• The item placement. You managed to place items such that you feel like you never have them when you *want* them, but you always have them when you *need* them.


• "Hell's Run", the run through Norfair for the Ice Beam before you have the Varia Suit. Feels a bit like a No-Boss/Mini-Boss (NBMB) run on the original (which I've done in emulation, and have almost finished doing on the console), but as a natural part of the game, with tight-but-not-too-tight margins. In general, I like how you punctuated the big adventure-game explorations with epic boss battles and fun action sequences.


• Room layout. The original Super Metroid, while wonderfully expansive and immersive, still felt somewhat "boxy" in room layout; with a few notable exceptions (like the big room in Brinstar near Spore Spawn), the rooms felt like "rooms". For example, the Craterian Gauntlet just feels like a bunch of obstacles in a linear room. You've made creative use of both dimensions simultaneously, connected areas (I hesitate to even call them "rooms") with a variety of means, and constructed morph-ball mazes better than those in Metroid Prime 1 and 2 (even despite their three dimensions to work with). Your Maridia really feels like a vast cavernous ocean; your Norfair feels rather like fiery torment caves, your Crateria feels craggy, and your Brinstar really comes alive.


• The "Beam Combo", and the fact that you can't use more than charge and one beam without it. This makes you think about your beam more, and use an appropriate beam for the situation, rather than just treating each new beam like an ability that you always leave on. This, together with increasing average enemies somewhat in strength, makes regular enemies something more than just cannon fodder throughout the game, at least up until you get the Screw Attack (and by then you have other problems to deal with).


• The escape sequence. To avoid spoiling people regarding what to expect, I'll put the following comments as black-on-black, so select them to see. "What the heck happened to all my gear? Oh, that beam must have really *hurt*. Twenty-five minutes; uh-oh! Whoa, dead end! Hey, wait a minute, a tunnel! Climb, climb, *gasp*, *puff*, *wheeze*. Hot foot, hot foot! Oh no, *water*?! Whoa, cave-ins! Oh, *more* water; no wonder he made Crateria flood earlier! Holy crud, my ship *moved*?! (pick up jaw)"

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Originally posted by Drewseph

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Excelent review! although I would love to know what you didn't like as well =)

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• Getting used to you blocking off almost all opportunities to sequence-break the major items, and resigning myself to just obtaining a few energy tanks and weapon capacity upgrades earlier than I suspect you intended, or differently. I did find the "early screw attack" shinespark method someone posted rather interesting, and I may have to try that at some point; however, screw attack just makes things easier, it doesn't really open anything up.
  Spoiler:
  I may have to try and see if you can bomb-jump up to the Varia Suit, as well, but I don't really *want* to skip Hell's Run


• Getting used to not wall-jumping everywhere, which somewhat goes with the above. I understand why you did it (blocking off wall-jumping sequence-breaks would require lots of gratuitous ledges and barriers which would detract from the game), and I don't actually think you should change it, it just took some getting used to compared to Super Metroid. If you had had a spare spot for a collectible, I think that universal wall-jump boots ("wall-grip boots" or similar) some time before space jump would have made things interesting, but I obviously don't think you should redesign that now.


• I really enjoyed the Lost Caverns, but one thing that made it much harder to figure out the pattern:
  Spoiler:
  IIRC, after you make the correct first move, the second move goes in the same direction, making the indicators identical. Or something like that.

Originally posted by Drewseph

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your compliments mean alot ot me, and I put all the energy into this hack for players like you to enjoy =)

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Originally posted by Drewseph

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also, I fixed the 100.6% bug the other day (shhhh, it was a uber secret update!) what happend was the perminently destroyed pb blocks use a plm to never come back. the power bomb next to charge beam has a barrier, that barrier had index of 95 00, when it should have been 95 01. the block uses the item bit array and so because the final % check looks at $00-$AF I had to change it


see, that powerbomb actually counted as 2 items accidently 1 for blowing up the block, another for actually getting it. but thats been fixed.

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Originally posted by Drewseph

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Also I want you to know about the water in crateria.

Spoiler:
I didn't put that there because of losing everything to mb, well, I sorta did. but the mai reason is because it is storming on zebes, and as you noticed, it was night time for a very long time, all while still storming out. but when morning comes, the storm is over. but wheres all that rain water? it builds up in the lower portions of the exterior areas.

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