Topic: Umm, Metroid rip-off?

[animecyberrat]

so there is still hope for a Turrican game, they recently made that cell phone turrican which I wanted pretty bad but dont have the phone it came with and dont know if you can download it or not. Anyways I amam HUGE turrican fan, I have all of the snes and genesis turrican games and play those more than any other action game on either system.  

[KDR_11k]

I THINK that game came with my father's cellphone. If that was it you're not missing anything, it's a sluggish, clumsy sidescroller with oversized sprites (i.e. you can see no further than three steps ahead) running at 3 frames per second with awfully long load times.

[Ian Sane]

Since Nintendo is giving as a Metroid FPS on the DS and hasn't annouced a real Metroid game yet and don't see any problem with another company filling in the gap.  I think the isometric view is a new enough twist to the formula to allow it to stand on it's own.  Often some of best games just take an existing formula and then add a few new elements to it.  Though the storyline with the female bounty hunter is a little too similar for my liking.

As for Metroid being a rip-off of alien I don't see any problem with it.  Alien is a movie and Metroid is a game.  Metroid's legacy is based on it's gameplay, not the storyline elements it shares with Alien, so it's hardly a rip-off.  Most videogames in terms of story are cliche city.

[KDR_11k]

But a jump and run in iso view is a really bad idea as Sonic 3D proved. Especially the diagonally oriented kind.

Personally I don't think there's much of a Metroid gap, Zero Mission works perfectly on the DS and although it's not the greatest game ever it's decent.

[Ian Sane]

"But a jump and run in iso view is a really bad idea as Sonic 3D proved. Especially the diagonally oriented kind."

It worked okay in Super Mario RPG.  There was a fair bit of platforming in that.

Comparing to Sonic has become almost silly.  If we're going to say "but when Sonic tried that it sucked" then we're going to be crapping on almost every game that isn't a sidescroller.

[KDR_11k]

In iso view you have no idea what your position in space is. That works for easy jumps but not for the stuff you'd expect from a platformer. Same for 3d. It works fine in Zelda because jumping is greatly simplified and not complicated but in 3d Mario there's so much comfusion with the camera spinning around, platforms floating in mid air and never knowing whether you'll make a jump. It's a bit better in 3d because you can spot the position while the camera moves and you got perspectivic distortion to help you but in iso view even that is lacking.