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Metroid Prime 2: Echoes Launches
The sequel to Metroid Prime, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes has been released to consumers. Details on the sequel can be found via a Gamespy hands on look or a Gamespot review. A snip from the review: "If you've played Metroid Prime, you've essentially played Metroid Prime 2. Retro hasn't mucked with the original, winning formula, so veterans of the first game will feel quite at home resuming their position behind Samus' computer-enhanced visor."
Somehow, I'm guessing you don't really mean that.
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
Offtopic my ass. JUSTIN BAILEY was one of the first name other than my own that I learned how to spell. The original Metroid for Nintendo was godly for its time.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
I'm looking forward to the DS game more (already out I believe). Multiplayer!
This new GC game also has multiplayer, though I think limited to 4 players on a single TV instead of the DS short-range wireless connection. The upside of the GC one is that only one system is needed, whereas you have to know others with a DS to play that one multiplayer.
And the DS one is not out yet. There's a demo of it that comes with the DS, which will be released on Nov 21, which seems to be a Sunday for some reason.
Honor Among Slackers. A veri
For the record, the JUSTIN BAILEY password (and its many variants) is almost certainly a complete coincidence. I spent hours reverse-engineering Metroid's password system, and it just so happens that the number of possible passwords (many of which will give the same results, and some of which will do unexpeced things such as locking up the game) is so vast that there are many, many passwords that spell interesting and novel things. In fact, you can put in any password at all, minus the last 2 characters (which encode a checksum) and calculate the final characters to make it valid.
There is one password that is hard-coded into the game, and this can be verified with a string dump[1] of the ROM. The password is "NARPASSWORD" (speculation is that this stands for North American Release Password). Enter this while leaving the remaining characters blank (or equivalently filling them with 0s[2]) to get what I assume is some kind of debugging mode. There are a few notable things about it: 1) Samus is invincible, and has infinite missiles. 2) Samus has both the Wave Beam and the Ice Beam equipped, which results in a beam that behaves just like the Ice Beam, but the projectile appears to be a blue Wave Beam projectile. 3) Destroying metroids has a tendancy to freeze the game.
Footnotes:
[1] The strings are not ASCII. IIRC, the character set is laid out exactly as it is on the password screen, so the value 0 corresponds to the character '0', etc. Obviously, strings are not 0-terminated.
[2] Unfilled spaces on the password screen are equivalent to 0s. The space character that you can enter is something different. In the case of the NARPASSWORD password, only so many of the characters are actually significant, so the last 8 or so characters can be anything. I've forgotten exactly how many are ignored.
Metroid is about the story, mainly.
My memory doesn't always serve me well, but Metroid Prime is the first Metroid game where I could sense anything like an appreciable storyline. What strike me as the Metroid series' most representative qualities would be its atmosphere of alienness and the frequently exhilarating feeling of exploration and discovery. The subdued soundtrack and near lack of verbal cues in the original Metroid lent the game a kind of elegance and abstraction that perfectly fit its alien setting. I think later games like Metroid Fusion, while still great fun, lost a little by grafting more overt storytelling elements onto the game. (As I mentioned, though, maybe my memory's not so good and I'm just idealizing the best parts of the earlier games.)
More generally (and this is not addressed to the parent post), I'm not sure why some gamers insist on the primacy of storytelling in games. In some cases, like the old Infocom games or brilliant RPGs like Planescape: Torment, a plot is indispensable, but there are games like Doom or Defender, in which the story is understood to be completely irrelevant. And then you have games like Go or Checkers, for which a story would be meaningless.