The Real Reason Everybody Loves Super Metroid

(This post was originally written for a planned "nostalgia about the classics" series for another website, where multiple writers would all write a short piece on why a game was important or memorable, that was scrapped.)

When I was a kid, our neighbors were on vacation without their daughter Kristen, and my parents were charged with taking care of her for the few days they were going to be out. I was playing Super Metroid, running around lower Norfair, putting up attempts against Ridley (who was giving me hell at the time), and Kristen was watching intently. Being a nice kid (the jaded asshole Cynical that you all know and love wouldn't be a thing for many years still), I offered her the controller, and she turned it down, saying "I don't want to play it, it looks scary."

Funny how a seven year old girl understood Super Metroid's appeal better than twenty-five years of supposed "professional" game critics.

While one segment of the fanbase goes on about speedruns and sequence-breaks and another goes on about the silly "mommy to the metroid" story, everyone ignores the fact that Super Metroid was appealing entirely because it did the most credible job of creating a consistent 2D world of any videogame in 1992, and even today is only rivaled by Castlevania: Symphony of the Night in that regard. Yes, it handles the "lock and key" mechanics better than any later entries in the "Metroidvania" subgenre by making its keys inherently interesting to use; yes, it controls like a dream; but it's still dull-as-dishwater as an action game taken on its own. The key to the game is that it's just barely threatening enough to keep the thrill of plowing into the unknown alive, while designing its world so that adjacent areas remain coherent. The underground fungus-forest is adjacent to an ocean boring deep into the planet's surface; as you go further and further underground, the tunnels get hotter and hotter, with magma flowing through gaps in the rock. Level design is frequently sacrificed for this world verisimilitude, and this hasn't always worked out well for videogames (it made the previously-mentioned Symphony of the Night something that no right-thinking person ever wants to play a second time), but it works out reasonably well here, thanks to a combination of general openness and particularly powerful jump abilities that let you quickly speed past any "squidgy" bits. It's notable that most of the game's transversal from area to area is vertical, while traversal within an area is generally horizontal (the major exception to this being the aforementioned forest-to-ocean transition), furthering the feeling of travelling through the stratas, away from the safe surface. The art direction finishes the dish, with most everything being recognizable as "natural terrain", "plant of some sort", "lava", "weird acid stuff", "Praying Mantis alien monster", etc., but while everything is recognizable in broad terms, none of it looks quite like anything that exists in the real world, which creates an unsettling "uncanny valley" effect that makes sure the alien world stays alien.

Super Metroid's enemies are mostly speedbumps (Ridley aside), and its action game elements are about as perfunctory of a "give the player some buttons to hit while they explore our cool world" exercise as exists within the medium. But, with a world like this, who cares?

About this blog

"Beauty of Button Mashing" -- the title is intended to reflect the cyclic relationship between aesthetics and mechanics in videogames. The current professional standard tends to be to treat the two separately and average them together to find a game's worth, but the two are inseparable -- aesthetics are a part of a game's mechanics, and, more importantly, mechanics are a part of a game's aesthetics.

The former of these two ideas is straightforward. What you see on your screen is a full half of the feedback loop between player and game. Imagine choosing dialogue options in an RPG where the text was replaced with random gibberish -- the mechanical challenge of talking to a threatening NPC would be ridiculous nonsense. Choosing guns based on what "feels good", moving slowly because an area feels creepy, or even an enemy camouflaging itself against the background -- all of these are aesthetics behaving as mechanics.

The latter is a bit trickier, but is the real magic of this medium. That twinge of regret when you blow a big retrieval in Dark Souls; that adrenaline rush when a huge boss appears at the end of a grueling level in Ketsui; that cleverness you feel when you find an alternate route around a guard in Dishonored; the elation you feel when you overcome the seemingly insurmountable final Vergil fight in Devil May Cry 3 -- all of these play into the narrative and thematic elements of the game, forcing the player to feel what the protagonist does. Even at a micro level, elements such as the UI of Supreme Commander echoing a desktop UI, a Guitar Hero controller mimicking the movements used to play a guitar, the motions for Shen's BnB combo in King of Fighters XIII with the rhythmic quarter circles mimicking his looping haymakers, or the elasticity of Blanka's and Guile's special moves off of their equally-elastic "charge" joystick motions make the player empathize more with the character representing them by having them make physical motions akin to what their onscreen alter-ego are performing.

A lot of people aren't going to like the above two paragraphs. The "gameplay is king!" types are all angrily yelling about how there's nothing more to gaming than perfecting a rote performance or reaching the peak of a competition -- never mind that the most popular games of all time in the physical world (Chess, combat sports) have been meant to simulate warfare in a safe (or at least safe-ish) manner. Meanwhile, the sensitive art-game hipsters are all crying about me instantly invalidating Gone Home, since they want "their feels" cordoned off in a remote area where there's no chance of experiencing it aside from the most distant empathy. They don't want to risk having to feel it themselves. And, finally, all of the masses who are most comfortable with Kotaku and IGN ran away the first time I wrote a long sentence with an em dash or used the phrase "cyclic relationship". For those of you who are left, you'll never see a review broken down into discrete "gameplay/graphics/sound/boobs" categories. You'll see a better type of game discussion, and hopefully, you'll think about games in new ways and get more enjoyment from them.

So, what kind of articles can you expect from this site? At the date of this writing, I expect you can expect a bit of everything -- proper reviews, musings on the workings of gaming, a bit of history, articles on specific aspects of some game or another that are worth looking into, and maybe even the occasional shitpost just for fun. You'll see things you disagree with (especially if you click that Discord link), you'll see things you agree with, and, if you're lucky, you might see a new idea that interests you. Welcome to the Beauty of Button Mashing.