The first screen is sort of a tutorial, though. If you go right first because you’ve played Super Mario Bros. or some other platformer and you think going right might be the way to win, you’re presented with a narrow passage you can’t crawl through. At this point, you’ll discover that you can also go left. There’s another rock formation with a narrow passage, but from this side you can jump on top of it to get over it, and you’ll find the Morph Ball. From the Morph Ball side, you can’t jump back over, so you have to figure out how to get through the narrow passage by pressing down to enter Morph Ball mode. Now you understand the game: find obstacles, acquire the corresponding upgrades, use them to bypass the obstacles.
Not to mention that at that time, games shipped with an instruction booklet that told you the controls…
In those days tutorials weren’t a thing. Games came with manuals that you were expected to actually read.
Yup…
RTFM
I’m getting flashbacks to NES Rambo seeing your comment. First ragequit, fuck that game lol
Just watched a video that talked about that game last night. Never played it myself but I can see it being a pain.
It is, the respawn rates are insane by modern standards. 0/10 would not recommend, stick to the movies instead.
I never understood why they call this genre Metroidvania. Metroid definitely came first right? Why isn’t it just Metroid-like?
Super Metroid + SOTN
Metroid wasn’t first. Games like Pitfall II and Montezuma’s Revenge predate it.
As for the “Metroidvania” name, originally it just applied to Castlevania games in the Metroid mould (particularly in the GBA/DS days when there were a tonne of them) but people just started applying it to the entire genre. It was always a terrible name.
Neither of those are Metroidvanias. Montezuma’s Revenge isn’t one big interconnected world and they both lack ability-based progression.
