MockingBird Station

MockingBird Station
Release date: Feb 11, 2008	Author: Xaggoth	Download: Version 7.0 [UH] (1661 downloads)
Genre: Exploration [?] Game:	Difficulty: Veteran [?]	Average runtime: 4:25 Average collection: 45%
Read Me: [None]	Forum Thread: [None]	Rating:

Description

Samus has been hired to investigate MockingBird Station. Others have come before her, but none of them have returned. Upon arrival the station sealed the hanger doors blocking her way out. After scanning her systems, Samus finds that she must disable the stations power generator before she can leave. Unfortunately the most direct route to the generator has been blocked and she must take a more roundabout path. The only thing that she knows is that much of the station is in lock down and she will need to release bulkheads to open more of the station. A larger bulkhead in engineering is blocking the alternate route. Disabling the generator will destroy the station, but there is no other option.

Screenshots

Ratings and Reviews

By MetroidMst on Mar 31, 2015 (

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50% in 1:41

Mockingbird station is an interesting concept thrown inside a blender of spikes and pain. The hack is very unforgiving, but at the same time, relatively enjoyable. Having to find doorcaps and open them to advance in other parts of the station is a really interesting idea, and it is pulled off relatively well.

Traversing the area is a big hassle in a lot of cases and can be a major cause of concern. There are also a lot of spikes, plenty of ways to die, and cleverly hidden secrets which can kill the player as well.

This is not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but you could do far worse than Mockingbird Station if you're looking for a relatively short and challenging hack.

By squishy_ichigo on Apr 11, 2015 (

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No completion stats.

By Vismund Cygnus on Apr 20, 2015 (

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No completion stats.

By Aran;Jaeger on Dec 08, 2016 (

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50% in 3:27

No animals to be saved.

Quick Summary of the meaning of my SM hack ratings:
5 orbs: SM hacks within the 80% to 100% (90% ± 10%) range of perceived perfection; SM hacks for outstanding wholesome playing experiences and at most minor inconveniences.
4 orbs: SM hacks within the 60% to 80% (70% ± 10%) range of perceived perfection; Well done SM hacks with noticeable design problems.
3 orbs: SM hacks within the 40% to 60% (50% ± 10%) range of perceived perfection; Normal decent average SM hacks.
2 orbs: SM hacks within the 20% to 40% (30% ± 10%) range of perceived perfection; Overall messy, confusing, or punishing SM hacks with some upsides.
1 orb : SM hacks within the 00% to 20% (10% ± 10%) range of perceived perfection; Ruthlessly unplayable, broken, or barely from the original game changed SM hacks.

Judgement parameters summary:
° Creative ideas and features, polished design, how enjoyable and fun the hack can be, lack of hard to find or cryptic required game elements, the difficulty, and if the hack can be finished without major guides or tools.
° Note that the length of a SM hack will not necessarily contribute to my rating of the SM hack, since instead the averaged out experience over the whole hack will be taken into account to get a relative comparison between SM hacks.
° Besides this, lack of impactful changes from the original SM game also went into the evaluation of SM hacks (otherwise one may consider them among the 3 stars hacks) as follows: Ultimately, for my ratings I consider a situation in which an SM enthusiast that already has, knows about and is familiar with the original game and its prominent mechanics could only choose 1 new SM hack to play and thus would really want to make sure he/she will get a fresh and fantastic experience or journey out of his/her 1 choice.

The goal of all these SM hack ratings is so that rather new players have an overview of the whole spectrum of SM hacks and how to sort them in, in relation to each other, where SM hacks that are rated lower might still be enjoyable for more experienced players.

Finally, sometimes for SM hacks it can be relevant that they may be significantly more enjoyable from a player standpoint at which the player is well practiced and familiarized with Super Metroid's game mechanics in general, and that in particular some of the best SM hacks may not be the outright best first SM hack choices to play otherwise because of this, and for beginner SM hack players this typically steers the best first SM hack choices towards some of the SM hacks that I rated with 4 orbs instead of 5.

Rating for some hacks may be off by 1 Star, but arguably not more, and ratings are not attempted to be provided within the precision of ''half orbs''.

By PHOSPHOTiDYL on May 15, 2018 (

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43% in 3:34

This is actually two hacks in one.
Mockingbird Station & Get The Grapple.

Feels forced linear. Worst phantoon fight. Get the grapple isn't happening.
One really sick speedboost puzzle during the escape sequence.
Kinda wana mockball & bounce, best part of the hack imo.

Maybe shoulda got the gravity suit so phantoon wasn't rng luck...
Ten hours rta, not a fun day, damn turtles are stupid.

Easy four stars if it gets finished with spore spawn & power bombz though.

Oh yeah, thanks for the hack.

By Ri2nOneRok on May 31, 2018 (

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No completion stats.

Love the background level designs of the depths of the engineering room. Sound selection gives the station an eerie vibe even though it is well lit. A few issues, and other things worth mentioning but dont want to give out spoilers. I do wish there was a more thorough background or synospsis on this hack, and a map. Because without these suggestions, I did need a lot of youtube to follow to make it through the hack. That was not the case with other hacks. Its an older hack so difficulty is up there.

By Sapphron on Jul 06, 2020 (

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34% in 2:12

A...special hack.
Quite difficult and not many sequence breaks. Suitless underwater is forced, and the final boss is quite tanky. I really didn't like the room for it but it made for a special challenge.
No map quite sucks. There are probably quite a few things I skipped too.
Door locks were used quite well in this hack, probably the first to use them this extensively.
Ice's location was incredibly stupid for me, it took some guiding from Ri2 to find it. Same with Spring Ball. Once again, not having a map hurts the experience quite a lot.
Music is eerie, level design isn't out of place for a station like this, the atmosphere is quite good. It's on the hard side.
44% in 2:00 second playthrough.
Finished.
If you're willing to use savestates, I recommend.

By Kandier on Feb 10, 2021 (

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No completion stats.

Ugly & weird hack, everything looks almost saturated & it doesn't even have a map screen

By caauyjdp on Feb 26, 2021 (

)

44% in 5:59

Spent about 11hours on this.

A good four orb hack that gets dragged down by few very annoying design decisions/restrictions.
The only save station is the ship. There is no map. Because the hack is quite deadly at times, you're forced to choose to either backtrack a lot of rooms back to the ship to save and then traverse them again to get back, or remember where every single thing you picked up was, possibly making a map, to recollect everything after death.

I chose to backtrack every few items. If you want to play this without getting annoyed, I recommend savestates.

Getting grapple was the worst part of the hack. Had to resort to pause abuse, and even with it took a while, partially because getting back there takes time.

There was one case where I missed scroll trigger and after failing to get back onscreen, had to deal with broken scroll offsets after door transition eventually leading to reset.

Super at turtles seemed to be respawning. Possibly not on reentry but on save reload, because same seemed to happen to one red door I opened.

Some "doors" were missing plm at the bottom tile. One of them seemed to use different index resulting in a new glitched door spawning from the bottom tile on room reentry.

"Broken" green gate was a terrible design decision. If you have tings that can be mistaken for unintentionally broken, there better not be actually broken things in the hack.

Ceiling clips doesn't seem to be required anywhere, and if you want to try, take care, because some ceilings seem to be just one tile thick, and you can easily clip to oob without a way to get back in.

One neat thing about the hack tho, is that lag was made a feature.
Another neat thing was, that after getting a new power up, I immediately knew which room I needed to use it in, just not where the hell it was or how to get there again, and whether that was a way to progression or just an expansion.

If you don't mind using savestates and can shortcharge, I recommend this.

By Aikner on Sep 13, 2021 (

)

51% in 10:53

Even though the entire hack takes place on some kind of station and looks very mechanical, it doesn't get boring or repetitive. The layout of the sectors gets more intriguing, challenging and menacing, the deeper you go. The above mentioned super missiles and an energy tank in a spiral block maze respawn on save reload.

By RX-78-2 on May 26, 2023 (

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46% in 3:22

the endgame part of the hack was pretty cool and unique and very interesting (especially with that difficult-to-execute shinespark trick) but in all honesty, I don't think I'll be playing this hack again after I finish it, I usually don't mind mapless hacks but this one is an exception tho and I don't like the fact that there's no map in the hack..also the hack was much too glitchy for me (which is why I can't give it a full 5 orbs despite how good of a playthrough it was for me so for me it's a 4 orb hack at best) and idk why it was but I almost rage quit because of that but thankfully, graphical glitches can be fixed by resetting the emulator/console and restarting from the save point in the emulator/console other than that issue (and the fact that there's NO map whatsoever), it was a pretty good hack.. 8/10 probably wouldn't recommend but go for it if you want

By ClaireDiviner on May 15, 2024 (

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42% in 4:53

This hack is awful. The idea is neat on paper, but the execution is absolute trash. For starters, no saves. Like, did ya'll really have some misplaced sense of pride in the late 2000s that ya'll couldn't ask others for help in that regard, or help those who didn't know how to? If Redesign could do it, I know save points could've been implemented. I'll likely see more and more of these issues with these 2000s hacks. Another issue is how obtuse this game's progression is; too many hidden blocks that lead to progression, and even the X-Ray Scope won't guarantee you'll find the path forward. Also, the red herring that is the yellow doors; this hack has no Power Bombs, so I'm saving whoever is reading this the trouble of looking for or expecting a way into yellow doors. There is no way in them, and are there purely to point at, and laugh at the player, like a dumbass.

I could forgive all of that had it not been for two things: The godawful Phantoon fight, and what comes after. I am 100% convinced Xaggoth cannot beat Phantoon without save states (I did it save stateless), until proven otherwise. Between the room layout being a goddamn Morph maze, and Phantoon being vulnerable ONLY to Bombs, there clearly was zero thought put into the fight. No sense of balance, reason, or even vision. "Oh, Impossible made a really hard Draygon fight. I'm going to make a hard Phantoon fight!" Yeah, guess what, you failed at realizing what makes a hard boss fight good; this was just a bad fucking fight!

Then there's the issue that follows the Phantoon fight. Be sure to backtrack allllll the way back to your ship to save, because the path forward from Phantoon is a room with three Metal Pirates that crashes the game due to some issue with the audio. Either retry over and over again, loading your game every time, until you get lucky, or middle finger the hack's design and save state in front of the room's door, brute forcing reloads until the sound stops having a fuckin' seizure! God help those who decide not to save after Phantoon, or else they'll have to refight him after the game crashes. Oh, and the location of the Gravity Suit was a dick move. I had to look at Dragon's playthrough to find it, and I wasn't even looking for Gravity at the time; I assumed it was locked behind Phantoon.

Shit design, shit philosophy, shit execution, shit game. This game sucks, and the hack maker should not be proud of this.

By Zhs2 on Jul 22, 2024 (

)

45% in 3:45

Honestly, it's not terrible to beat, but it is full of things you should not do in a hack. These things are: a spike-floored hallway with baby turtles for platforms and rippers for less damage than the spikes. The fact that you need to cross this hallway and all that are like it a number of times. A room with lowering gates that makes you think you need Speedbooster for it but the gates can actually be defeated by bombs, lol. The path to Ice. The grapple tricks you need to cross to get High Jump. The Spore Spawn fight room (Varia highly recommended). The path INTO the Spore Spawn fight room (hint: grapple the floor). And various other quirks, such as how you need Plasma to get Gravity (the fact that you need to know about underwater gravity jumps notwithstanding...) and the temp bluesuit path in the escape...

First and foremost, get yourself the Danidub map and save yourself the trouble - this hack has no internal map and you'll thank me later. For convenience, I have added it as the video link to this review (hosted by Ambureon.) Second, some very helpful knowledge: the item order after Bombs has you finding Wave and Ice, then Grapple (navigating the Grapple hall is its own puzzle), then High Jump, then Supers, then Varia (after Varia you can take the secret passage right of the Deck B-Deck C elevator and beat up Spore Spawn for X-Ray - the path to X-Ray requires some patience because of enemy destroy blocks), then Speedbooster, then Spring Ball, and at this point you should absolutely grab Plasma during your backtrack through Crocomire's area because you will need it for Gravity, which cleans up the hack's difficulty somewhat. From there, you are easily able to beat up Ridley and Phantoon, then clear the hack, provided you know how to temp bluesuit machspring in the escape. And yes, Phantoon's weakness is bombs, and you may have noticed his arena is set up so it's difficult to shoot ghosts for health, so basically dodge what you can, shoot what you can, and be relentless in your bombing because the fight WILL come down to you or him. It's not horrible provided you know this weakness and have enough e-tanks to simply survive.

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