SNES classic Super Metroid went on sale for under a buck earlier this week, the combination of price and the game’s status obviously resulting in a massive influx of new players.
Players that, thanks to the wonders of the Miiverse, appear to be…struggling with 1990s game design.
There’s always the chance these guys are trolling/joking, but then, it seems just as likely that a generation of people who have grown up with proper tutorials and hand-holding are, well, finding it all a little difficult.
Are people struggling with Super Metroid or are they trolling? [Go Nintendo]
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30 responses to “The Kids Of Today Seem To Be Struggling With Super Metroid”
Aren’t we smug Plunkett?
I’m not ashamed to admit that I got stuck in Super Metroid frequently, despite the fact I played it in the 90’s. Metroidvania titles have their own logic, which can be obtuse to new players.
Acute comment with solid equilateral thought. Isosceles?
I’m sure you didn’t stop at a dead end with no sign of a message prompt telling you what to do next in sight and put the controller down, put your hands to the side of your face and say, “oh dear, I’m stuck. What do I do?!?!”
I’m sure instead you would have turned back and found another path that helped you progress through your journey. Why? Because you would have been used to figuring out things for yourself. Such was the way of the 80’s – 90’s gamer. And then for fun check if there were any cheats for the game in the latest gaming mags 😀
Ahhh nostalgia… we meet again.
No easy-mode tutorial hand holding back then, I think that is what makes older games more fun, the act of finding out for yourself.
I got stuck while playing it on the Wii at some point after getting the speed-run ability. The map had opened up so much that there was just no clear indication of where I had to go next. Then when I returned to it a few weeks later, I had no chance of working out where I was, even with a guide!
So yeah, there’s a definite lack of hand holding in the older games. Newer games would have actually popped up after half an hour and said “hey, you should go check out over here”. Not sure which approach is better, both have their merits.
I look forward to buying it on Wii U and getting stuck towards the end all over again 🙂
I think its a matter of preference. Some people won’t want any hand holding. No one wants too much. I hate it when a game doesn’t respect my time, so I usually don’t want to spend more than 30 minutes working out where to go next (which could be a weeks gaming session for me).
just call me! (I have prolly forgotten now) :p
I think this is relatively common across most Metroid games. I can’t recall how many times I looked at gamefaqs while I was playing Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.
except in modern games they had maps which pointed out where your next objective was and made it clear where the doors you hadn’t opened yet were.
They had that in the GBA metroid. (I played it on my 3DS).
Without it telling me where to go I would have quickly been lost.
Yeah, but Nintendo games have the tendency to be cryptic when it comes to navigating across levels. This can range from levels in Super Mario Bros 3 to Super Paper Mario to LOZ: Link to the Past and so forth.
This is probably a good example of when I play my childhood games again as an adult and think to myself “how the f*** did I manage to even pass the first level back then”
I ordered a couple of Buffalo SNES USB controllers off ebay and tested it out with a few games I used to play as a kid. I found myself in that exact same situation a few days ago playing Super Mario World. I used to pride myself on my “precise hand-eye coordination skills” that I had developed as a kid, and not having played any good games lately (for lack of said products), I laughed when I miss-judged a jump only to fall down a hole and die lol.
Could it be true? Had I become the “newbie” gamer that I used to despise all those years ago.. you know.. the ones that used to thrust their controllers up into the air to make their character jump?! Nah.. I was never that bad, and thankfully a few short minutes later I had my groove back 😛
On a side note, I highly recommend the Buffalo USB controllers for anyone who hasn’t got an original SNES controller and USB converter.
Hahaha! Foolish noobs. I played the s##t out of Super Metroid when I was a kid. When I get home tonight I’m slapping down 30c to relive the magic. Then when I get stuck I’ll realise I too have become a soft noob.
Thanks for the reminder about the sale – still only 30c for Super Metroid!
These people should be first choice candidates for the one way Mars mission…
HA HA HA!
But yeah, I remember my mates all getting stuck and giving up because
you had to shoot 5 missiles at the pink doors, they would shoot one and give up,http://www.kotaku.com.au/2013/05/talk-amongst-yourselves-225/comment-page-4/#comment-1400713
Hahaha it was you!
Thanks lol
HA!
Its amazing how ppl get stuck on a game which dosnt old your hand as you play…
One of the ways Games have changed over the years
Having grown up with grueling trial-and-error and problem solving NES and SNES games (and then having owned almost every console thereafter) I can’t even sit down and play a game like COD without feeling somewhat insulted by how dumb the developers must think I am that I must be told what to do at each moment where I finally SHOULD be making “life or death” decisions. Who are they designing games for these days?! The sales figures of games like COD are astonishing which just makes things even more unsettling.
While looking at the picture above, I can’t help but picture mice/rats in a maze trying to hunt down the elusive block of cheese. They’ve finally gotten themselves to the wall behind which it sits. They know this because they can smell it! And so there they sit, stuck in place looking for the little non-existent door to get through to their prize, as opposed to exploring further around the maze. Almost makes me want to purchase a clipboard and a white coat and start examining these ‘new-age gamers’. I’ll put cod players next on the list of gamer species to examine, though I feel I’ll probably have better luck with mice and rats.
I grew up playing Nes?SNES games too, I’ve found though that now I’m an adult with adult responsibilities I just don’t wanna put in as much effort as I did growing up.
Sometimes I’m too busy to come back to a game for a while and if it wasn’t for map markers and quest logs I would never be able to pick up where I left off.
There’s a balance though, I used to get annoyed in Metroid Prime when it kept trying to tell me where to go and all I wanted to do was wander about and soak up the atmosphere.
So many of these Miiverse posts could be resolved with a quick and simple “RTFM”.
Ok, there are legitimate reasons for getting stuck in games. But because you can’t figure out how to do a basic and regular function of the game? Do kids today really not bother to read the manual? Or are games today becoming so streamlined that they’re able to transfer what they’ve learned from one game to another without having to learn anything new? (probly why CoD is so popular)
Just shows that not all of us can remember everything from a game we played in our childhood
There’s a difference between recalling how to do something and figuring something out yourself.
I hired this game from the video shop as a kid and it took me 2 weeks to complete it. I still remember to this day how amazed I was at how awesome Super Metroid 3 was. It was as difficult for me then as I’m sure it is difficult for people now. Those days most people like myself had to persevere as it was much more difficult to find help with no internets.
Just picked it up and am very disappointed. It’s in 50HZ and either French or German subtitles are always on and cannot be disabled and get in the way on the screen.
Nintendo Hard™
I recently got Kid Icarus on the 3DS and was ashamed at how much difficulty I had progressing. I then remembered that a few games here and there have started to bring back N-Hard aspects to their gameplay. DKC Returns, Harmoknight and NSMBU come to mind that had a selection of challenging stages that aren’t meant to be beaten easily.
I’m pretty sure that we all struggled back then too even without having been raised by tutorial-ridden, friendly games. The main difference is that back then, there was no Internet to jump into to quickly find the answers, so you just had to try and try and try and try until you found a way. As an adult nowadays with little free time, I’m kind of grateful about the current arrangement. I enjoy puzzles and high difficulty settings but if I’m getting stuck at some point in the game for days, wasting my precious few spare hours in doing the same thing over and over trying to figure what I’m doing wrong, I’ll happily check a youtube video and learn it rather than spending any more time in it when there’s so much more gaming to be had. It’s less rewarding, sure, but more responsible to yourself.
this game had some seriously flawed mechanics. i hereby call BULLSHIT on your “holiar than thou” attitude. post a video of yourself doing the ridiculous wall-jump trick. you know you cant do it. it’s a broken mechanic that works 5% of the time. not to mention the horrible morph ball bomb climbing mechanic…
you probably never even beat the game. youtube of you wall-jumping without an emulator or cheat, or it didnt happen… lying bitch
Are you serious blowme??
The game had no broken mechanic !!
you’re thinking of future metroid titles!!
Super Metroid was a classic of the first order !!
I am 12 years old and i have an snes from gamesplus and a copy of super metroid im having no trouble just look it up wat your stuck on