Happy new year everybody.

I have been playing Super Metroid over the last two or three weeks. As you may know I don't have time to devote to long continuous gaming sessions, so this is just kind of in dribs and drabs whenever I get the chance. Thankfully I have had four fairly long flights and much time sitting around in airports over the holiday period which allowed me to make some decent progress.

I'm still not altogether sure exactly what to make of this game. I never played it back when it was released as I didn't have a Super Nintendo. I was hugely excited to get to play it when it was released on the Wii virtual console in 2007, but I gave up on it shortly thereafter after getting stuck a few times (not long after starting the game). But it always remained as one of those games I felt I needed to experience since I carry a huge amount of reverence towards it for introducing so many innovations we have since taken for granted and for birthing quite possibly my favourite genre and the blueprint for so many of my favourite games of all time.

But all that aside, it is not an easy game for me to enjoy in this day and age. I don't like being stuck for hours not knowing where I need to go to make some progress, particularly since there is no warping or fast travelling this huge maze of a map, and there isn't even a way of recognizing on the map which pathways are accessible and which are deadends. Also, the move set/mechanics ... innovative as they are, are also not that great (perhaps since I'm going back to this games having already played much more refined versions of this or similar moveset/skillset. Some moves take one a long time to figure out, like the wall-jump. Some moves are outright broken, like the space-jump. This makes it confusing for me to know when I can't progress because I haven't picked up a skill/upgrade yet or because I can't figure out what I am meant to do or how to do it. It is usually not because I haven't got the relevant upgrade. I have used a guide once, to stop being stuck. Trying to stick with it and finish it this time but I am having a love/hate time with it.