Saturday, August 6, 2011

25th Anniversary of Metroid



Happy Birthday, Metroid! Today, 25 years ago, Metroid was released for the Famicon in Japan and was followed by ten more games over the years.

Nintendo won't celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Metroid franchise, primarily because it would overlap with the celebration of the 25th Anniversary of Zelda, two anniversaries at once would be too much. As a Zelda fan I won't complain about this, however, you might also think that the underperformance of Metroid: Other M could be another reason for Nintendo's current disinterest in the anniversary. And after all the whole 25th Anniversary thing is just one big marketing move. There are no new Metroid games coming this year, unlike Zelda, where we're heading towards Skyward Sword... Nintendo isn't promoting the 25th Anniversary of Metroid, because there's nothing to sell.

But I'm still convinced that Nintendo will acknowledge this anniversary in some form, for example by releasing Metroid II - Return of Samus on the 3DS Virtual Console.

And even if Nintendo doesn't celebrate, Metroid fans certainly do by releasing various fan arts and music remixes. I'm especially looking forward to the Harmony of a Hunter album, more about that soon. And my contribution is the very simple 25th Anniversary logo which you can see above.

Metroid is my second favorite Action Adventure game after Zelda. I primarily play Metroid because it is quite similar to Zelda in a lot of ways, for me Metroid is Sci-Fi Zelda. You explore a huge world, you power up by collecting new items which let you explore new areas, etc. There are even collectibles in form of Missile Expansions and Energy Containers. The big difference is that most Zelda games devide their game world into overworld and dungeons and that the overworld may have friendly places like villages. Metroid doesn't have something like villages, it's all a giant complex of connected dungeons. But overall the gameplay is quite similar. And sometimes the similarities between both franchises are striking.

So, Happy Birthday, Metroid!

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