Idle Thumbs 106: Imagine the Man

[Merus]

Super Metroid is almost entirely gated with mechanics, isn't it? You need crazy missile type X to bash through this wall, or you need the grappling beam to swing across this otherwise insane gap! I'm sure there are parts of the game which you can complete if you have near-exploit-worthy levels of wall hopping traversal skill, but that's not explicit in the design of the game, right? I'm not anywhere near a skilled Metroid player, so while I know about speed run type scenarios, my understanding of Metroid design is "the player sees an interesting place that they can't go but find intriguing, and then when they gain a new unlock or ability they realize they can backtrack to that interesting place and discover they now have the mechanical means to access it." That's pretty different than core-skill-based gating.

 

Super Metroid's interesting in that there are mechanical gates but sufficient understanding of the world and the game mechanics allows you to bypass them. For instance, the game treats the first expansion you get of a particular weapon as an unlock instead, so if you work out a way to get a particular expansion early, you can skip going to the canonical place to get that weapon. The morph ball, bomb jump, wall jump and shinespark are exploitable enough that skilled players can skip getting the supposedly required grappling beam and morph ball jump, and can usually get certain weapons out of sequence.

 

Many of these abilities that allow players to bypass mechanical gates are things Samus has innately, or earns in the first fifteen minutes of the game.

 

Many of the games that draw on Super Metroid, including its sequels, make their upgrade path much more strict. Very few of them are still played today.

[sclpls]

I'm not so sure that that's actually what's going on, though. I think it's really significant that between your arrival on Columbia and exposure to Comstock's rather appalling regime, and the nearly as appalling widespread violence of the Vox's successful overthrow of that regime, you step into an alternate universe. And not just once, either. There are really creepy effects associated with those changes, and the tears are repeatedly called out as being corruptive and damaging to people who use them too heavily, as well as catering to Elizabeth's perceptions. It's been argued, and I think very plausibly, that the reason Booker goes from apathetic, hard-hearted mercenary to someone who actually cares about Elizabeth and wants to help her, is because he passes through those tears with her. And I think it's very possible that the Vox of the final universe, are, essentially, what Elizabeth expects them to be.

 

I think this, and several other interpretations are definitely plausible. It is to the game's credit that there is room to interpret events differently. However a lot of people interpreted the theme of Infinite the way Chris did, and while it's not the interpretation I personally subscribe to, it also isn't an interpretation I can dismiss because as far as I know there isn't any piece of evidence in the game that would necessarily weaken the more nihilistic interpretation that a lot of people got from the game. And if that isn't something Ken Levine & co. wanted then that is a problem of artistic execution, and if it is what was intended then it is a philosophically bankrupt message to propagate.

[Chris]

I'm not so sure that that's actually what's going on, though. I think it's really significant that between your arrival on Columbia and exposure to Comstock's rather appalling regime, and the nearly as appalling widespread violence of the Vox's successful overthrow of that regime, you step into an alternate universe. And not just once, either. There are really creepy effects associated with those changes, and the tears are repeatedly called out as being corruptive and damaging to people who use them too heavily, as well as catering to Elizabeth's perceptions. It's been argued, and I think very plausibly, that the reason Booker goes from apathetic, hard-hearted mercenary to someone who actually cares about Elizabeth and wants to help her, is because he passes through those tears with her. And I think it's very possible that the Vox of the final universe, are, essentially, what Elizabeth expects them to be.

 

If that's the case, I'm still not really sure what that means. "In alternate universes things might theoretically be pretty different"? 

[malkav11]

I think this, and several other interpretations are definitely plausible. It is to the game's credit that there is room to interpret events differently. However a lot of people interpreted the theme of Infinite the way Chris did, and while it's not the interpretation I personally subscribe to, it also isn't an interpretation I can dismiss because as far as I know there isn't any piece of evidence in the game that would necessarily weaken the more nihilistic interpretation that a lot of people got from the game. And if that isn't something Ken Levine & co. wanted then that is a problem of artistic execution, and if it is what was intended then it is a philosophically bankrupt message to propagate.

 

I think that's fair enough.