Why Metroid II is the baby nobody wanted
Metroid II: Return of Samus (1992)
Metroid II: Return of Samus (1992)
Some men, and presumably some women, are born cynical. Some become cynical. And some have cynicism thrust upon them. You’ll find that one becomes naturally more cynical towards modern trends as they become older.
Actually, from what I've read online, a majority of people seem to become absolutely decrepit in their 30s, waking up in the morning with all kinds of new aches and pains which quickly become the norm. If they haven’t already woken up during the night to take a whizz, that is.
These days you can probably measure how old you are, mentally, by pinpointing where in the social media tapestry you finally decided to bow out. I didn’t even go near TikTok, because I already knew I was four hundred years too old to use it. But one of the more depressing trends that has grown lately, thanks mostly to how attention seeking it is, is gender reveal parties.
You’ll have seen these parties mentioned before, I’m sure, especially the ones that have gone badly wrong. I was reading about one where there was a full firework display, for God’s sake, all for one more child born into a dying world. How’s that for cynicism?
Well, unfortunately, on this occasion the fireworks quite literally backfired and took the expectant father down with them. That’s how badly wrong the whole thing went. Now, if I found out I was gonna be a father, I’d probably be looking for a way out of it too, but nothing so extreme as that.
Then of course there was that gender reveal party which was, to use a social media term, fire - so fire in fact, that it set the nearby forests ablaze and they needed to bring in several fire engines to calm it all down, resulting in the death of one firefighter. Forget about guns and blunt objects for home protection, that's boring - hoard some home explosives instead, and even if you never have to grenade a burglar, you can at least bust them out at your next gender reveal party.
Obviously this gender reveal trend is all female led, as most trends on social media are - if you hate yourself enough to look at a video of a gender reveal party for people you barely even know, as I have, then you'll notice that the man is always acting. Actually, it’s worse than that, they’ll be outright cringing. And if they’re not, they should be.
It’s just a gender difference is all. As another example: every man out there, with no exception, feels their eyes glaze over when their partner starts giving them chapter and verse about their friends' baby scans. Ever had to look through four hundred photos of some baby you’ve never even met? Men, you know what I mean. There’s only so many times you can avoid saying that, actually, newborn babies are mostly pretty ugly.
Still, what a depressing indictment, this whole gender reveal fad. To whoever reads this: nobody cares what gender your baby is going to be, and although this may be alien to you, if you could please stop seeking attention and broadcasting your personal life online for five minutes, we’d all appreciate it.
And it’s funny that we mention aliens, genders and depressiveness, because it brings us neatly on to Metroid II: Return of Samus for the Game Boy - and only the original Game Boy. Which is quite a shame, because if any game cried out for a Deluxe treatment on the Game Boy Color, it was this one.
Metroid II doesn’t have much of an act to follow, though. The first Metroid on NES was an absolute turkey. It got a bit better if you had a map from a magazine or a strategy guide with you, but otherwise you had to go down the graphing paper route, and that’s never a route you wanna go down.
The original game was at least blessed with color, which Metroid II sadly lacks. The NES title also had a small library of decentish music to listen to, motifs that still get used today. There are a couple of tunes in Metroid II, if you know where to find them, but for the most part it’ll make your Game Boy speaker sound like it’s about to burst out of the console, like a horrible giant spider bursting out of an egg.
There’s still no map for reference either, and overall the whole endeavour just drains your energy and happiness, so much so that the game begged for a remake - luckily, it received two of them. There was the fan-made AM2R, or Another Metroid 2 Remake, and the Nintendo official remake, Samus Returns on 3DS. Both are definitely worth playing, and they obsolete this game to hell and back.
Back in the day, you may have already been aware that Samus was a lady, but the only way you’d know is if you were quick beating the NES game. And given how cryptic that game is, that really isn’t an easygoing gender reveal, believe me. It’s the same with Metroid II - beat the game quick enough and you’ll get yourself a look at Samus in her smalls, albeit in black and white.
Again, that won’t do much to impress men out there in this day and age. But then, it was difficult to glimpse women in states of undress anywhere. It used to be that we’d either have to find a few grot mags in the bushes, an Argos catalogue with fitness equipment advertised... or best of all, an hour to yourself with the TV set to Channel 5.
No, Metroid II is the dowdy old mother who's had her kids now, and knows her figure ain't never coming back. I suppose this is a game "of its time". It wasn’t unheard of for middling NES games to receive even worse Game Boy renditions - Kid Icarus, to name one example, or the Game Boy’s attempt at Dr. Mario. It was all for the sake of portability.
And having games like these was ideal for long car journeys, once you had a healthy stock of batteries and preferably one of those huge clip-on backlights for the Game Boy that resembled a home sunbed. There’s something greatly intimate about portable devices, where only you can see what’s going on. And that’s really amplified with the Game Boy, where not even the player can make out what’s going on.
For that reason, I see Metroid II not so much as the game you’d play in the backseat of the car while staving off motion sickness. I think of it more of a game that you’d play in the dead of night, under the blanket - so long as you have that backlight device handy.
In that scenario, the dark, foreboding atmosphere of Metroid II might actually become exciting. If you bury yourself deep enough, you may even get to the end, rescuing the little Baby Metroid, with its relaxing theme song, in the wee hours of the morning. Incidentally do you think Metroids have genders…?
But beating this game is no easy task. Honestly, you'll only get to the end of Metroid II if you have a decent guide, or if you play it all in one sitting without having to remember everywhere you've been. Otherwise, you’re completely lost in a spacefest that doesn’t really go anywhere. You might as well just save yourself the aggro and watch Alien instead, if you’ve got the nerve. At least that’s in colour.
To say the least, suffering through the depressing extents of Metroid II, less a game and more a gender reveal party in slow motion and in black-and-white (well, black, white and green), doesn't really appeal. Play the remakes instead, or better still, get on Super Metroid - that’s the game where Samus’s baby was taken away by the authorities, and life immediately became a whole lot better for her.
2 January 2024