As you may know from some of my previous posts, I’m a fan of well-made fan games. The recent Metroid Jam resulted in a pair of stellar homages to the game that birthed a genre. *
These two games take quite different tacks in their approaches to the source material, and each one is entirely successful in what it’s trying to do. And we get a couple of cool games to play!
MTRD (Windows, Mac, Linux)
It only took a two-word description to make me want to play this game, and they’ll probably work on you, too: “ASCII Metroid”. Boom.
MTRD is a fan game that had to be made. Ideally, there will one day be an ASCII remake of every classic videogame ever (heck, why stop with the classics…)
Part of the joy produced by this small gem comes from playing it; part comes from seeing all of the clever ways in which the developer recreated instantly recognizable elements of Metroid using ASCII graphics. The game was, impressively, coded in Java, and the graphics were made using the wonderful open source art tool Playscii.
Metroid Sigma (Windows, Mac, Linux)
Metroid Sigma knocks my socks off for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s a solid little game that’s fun to play and recreates that Metroid feeling. It’s packed with good stuff like powerups (including a screwattack), creatures both familiar and new, and multiple stages, each with a boss to greet you at the end. It even has a mini-map.
Secondly, it’s a technical achievement. Rather than relying on a pre-existing engine, the developer crafted a brand new one from scratch. The game was coded from the ground up in C++ and Lua (with some SDL2). Furthermore, the graphics were not ripped from official games, nor slavishly recreated, pixel for pixel. I like how the art approximates Metroid without being an exact facsimile. Sigma feels a lot like a “lost” official installment in the series (or at least the first 5 levels of one).
* I realize the term “metroidvania” references another game series, too, but Metroid and Super Metroid were really the genre’s progenitors. Castlevania: SOTN came much later and was merely an example (a great one) of a tradition that had already been established. Lots of people compared SOTN to Super Metroid when it first came out, but the term “metroidvania” didn’t exist yet. As further proof, I present the fact that Metroid is the game with its entire title used in the genre’s name, not Castlevania.
2 comments