Overall score on pook's 100-point system (TM): 76, rounded up to 80 or just 8. this game has aged pretty well, being about 10 years old now. note how i'm handling gameplay:length for a further explanation. it allows this game to more closely reflect what i felt in my gut about it.
-the breakdown-
Graphics (26/30, judged by system)- Ok, this was a b/w gameboy game, but for the system the graphics are pretty nice. lots of enemies and pretty decent animation. good variety of background tiles, and large bosses. better at least than the original metroid.
Sound- FX/Voice (7/10) it's a gb game and the sounds do their job pretty well.
Sound- Music (6/10) honestly, the music is a little lacking. while the original metroid was even more repetitive, the music was very sparse and often became nothing more than bleeps, which was so well done it was creepy. this game attempts to do the same, but doesn't quite hit that same level of minimalistic creepiness.
Gameplay- Length (8/10) hmm. well i usually say 40 hours is golden, and i've based this on the average price of a game of $50. i rate gameplay as $/hours and like to get 40 hours out of a $50 game. i suppose that makes this score relative since i would not expect 40 hours out of a $5 game. So, it looks like i demand 1 hour of gameplay for every $1.25 spent. this game took 8 hours to complete according to my savegame. but with deaths and having to do parts over it probably lasted about 11 hours. this game currently goes for about $16 total. so, i would expect ~13 hours out of this game.
Gameplay- Difficulty/Complexity (8/10) a solid sequel to the nes version. lots more action than the original, some tough metroids make for good challenges. though there are fewer random enemies than the original, there are more fights that matter. the final fight is a toughie if you haven't read spoilers in an faq. the game covers a huge area, and there is no map system like the original. however whereas the original was kind of color-coded so you could guess where you were, this one obviously isn't. i took a week and a half break from this game to play animal crossing and thought i'd be totally lost getting back to it. it only took me a few minutes to regain the sense of where i was. i'm not sure how they did that, but it caused me to boost the score.
Gameplay- Story (3/5) well in game there really isn't any. the manual has a basic story in it, enough to get you going.
Gameplay- Innovation (16/20)- shares a lot in common with its predecessor, and as usual per nintendo adds just enough to make it unique. where the first game had huge areas where all you were doing was looking for power-ups since there were only 2 minibosses, this game has a set number of metroids of different types that you need to eradicate, so you're always hunting them down. the world is structured so that you have to clear an area before being given access to deeper areas, meaning you can't miss some metroids, delve really deep into the caves, then realize you have to backtrack. this fear occured to me early on--with so many metroids pretty well hidden, i'm going to have to backtrack a ton. but it was not so. there is a meter that shows how many metroids are in the current area (if you pause). the spider ball rocked and allowed a whole new type of exploration.
Gameplay- Replay value (2/5) while the game does not scream play me again you get the option of trying to beat your finish time and get the good ending, which reveals samus' true form. finishing it once would greatly reduce the playtime the second time through. put it this way, the best ending is 3 hours or under, so it's possible you could replay it in an afternoon and get some more play time out of it.
Final Thoughts- took me a little bit to get into this. the monochrome scheme didn't help. interestingly if you play on a gba the game is colorized pleasantly so that samus actually appears her proper colors! once i got into this game though i was very involved. if you're a metroid fan of old, or just discovered metroid with the recent release of fusion/prime, and want to check out some more metroid action, pick up a copy of this used.
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