Every Metroid Game, Ranked
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After last month’s “Metroid Dread” release, I revisited several games in the series to reflect on its varying qualities and impact on the medium. This ranking is based on three factors: influence, innovation and whether the game still holds up today. As you’ll see, some of these games haven’t aged well, and the series has constantly surpassed itself. As an aside, we’re not counting “Metroid Prime Pinball,” the 2005 Nintendo DS game, simply because it’s not a Metroid game, it’s a pinball game (albeit a very good one that you should still play).
Without further ado, here are the best Metroid games ever released.
13. Metroid Prime: Federation Force (3DS, 2016)
Even if we’re adamant about not including “Pinball,” it’s hard not to include this multiplayer-focused misfire. The early 2000s saw the Metroid brand flailing about for any kind of relevancy in trying to catch up with its first-person peers, resulting in a confusing series of branded games that barely count as a Metroid experience, including this multiplayer-only title. While “Federation Force” was fun with friends, there’s little doubt this game was a haphazardly thrown together project made to chase a trend.
12. Metroid Prime: Hunters (DS, 2006)
This was the first foray into the Metroid Prime brand entering some sort of weird arena shooter phase, and it’s just as bad for it. There simply were not enough buttons to support the kind of fast-paced shooter gameplay both of these titles hoped to achieve. “Hunters” only squeaks it out because it had a dedicated campaign starring Samus Aran. To be fair, it was stuck on the Nintendo DS, which didn’t have a traditional button layout to support a first-person shooter. “Hunters” tried its best, but it was a victim of form and format.
11. Metroid: Samus Returns (3DS, 2017)
The first Metroid game by Spanish studio MercurySteam was a success. It was an excellent proving ground for the studio to eventually create “Metroid Dread.” This 3DS title is only so low on this list mostly because of its nature as a remake to the Game Boy sequel, “Metroid II: Return of Samus.” Its best ideas were gameplay iterations like the melee counter, all of which are done better in “Metroid Dread.” Also, this is yet another handheld Metroid game that suffers from hand-cramping gameplay. It was a solid remake, even if it lost its horror soul for a more bombastic, space-faring adventure.
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But “Dread” has rendered this version rather obsolete. It served best as a resume builder for the studio in its audition to Nintendo and to the fans. “Samus Returns” houses many small innovations, most importantly allowing Samus to finally aim in any direction at any point, not just eight during certain circumstances. The addition of the melee counter also moved the series toward a far more action-heavy direction, one that was pioneered by the next, much-maligned entry in this list.
10. Metroid: Other M (Wii, 2010)
This placement hurts me, because it is easily the most despised of the mainline entries of the series. Long considered the black sheep of the Metroid series, “Other M” was produced and directed by the original creators but developed by Team Ninja, who steered the game toward character action, like the studio’s previous game series Ninja Gaiden. The action part was solid. This was the beginning of Samus Aran finally being portrayed through cutscenes and animations as the unflappable, agile and powerful bounty hunter we know today.
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But on the flip side, its story fell short. While it’s the first game to properly portray and mine her past trauma (mentioned only in manga and instruction manuals until then), it was just the wrong context, taking place in the wrong part of the timeline, featuring uninteresting and boring characters, and functioning mostly as a lore dump for the overall story. I’m one of the few Metroid fans who believe the ideas of “Other M” are worth resurrecting, especially when it comes to navigating Samus in a 3-D space outside of a first-person lens. But not like this, not again.
9. Metroid (NES, 1986)
The first game is probably one of the most influential Nintendo games ever that’s aged the most poorly. “Metroid” by Gunpei Yokoi revolutionized the sidescrolling format by creating a game about exploring a planet in any direction on the screen, not just the then-traditional “move right” design philosophy of “Super Mario Bros.” It established the template of finding special items to access areas, using these power to find hidden areas, and rewarding a player’s curiosity and memory through level design.
But this game plays terribly today, and the level design just doesn’t hold up. There are too many indecipherable secrets for anyone but the most seasoned “Metroid” player to enjoy and understand. As I’ve said before in my rankings of The Legend of Zelda games, this first game belongs in a Smithsonian museum, but not anywhere atop any rankings of the best in the series. With all due respect, the series has gratefully evolved past this first important, imperfect step.
8. Metroid 2: Return of Samus (Game Boy, 1992)
The Game Boy sequel squeaks past the original thanks to its focus on atmosphere. While MercurySteam’s remake was a solid update in gameplay, it completely ditched the original’s Dante’s “Inferno”-like structure of Samus going deeper and deeper into an unknown hell. Gunpei Yokoi, the series creator who also designed the Game Boy, understood the limits of his own hardware, narrowed the game’s screen space to create the most claustrophobic Metroid experience to this day.
7. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (GameCube, 2004)
Make no mistake, “Echoes” is a solid sequel and in many ways improved on “Metroid Prime.” But its level design was less distinctive, which made it harder to follow. Its primary mechanic, switching between “light” and “dark” worlds, made this all the more confusing, and it made the world feel less diverse by adhering to that core gimmick.
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Metroid games live and die by their environments, especially the first-person games, and “Echoes” just didn’t deliver enough that was different from the first and didn’t innovate much past fine-tuning some flaws, many of which weren’t exactly washed away. Finding temple keys throughout the game turned it less into an adventure and more of an extended, confusing scavenger hunt, and the game also made the regrettable decision to have expendable special ammo. Despite all that, the game was mostly enjoyable from beginning to end thanks to solid controls and encounter design, and is just another reason the Prime trilogy is among the best Nintendo has ever published.
6. Metroid: Zero Mission (Game Boy Advance, 2004)
This is the definitive version of the first game. “Zero Mission” took the streamlining lessons from “Metroid Fusion,” incorporates the ledge grab and built it on top of the foundation built by “Super Metroid.” This game proved that the first game was always excellent, but it just needed its early, rough edges chiseled out to make it almost perfect.
While the main quest is streamlined, the game was also built with “sequence breaks” in mind, the ability to play the game out of order if the player has enough skill and knowledge. And just when you think the adventure is over, the game switches gears to all new content, becoming a horror chase game with players pushing a depowered Samus through unfamiliar territory. “Zero Mission” is very nearly the definitive Metroid game, and it should be the first stop for anyone new to the series.
5. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (Wii, 2007)
Outside of “Other M,” this is the chattiest Metroid game ever released. It opens with an explosive, all-out war scenario, with soldiers grunting and shouting all around Samus. But then, the game slows back down and reveals itself to be a sweeping epic that takes the series beyond its usual scope to other planets. This is the only Metroid game to do this, and it makes this entry so much more distinctive and fresh compared to the otherwise excellent “Metroid Prime 2: Echoes.”
You’ll realize this once Samus touches down on Elysia and its breathtaking SkyTown, where players navigate a floating city by ziplining between floating castles. This game achieved what “BioShock Infinite” tried, and it was only in its third level. Despite the game’s loud opening, the rest of the game is a Metroid Prime experience through and through. This is also the game that best justified the Nintendo Wii’s motion controls to a more dedicated gaming audience. First-person shooting never felt this good or natural, and puzzle solving felt genuinely immersive as Samus’s hand movements would match your own, whether twisting an alien key to ripping out armor pieces from space pirates with your left hand’s grappling beam. The third Metroid Prime game is one of the best games to ever justify the existence of the Wii — and probably the best motion-controlled game ever released.
4. Metroid Fusion (Game Boy Advance, 2002)
“Dread” begins here. This was the first game to finally fully embrace the sci-fi horror roots of the series. Faced with the shape-shifting X parasite, Samus is hunted by literal husks of her former self. This was the first game to introduce the ledge grab, which would become a staple for the series moving forward. But more importantly, it helped defined the series identity. Lessons from “Fusion” are apparent in “Zero Mission" and “Dread,” which speaks to the timelessness of the design. Its biggest departure is that it is probably the most linear of all the Metroid games, but that decision wasn’t made thoughtlessly.
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“Fusion” used its linear approach to add even more detail into the game, which still makes this the most frightening game in the series. When Samus’s old armor tries to kill her, they would attempt to freeze her before killing her with missiles. Outside of being challenging, it’s also clever storytelling. To guard her from the X parasite, Samus begins the game by being vaccinated with the DNA of the Metroid species, an alien race she made extinct by freezing them before killing them with missiles.
3. Metroid Dread (Switch, 2021)
It’s new, but it also very nearly makes playing any other 2-D game in the series almost obsolete. “Dread” has the horror and attention to detail of “Fusion,” the speedrunning architecture of “Zero Mission,” and, on a minute-to-minute basis, more exciting and pleasurable gameplay than even “Super Metroid.” “Dread” doesn’t innovate," but it spit polishes the formula to near perfection.
Its environmental design still lags behind its predecessors, mostly due to the introduction of the indestructible EMMI robots, who will chase you through similar-looking laboratories. But the brilliance of the EMMI sequences is that it hard codes the chase and escape sequences of the early games inside the gameplay loop. Every EMMI chase are essentially kill countdowns to outrun. This is the hardest Metroid game to date, but it’s also now the easiest to revisit for many reasons.
2. Super Metroid (Super NES, 1994)
It’s long been considered one of God’s perfect video games, and that remains true today. Of all the games on this list, even the one above it, this is the one with the least amount of flaws. Besides a few hard-to-find secrets, “Super Metroid” is immaculately paced and remains one of the greatest games of the 1990s, all the while being one of the earliest prime examples of how the medium can weave gameplay and narrative.
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The wrecked ship of Zebes demonstrates why “Super Metroid” stands above the rest, even in games that build on it. Early in the game on the planet’s surface, players will discover a wrecked alien rocket ship, inaccessible, mysterious and abandoned. As the player, you have to remember which tools were needed to return and explore this ship. Once inside, you find space cockroaches and burned-out wiring and, eventually, one of the game’s four main villains. The player would not only feel rewarded for remembering to return to this place, but they would realize that this was a necessary visit. The medium of video games hits its creative peak when gameplay and context rewards the player. “Super Metroid” is a game that hits this high constantly. No wonder it’s considered perfect.
1. Metroid Prime (GameCube, 2002)
To this day, there is no game quite like “Metroid Prime." Rather than copying the first-person shooter formula that remains popular today, “Prime” implemented a lock-on feature that accomplished many things, including allowing player freedom in movement during combat, narrowing the experience to dodging and movement rather than precision. This lock-on mechanic extended to the game’s visor scan, which became a far better way to convey environmental storytelling beyond the tired “audio log” trope established by “System Shock” in 1994.
That’s the brilliance of “Metroid Prime." It was a meaningful, polished innovation on immersive, first-person storytelling, all while retaining the character, action, mystery and pacing of a Metroid game. While a late-game treasure hunt hurts the game’s claim to perfection like “Super Metroid,” “Prime” exceeds that title in what it brought to table not just for the genre the series founded, but also for first-person storytelling. The Metroidvania genre has many games that have matched or even exceeded the best this series has offered, but “Metroid Prime” still stands distinct and unrivaled.
Ranking Apex’s Best Character Releases Of 2021
This year was one to remember for Apex Legends. The game reached heights in its player base and Twitch viewership that it hadn’t seen since the halcyon days of its release. A new permanent mode was added to the game in the form of Arenas. The newest battle royale map launched this year as well. And, of course, as with every new season of Apex, there came new legends.
The past 12 months brought four new playable characters to the game, and each shook up Apex Legends in their own way. But which characters’ releases broke the hype meter, and which ones were duds? Fear not, intrepid reader: here are 2021’s legend releases, ranked.
4) Valkyrie
This feels like an odd one to put in last, since Valkyrie has arguably been one of the most successful new characters balance-wise to be added to the game. She didn’t feel overpowered on arrival but still carved out a niche in the meta and is a fun character to play. Her release itself simply felt a bit underwhelming, though, all things considered.
Valkyrie’s introduction was overshadowed by the introduction of the Arenas game mode. That’s pretty understandable. Arenas was the first new game mode Apex added to the game on a permanent basis, and not simply as a slight twist on the battle royale base game that would only be available for a couple weeks. It still feels like Valkyrie could have received a bit more love in the run-up to her introduction, however. Most legends introduced to the game get some sort of in-game teaser that players can interact with. There was the random appearance of Octane’s Jump Pad, players activating Horizon’s gravity lifts, and Loba’s teasers even ended with the game briefly teleporting players from a cleaned-out vault in World’s Edge to the Revenant simulacrum facility beneath Kings Canyon.
Valkyrie got a couple Instagram posts.
Yes, there was a great Stories from the Outlands about her and her unique place in Apex Legends and Titanfall lore. But every character gets cool introduction videos. The in-game teaser we got for season nine was ultimately for Arenas, featured a teaser for a different future legend in Ash, and an easter egg for yet another different legend in Seer, with the conspicuous moth graffiti on the wall in the Arenas teaser. Couple this with the not-insignificant server issues when season nine rolled out, and you’ve got yourself a lackluster character launch.
3) Seer
Seer’s launch was a good one, but not one without its flaws, and most of those flaws were confined to the character himself. The devs gave the character his due in-game, featuring teasers of his heart chamber players could find on Olympus and subsequent micro-drones forming Seer’s trademark moth symbol. The game even threw in an unlockable gun charm if players found the heart chamber in three different locations. Add this to some of the incredible animation for both Seer’s Stories from the Outlands, as well as the teaser videos posted to social media, and it’s clear that plenty of care and effort went into making players excited about Seer’s arrival in the game.
There was just one problem: Seer was a busted character. The infamous “Seer meta,” which lasted all of a week or two at the beginning of season 10, had players in fits. Sure, Seer was fun to play, in that it’s usually fun to play a character that is more powerful than other characters. The combination of his heartbeat sensor revealing far-off enemies and his tactical ability, Focus of Attention, providing players with a scan, enemy health bar info, 10 damage, a stun, a silence, and the ability to interrupt enemies reviving teammates and using health items turned out to be a bit too powerful to do with just one ability. And that wasn’t even his ultimate.
Strong characters are fun to play, but they’re also the characters that become unbearable to play against quickly. Seer was undoubtedly cool. The game assured in every possible way that he was very, very cool, and early on in the season he was an incredibly popular pick. But he had to be swiftly nerfed, and when he was, the hype around him died quite quickly. A good release foiled by some bad balancing.
2) Fuse
Yep! It’s your old mate Fusey, coming in at No. 2 on the best character releases of 2021. That might seem a little odd, because Fuse simply wasn’t a very good or even popular character to play by the end of season eight when he was released. In fact, the amount of people playing him only recently overtook any of the other legends released this year, thanks to the number of people playing Seer falling sharply.
So why does Fuse rank this high on the list? Pretty simple, really: style.
Fuse’s entire modus operandi was incredibly clear from the start: his name is Fuse. He likes blowing things up. Every single decision about him the Apex devs made from then on stemmed from that simple fact, and the entire character release blossomed into a full-on eighties action movie theme for season eight. Fuse was the attitude, the look, and the style for the entire season. The gameplay trailer for the season was so good it almost made players forget that much of the season would be played on Kings Canyon.
Even then, the teasers and videos for Fuse went a step further. Even though Fuse wasn’t a character like Valkyrie or Ash, both characters fully invested in the Titanfall story, everything about Fuse was steeped in lore that held implications for everyone in the game. The in-game teasers, featuring balloons, fireworks, and in the final circles of non-ranked matches, randomly spawning Fuse ultimates, held lore implications with the planet Salvo joining the Syndicate. Players later learned this paved the way for Fuse to join the games. In Fuse’s Stories from the Outlands, players saw Mad Maggie for the first time, and the lifelong friendship between her and Fuse. This relationship didn’t just remain in the Stories from the Outlands, however. Maggie returned when the season launched, and it was explained that she was responsible for destroying much of the northern portions of Kings Canyon. Again, players found themselves chasing and being chased by Maggie in the season’s quest.
Every bit of information released and teased about Fuse in the run-up to his release became storylines the game explored and backstory for why certain things were happening in the game’s story. Fuse might not have been the most powerful character in the game when he was introduced, but his release was top notch.
1) Ash
Well, well, well, if it isn’t the character Apex teased in one form or another for an entire year and a half before actually bringing her to the game. Ash was always going to take No. 1 here. It’s difficult to imagine any universe in which Respawn wouldn’t give the iconic Titanfall antagonist her due—and boy, did she get her due.
Already a character with more history than any other in Apex Legends outside of Kuben Blisk, Ash’s build-up was a slow burn for the ages. Players literally rebuilt her in The Broken Ghost, which also served both as an introduction to the game for quests and as a teaser for yet another map: Olympus. Players then got to see Ash again, interacting with Pathfinder and Kuben Blisk in season six, while some players picked up hints on the character design of a certain prominent doctor in Horizon’s backstory. Season eight’s Arenas teasers again featured Ash heavily, until the final teaser of the season revealed Ash as the organizer of the Arenas competition. She popped up yet again in season nine’s Legacy Antigen quest, interacting with Horizon and dropping somehow even more hints until, finally, most everything players suspected about Ash was confirmed with the teasers featured in season 10 and Ash’s Stories from the Outlands: Ash was in fact Dr. Ashleigh Reid at one point, and she would be coming to the Apex Games.
We don’t want to belabor the point, but it all bears repeating: Ash feels, in many ways, like the culmination of an act. Most character teasers are short, simple, and to the point. Ash’s introduction to the game was a Greek epic: the rise and fall of Ashleigh Reid, the forging, breaking, and re-forging of Ash, the triumphs and deep tragedies of her story, it’s all in there.
And, more than that, Ash was the lens by which so much of the Apex story was told. Despite not even being a character you could play in the game, she influenced and actively altered several characters’ storylines.
The smooth release of season 11 and Ash being a fun, yet not all-powerful character only serves to reinforce the point that Ash’s release was simply the best legend release of 2021. From lore and teasers to quests and gameplay, Apex has been waiting for Ash. Now, she’s here, and the entire game feels like it has reached both a high point, and something of a cliffhanger. Now that the character that’s seemed most destined to become a legend is in Apex, where does the game go from here? What does 2022 hold for players and characters alike?
If the last year of Apex Legends has taught us anything, it’s to be ready for anything, and anyone.
Mustachioed Nintendo Virtual Boy Gone Augmented Reality
Some people just want to watch the world burn. Others want to spread peace, joy and mustaches. [Joe Grand] falls into the latter group this time around. His latest creation is Mustache Mayhem, a hack, video game, and art project all rolled into one. This is a bit of a change from deconstructing circuit boards or designing electronic badges, but not completely new for [Joe], who wrote SCSIcide and Ultra SCSIcide for the Atari 2600 back in the early 2000’s.
Mustache Mayhem is built into a Nintendo Virtual Boy housing. The Virtual Boy itself was broken, and unfortunately was beyond repair. [Joe] removed most of the stock electronics and added a BeagleBone Black, Logitech C920 webcam, an LCD screen and some custom electronics. He kept the original audio amplifier, speakers, and controller connector. Angstrom Linux boots into [Joe’s] software, which uses OpenCV to detect faces and overlay mustaches. Gameplay is simple: Point the console at one or more faces. If you see a mustache, press the A button on the controller! The more faces and mustaches on-screen at once, the more points, or “mojo” the player gets. The code is up on Github, and can be built with Xcode targeted to the Mac, or directly on the BeagleBone Black.
[Joe’s] goal for the project was to make a ridiculous game that looks like it could have come out in the 90’s. He also used Mustache Mayhem as a fun way to learn some new skills which will come in handy for more serious projects in the future.
We caught up with [Joe] for a quick interview about his new creation.
How did you come up with the idea for Mustache Mayhem?
I was selling a bunch of my video game collection at PRGE (Portland Retro Gaming Expo) a few years ago and had a broken Virtual Boy that no one bought. A friend of mine was at the table and said I had to do something with it. I thought “People wear cosplay and walk around at conventions, so what if I could do something with the Virtual Boy that you could walk around with?” That was the seed.
A few months later, Texas Instruments sent me the original production release of the BeagleBone Black (rev. A5A). Eighteen months after that I actually started the project. The catalyst was to do something for an upcoming Portland, OR art show (Byte Me 4.0), which is an annual event that shows off interactive technology-based artwork. I wrote up a little description and got accepted. I had less than 2 months to actually get things working and it ended up taking about a month of full-time work. It was much more work than I expected for such a silly project. I originally was going to do something along the lines of walking around in a Doom-like perspective and shooting people when their faces were detected.
That would be pretty darn cool. How did you get from Doom to Mustaches?
I saw a TI BeagleBoard demo called “boothstache” which drew mustaches on faces and tweeted the pictures. I thought that doing something non-violent with mustaches would be more suitable (and funny) to actually show my kids. I also secretly wanted to use this project as a way to experiment with Linux, write some code, and learn about face detection and image processing with OpenCV, which I plan to use for some actual computer security research in the future. Mustache Mayhem turned out to be a super cool project and I’m really happy with it. I sort of feel guilty spending so much time on it, since it’s basically just a one-off prototype, but I just got so obsessed with making it exactly as I wanted.
You mentioned on your website that Mustache was “designed to challenge the paradigms of personal privacy and entertainment.” What exactly did you mean there?
Many people post images (and all sort of other personally identifiable information) of themselves online without thinking about the ramifications. I noticed that players willingly put their faces in front of the camera to see what they’d look like with a “virtual mustache.” I can’t really blame them, because mustaches are pretty cool, but if I can use a single-board Linux machine to detect faces, think about what cities, states, and nation-states can do/are doing on a much larger scale. The statement is sort of an underlying theme for people to think more carefully about their personal privacy and how it is or isn’t okay to sacrifice it in the name of having fun.
What was your favorite part of the project?
I loved the freedom of being able to create whatever I wanted to just for the hell of it. I have a real affinity for retro/classic gaming, so it was fun to try to make the game look like it could have belonged in the 90s (when the Virtual Boy was originally released). Being able to use the stock Virtual Boy controller was another highlight, since it made the game look more complete and less of hack (from outside appearance).
Did you have to figure the protocol out from scratch?
Nope, and that saved me a lot of time. I found a document online about the Virtual Boy controller pinout and interface, so I used that as a starting point. It didn’t take long to write the code to communicate with the controller (which uses a synchronous serial interface and basically just shifts out a bunch of bits with each one corresponding to a button on the controller).
Did your run into any unexpected challenges?
This was my first time really working in-depth with Linux. I ran into all sorts of trouble with configuring the system, compiling various packages, and generally just forcing it to do what I wanted it to do. This was purely a limitation of my own skills. Without the huge amount of open source tools and resources for both Linux and the BeagleBone Black, I would have been completely screwed. I’m a hardware guy, so this was truly a trial by fire.
A more significant unexpected challenge was realizing that the batteries I selected (Energizer L91 Lithium AA primary cells) couldn’t handle the power requirements (~7W) of the system. This was a major oversight on my part and I didn’t notice the problem until opening night of the art show when I started getting seemingly random shutdowns of the unit. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was like a bad dream and reminded me of the stress while filming Prototype This when the cameras were rolling and everyone was looking at you.
How did you get around it for the show?
I thought that the batteries were just running low (and, technically, they were), so I switched over to using the stock Virtual Boy wall wart. Unbeknownst to me, that was also underpowered for my design. The system shutdown twice that night, but luckily attendees still got to experience the wonder of Mustache Mayhem.
After the show, I figured out the root cause of the problem: When running on batteries (the Virtual Boy controller uses six AAs in series), the system voltage was already sagging down to 7V (from a nominal 10.2V) before the game even started. As soon I started the game (which enabled the webcam), the voltage dropped below the 7V minimum limit of my DC/DC converter, causing the system to shutdown. With the wall wart (10V, 850mA), its output under load was actually a triangle (!) wave. On occasion, this would also cause the DC/DC converter to shutdown. It’s amazing nothing got damaged in the process. For most of my development, I had the USB connection plugged in (for network access to the BeagleBone Black from my computer), which supplements the main power, so I never noticed the poor performance of both the wall wart and batteries.
I ultimately hacked the Virtual Boy AC adapter pack (that connects to the back of the Virtual Boy controller) to fit a standard 2.1mm barrel jack and used a high-quality CUI 12V, 2.5A supply. The output under load is totally clean and stable with no noise whatsoever. I wasn’t able to find any battery chemistry in a AA package (or a pack that can fit into the space of the Virtual Boy battery holder) that will handle the high-current drain of the system while staying above 7V and don’t want to change my DC/DC converter to one with a lower minimum input voltage. So, for now, I’m stuck with wall power. I’m OK with that, though.
We want to thank [Joe] for taking the time to talk with us. We don’t know what he’ll be working on next, but we’re sure it will be a [Grand] Idea!
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