Background | Year of Release | Media | Mini-Reivew | The Result

System: GameBoy Developer: Intelligent Systems Publisher: Nintendo Players: 1 Save: Battery Genre: Action

Metroid, was a classic NES game that many people got addicted to. Samus Aran, the first female video game hero blasted her way along defeating popular enemies like Ridley and Mother Brain. Following this, Nintendo released Metroid II: Return of Samus. This time she went onto the portable console, GameBoy. No familiar Space Pirates to fight, instead, the Metroids were evolving like Pokémon at a near unstoppable rate. Well, almost. Samus Aran has been called to commit genocide on this poor species.

North America: 08/26/1991
Japan: 01/21/1992
Europe: unknown

Screeshots: 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5

Metroid, although fun, suffered from a few flaws. The first one that always comes to my mind is crouching. I can recall much frustration as stupid crawling enemies would run into my feet. Surely my powerful arm-canon could blast this things to smithereens, but oh no, you can't aim down, that would be too convenient. Anyway, this has been fixed. This game has tight controls despite occasional frustrations while space jumping. For a GameBoy game, this has solid graphics and well animated sprites. Backgrounds can become repetitious, but are very atmospheric and well made. Oh, and did I mention battery save? God bless battery save. This game is really a pioneer of the Metroid games we know and love today. Using spider-ball to explore every nook and cranny of the game revealing power-ups and hidden rooms, crouching, battery save, and many other innovations help take this game to the next level, away from the NES game. Of course it also lead to the creation of Super Metroid which had great success. If you have played Super Metroid, but not Metroid II, go back and try it out, you will be surprised at how much of an influence it had in the SNES sequel. This game is a decent length and features 3 possible endings. A solid addition to any gamer's collection.

Score - 9.0

It's a classic!

Page by Xander

06/26/2004