with the changes to some bosses such as Spore Spawn, Gold Torizo, and Draygon in order to try and balance the difficulty curve probably make for most of this drop in difficulty I experienced, if I had to guess. From a balancing standpoint I understand those changes though, and after looking at some notes I have on hacks in general the main issue I had with Eris before now was its uneven difficulty curve and the spikes that happened due to those bosses and some of the enemy placements in rooms you're likely to travel through often. Seeing as those have been mostly addressed with 2012 I guess this is more of a personal opinion than anything inherently wrong with the design. [/spoiler]

Eris 2012 is still a blast and remains one of my favorite SM hacks despite that though. It's now of the most polished hacks I've had the pleasure to experience and there's not much I can say against it at this point in time. Now that I've had some time to think about it I'm pretty sure I can say that Eris 2012 trumps 2009 in almost every way and is clearly my favorite version of the two. I'd say that's an achievement in itself. Congrats!


Oh, and as far as the Plasma Beam goes advancedpillow, it's still here:
[spoiler]That new room with the Metroid eggs is larger than you might expect at first. And Metroids like to hide all throughout it as well, so if that door doesn't open keep searching.[/spoiler]

[passarbye]

ummm.. help?

[spoiler]i can't activate the statue for some reason.

does anyone know what to do?
(also, i haven't completed eris yet, so some pointers would help on where to go next.)

items i have that aren't immediately obvious:

spazer
ice
evasion
speed booster

[/spoiler]

[Metaquarius]

All the balance changes made are highly welcomed, I got further in this hack than the 2009 version.
[spoiler]The Alien series references definitely are nice touches.[/spoiler]
Eris is still not my cup of tea though, I'm not sure I will eventually beat it. This is nevertheless an amazing work you did there. More ROM hackers should follow your example and give a soul to their own creations.


@passarbye
[spoiler]There's a symbol above the statue, on the ceiling, this gives you a hint about the item required to activate the statue. :)[/spoiler]

[advancedpillow]

ummm.. help?

[spoiler]i can't activate the statue for some reason.

does anyone know what to do?
(also, i haven't completed eris yet, so some pointers would help on where to go next.)

items i have that aren't immediately obvious:

spazer
ice
evasion
speed booster

[/spoiler]

you need [spoiler]space jump[/spoiler] to proceed.

[advancedpillow]

Oh, and as far as the Plasma Beam goes advancedpillow, it's still here:
[spoiler]That new room with the Metroid eggs is larger than you might expect at first. And Metroids like to hide all throughout it as well, so if that door doesn't open keep searching.[/spoiler]

Yup, I went back and searched for it after I beat the game last night. Found it. So awesome.

[germanmetroid]

This is the best hack I ever played in my entire life (Im Serious)
Eris gives a challenging gameplay if you want to collect every item, It gives something special that other hacks dont have, the level editing is unique in this hack, giving the player that you edited the tiles, but you didnt.
The HUD is "Smooth", the level editing and the gameplay that you feel, and the spinjump restart is a nice feature and even the map/upgrade menu is updated to fit in the hack.
Oh yeah
Time: 03:03
Items: 83%
I really recomend this hack
(If I have some grammar mistakes please feel free to correct me)

[Vorpal]

Eris was by far my favorite hack of all time, so when I heard a while ago that you had vague intentions of updating it I was pretty happy.  Still had a couple things I'd have liked to see changed, and all of them got included.  Unfortunately, a lot of the other changes I don't agree with.

[spoiler]Things I liked:
-Not having to go through the grapple beam area twice for grapple and ice.  This, right here, is easily the thing I most wanted to see.
-Altering the metroid room a couple rooms left of the ship.  As hilarious as wandering into that immediately after starting the game is, that did need to be changed.
-Altered chozo mess hall artifact room.  Made no sense how you could just walk up and grab the artifact while ignoring the other 2/3ds of the room.  I spent five minutes bombing every block in that dead end...
-re-spin during neutral jump.  Should be in every hack.
-The new content in the endgame.  Pretty spiffy.  Were there supposed to be a couple metroids in the one room that you could only kill with powerbombs?
-the new footfall effect on the chozen armor.
-spore spawn/botwoon difficulty reduction.

Things I didn't like:
-It's really offputting that a lot of the freedom in the early game was removed.  One of the things I enjoyed about the hack was not even the difficulty, so much that you had a fair amount of alternate routes if you were willing to face the consequences.  Now I can't go through the underwater area at all until after bombs, and the red gate feels a lot more artificial than "fuck i can't kill these pirates".  You know, if you wanted to skill check the underwater area, you didn't have to use bomb blocks.  All you had to do was require a crouch jump+ledgegrab.  That'd keep out anyone who didn't know their underwater platforming.
-and on the subject of gates, why the fuck did you remove the ability to get wave early while simultaneously putting blue gates everywhere?  dick move.  I got pissed every time I found one.
-Why only three supers? =(
-Removing the minimap.  It wasn't exactly all that useful with the rooms packed so closely together, but the whitespace is annoying.

Things I'm not sure about: Evasion requiring power bombs.  Well, at least now that spore spawn doesn't do a lot of damage on contact it's not practically necessary.

Overall, this time around, it seems like you're a lot less sure how difficult you want the hack to be, and that negatively affects the hack's cohesion.  Walljumping's a lot less necessary (unnecessary?) in the early game, but then later on there's still just as much need for it, and there wasn't a conscious effort to train the player in it as the game goes on.  The additional platforms in the evasion room were harder to navigate than straight vertical shafts, rofl.  Spore Spawn and Botwoon were easier but then Gold Torizo didn't feel changed, and he was the hardest and most-in-need-of-rebalancing of the three to begin with.  Overall, the additional new player lockouts are rather frustrating.

Of all the room remixes, the ones I liked the least were the first room of... the Western Ruins?  The norfair palette swap.  The straight drop and somewhat difficult climb out felt like they suited the area more.  The landing site remix I'm not a fan of, because it made grapple seem useful even if it wasn't necessary.  It could've stood to have some more room for error with grapple, but just being able to jump up without trying is lame.  And the morph ball room remix just seems a lot uglier... idk, I'm mentioning this because I just beat the game and want to talk about it, they're not horrible or anything.  I probably would like them a lot more if I played 2012 first.  Curious to know what the logic was behind some of them though.  I didn't see much difference between the pre-grapple beam room and the current version at all, although maybe I should go back with the armor.

I am a fan of spazer room remix though.  Felt like spazer was hinted quite well this time around, whereas before it was barely hinted at all.  Also, putting one of the energy balls or w/e in front of the spazer room is a nice way of putting the message out that players destroy those things at some point or another.

The last thing I'm going to mention is that I know a couple people who like to play hacks on real hardware with a powerpak, but apparently this version of Eris doesn't work.
[/spoiler]

I know I talked more about the things I disliked than the things I did, but it's easier to make long complaints than praise.  I enjoyed the new content, so thanks for putting this out. =)

3:39 with 92%

re: advancedpillow:

Am I supposed to have to IBJ to get up here? This (the block isn't pictured) used to be a shot block but it doesn't break when shot.

I'm fairly sure the intended solution is now to shinespark it.

[Cloud20]

I've not played it yet. But I will be glad to redo an new update of one of the most innovative hacks. :)

[Digital_Mantra]

-and on the subject of gates, why the fuck did you remove the ability to get wave early while simultaneously putting blue gates everywhere?  dick move.  I got pissed every time I found one.

I never removed the ability to get wave early, and given that wave didn't serve an exploratory pathfinder ever (except for Draygon), I made it useful in a few areas.
I simply made it a more rewarding upgrade.

-Removing the minimap.  It wasn't exactly all that useful with the rooms packed so closely together, but the whitespace is annoying.

Yup. Some weren't happy with that but I was. Though I have no idea what you mean by white space. It's all just black, what emu do you use.
I've also played this on console and that was never a problem.

Gold Torizo didn't feel changed, and he was the hardest and most-in-need-of-rebalancing

Gold Torizo's health was nearly halfed, and his damage was slightly reduced. Given the amount of paths you can take at that point,
you could have lots of tanks, and loaded with enough supers to kill him before he takes one step.

The landing site remix I'm not a fan of, because it made grapple seem useful even if it wasn't necessary. 

The usefulness of grapple in Eris is it's an underwater weapon, and for certain land creatures.

The last thing I'm going to mention is that I know a couple people who like to play hacks on real hardware with a powerpak, but apparently this version of Eris doesn't work.

Not entirely sure what you mean by a powerpack (I'm not too familiar with what people use to play roms on a snes),
but this hack has worked on console for Advanced Pillow and Daltone without any errors. Maybe they could explain what could be wrong.

Thanks to everyone for playing (and maybe listening to the soundtrack)!

[squishy_ichigo]

The usefulness of grapple in Eris is it's an underwater weapon, and for certain land creatures.

ohsnap, that would make it.... a harpoon! You clever bastard~~<3

[Daltone]

Congrats on the relese,
i dont know why you removed the header, its a broken game without it. You need a header to play it on the "powerpack"

[advancedpillow]

this hack has worked on console for Advanced Pillow and Daltone without any errors. Maybe they could explain what could be wrong.

I haven't tried to put this 2012 version on a cart yet but the previous versions worked perfectly.

(and maybe listening to the soundtrack)!

I'm loving it. What do you call this genre of music?

i dont know why you removed the header, its a broken game without it.

What happens when you try to play? Does it start you in one of the new rooms, stuck at the top of the screen? That happened to me at first, but I merely had to delete the save files that seemed to already be "saved" in the game. Once I emptied all the save files within the menu, I could begin playing normally. This occurred not on a powerpak, but in a good ol' fashioned emulator.

[Daltone]

If you just patch a rom and fire it up it will crash after trying to load the game twice, but after you add a header it does not crash after the second load attempt. don't know about why there would be saves for you, the emulator would only auto load it if you have .srm named the same. on the copier you have to choose your save unless your not lazy and name them all.

game runs and looks great on snes

short review:
Too many platforms in my way when im wall jumping, needs more spikes.

[Digital_Mantra]

Let's just blame DSO for circumcising my rom.  :<_<:
Adding a header is an easy fix though to get this running on a cart (I'm guessing).