This is an announcement for those who may not be aware but could be interested that a good hack of S

This is an announcement for those who may not be aware but could be interested that a good hack of Super Metroid, called Vitality, was released last October. Its maker, who goes by the username Digital Mantra, is the same as Cliffhanger’s and Eris’. I played through Eris in 2009 and, despite all of its unpleasantries, found it the most interesting Metroid hack to have crossed my sight, and a memorable experience unto itself. That still holds true. Most admirable about Vitality is that Digital Mantra has hit a stride of repurposing Super Metroid’s tilesets while maintaining the best traits of that game’s level design and somber, far-flung tone.

If we’re looking at these three hacks and attempting to describe a progression, I think it’s fair and comprehensible to say that each has moved further away from a gauntlet of specialized navigational challenges for “veterans” and closer towards a sort of atmospheric expressiveness. Depending on your viewpoint and what you’re looking for, then, either of the bookending titles could be what you don’t care for at all. Cliffhanger will make you do tricky things over and over again while barely offering any visual makeup that distinguishes itself from its source material. The inverse would be true of Vitality. So, I guess, Eris is the midway point, taking great delight in drawing out the textural possibilities of Super Metroid’s mechanics and environmental building blocks, yet frustrating its own potential by combining a pleasing inscrutability regarding what exactly within each of its places is what – interactive platform or background detail? – with a heaping load of technically ugly graphical decisions; to say nothing about its balancing issues.

But that’s enough about Eris. Even if it’s a little odd to say this about a ROM-hack, an upside to Vitality is that it’s just more accessible to a Metroid-curious public. None of the encounters should strike series-familiar persons as being much tougher than anything from Super Metroid, and you do not need to be competent with, say, wall-jumping or mock-balling to get around. The challenge has been allocated to managing your resources, alongside the expectable trials of figuring out where to go and where hidden embedded items are. But I think the real value of Vitality is that, even if it may further exasperate the opinion that Super Metroid, like Prime, has become far too much of a reference point for the series’ identity, it can, through that association and its excellences, re-emphasize what has traditionally made Metroid worthy of engagement and critical stewardship. And I do not mean worthy relative only to other series but also to its own entries, especially now that a new title, Metroid Dread, has been unveiled (a title I am sorry to say appears to be about as dull and dreary as Shadow Complex, and will likely have as little restraint as Metroid: Samus Returns). Check Vitalityout!