Forums > Submission Feedback > dagoss's Metroid review

Put simply, this isn't a review- it's a misplaced (or mislabeled) blog post.

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Why did you change it? I figured everyone would have understood what you were saying from the first message--provided they clicked the link.

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As it was, anyone who didn't bother to click on it would think I was just being rude.

If at first you don't succeed, give up. Don't make a damn fool of yourself.

I found that article on NGJ really quite interesting, and why I don't read a lot of reviews these days.

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It's definitely not "a critical evaluation of [Metroid's] rule system in comparison with the rule systems of similar games;" if that's how you define a review, this is not a review.

That's a very narrow definition though, and it doesn't account for a lot of the reasons why people actually play video games. If you're playing Metroid today, you're likely treating it like a relic in a museum, walking around it, staring at it with a look on your face like you're constipated, and muttering to yourself "I don't get it" or "well, it's no Super Metroid!"

That's the issue with a lot of older games. To only talk about Metroid's mechanics would be, in essence, to say "don't play this; let's not play this game anymore because we've replaced it with better games; let's forget about it."

I'm not saying that this isn't not a review, but I am saying that if it's not a review, and mechanical evaluation and comparison is what reviews should be limited to, then there's really no point to writing a review of Metroid (or probably reading one) in the first place.

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I read this review because Metroid, like Mega Man, passed me by at the time and I wonder what made it so legendary, how it stands up today, and whether it's worth me going back to acquaint myself with it.

This post is quite an interesting article in its own right, but it's not a review. You're right that talking about a game's mechanics isn't necessarily the best way to approach old games, but that's also not the only way to provide a review. The final paragraph gives an indication of where you intended to go with this, but most of the article is a discussion of one small oddity of an old game. As it stands, interesting or not (I did enjoy reading it), it's not a review.

'There would be tears and there would be strange laughter. Fierce births and deaths beneath umbrageous ceilings. And dreams, and violence, and disenchantment.'

I agree that this is not a review, though I think it fulfills the purpose of a review.

There is a certain type of person. A person who was mesmerized by BASIC, who spent hours with a Micro, who applies the UNIX philosophy like it is the word of God. I refer to people that were inspired by games like Metroid to search for meaning in machines only to end up as a 20/30-something cog in a marketing scheme. You know the type. Mid-level programmers who got married, started a family, and spend their days toiling away at Java or some other such non-sense. People who want to feel the same sense of wonder and exploration that they felt with their NES or Atari, and search vainly in database management and their family tree. These are the people that, 200 years early, would have readily boarded a ship bound for certain death just for the sake of exploration. The only frontier left now is computers.

HG, a site populated by people that knew the Internet as a frontier back in the 1990s, is one of the few places that might understand. Imagine that a new area is discovered in Metroid. My God--it would be like the stone thrown that shattered the casing of the dead sea scrolls. .NET experts and social media marketing gurus would turn their heads in awe: this is what they've been looking for, the thing that will make the machines to which they are dedicating their lives worthwhile, to show them the same inspiration they knew as a 10 year old.

Video games are different that books and film and everything that came before. If Milton was inspired by Homer to write poetry, what would Milton have done if he had been inspired by Final Fantasy III? He'd probably drink himself blind (for irony) and end up writing something like this forum post/review; he'd be really freaking weird and he'd have no where to express his weirdness.

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Review or not, I still enjoyed this piece.

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