Surprisingly high effort for such a short hack, with custom graphics and music as well as multiple juice-themed ending screens. Hard mode is a proper challenge, I had to play on quarter speed to escape in time.
There's a small typo in the intro text, "Samos Aran".
I recommend.
Metroid 2000 2000 by Ing-ing [ Unknown],
rated by SpineShark on May 09, 2024 ()
A hack that keeps Fusion's event system, but brings a new story that's whacky and pretty hilarious at times.
The experience is a mixed bag, there are parts with fun exploration gameplay and parts with super trollish (trolly?) enemies and level design. The areas are large and creative, however the way forward is often obscure, I admit that I used MAGE to find it a couple times. E-tanks are scarce and the boss arenas are kinda ass.
Overall it's not a bad hack, I don't mind the challenge, I just think there's too much troll stuff.
Metroid Volonus by Alex S [ Quick Play],
rated by SpineShark on Apr 22, 2024 ()
This hack has a lot of jank, no doubt about it. The geemers falling off edges because of weird clipdata is kinda amusing though.
Gameplay-wise I think it's alright, nothing struck me as offensively bad.
A shame that the author stopped working on it.
Metroid Acrash by Heyhooheyhoo [ Exploration],
rated by SpineShark on Apr 29, 2024 ()
This hack has a lot of interesting features but suffers from a lack of polish, which brings down the experience.
Let's start with the good:
It's a nonlinear Fusion hack, which is always nice. No Adam, no navigation rooms. The rooms and tilesets look good. There is good music that was imported from other games. It has a lot of custom ASM such as new enemy behaviours, upgrade pickups, puzzles, rising lava, new physics, etc...
However, the nonlinearity is implemented in a bad way, especially in the earlygame there's only one way forward with lots of dead ends. There are one-way paths everywhere, which lead you in endless circles until you find the one room that lets you progress. It does get slightly better after you get varia though. The hack throws loads of enemies at you which are badly placed. You get hit often right after going through a door. There are walls that are actually ladders. The ceiling ladders in both BOX fights also look just like regular ceilings. Guess who only found that out after finishing the hack...
Speaking of BOX, I had to kill him thrice because he respawned for some reason. The boss rooms had their layouts changed, which just makes them more annoying most of the time (especially Yakuza). If you enter Yakuza's room fromm the back and get grabbed, you're softlocked. Many rooms lag because of too many sprites or other reasons. Occasional rooms have awful screen scrolling. I got softlocked in sector 3 because I saved in an area not knowing that you can't get out without high jump and had to edit a room in MAGE. Save stations are rare in general and there's a single recharge room, so have fun farming enemies for drops. In the middle of my playthrough, all save stations and elevators stopped working for a while, giving you another reason to use savestates everywhere. The hack also straight up crashed twice, that's fun. Sector 4 is about twice as big as it needs to be and uses the same tileset throughout, which makes it very boring.
On top of that you have graphical glitches sprinkled everywhere. The music often gets overwritten by competing sound effects. At one point all audio turned into persistent screeching, which only stopped when I grabbed an upgrade. The map menu has a bunch of problems, such as rooms that don't line up, doors and collected items aren't shown. Regular bombs need ammo, because that's something the game needed!? Speed booster only activates if you hold select, which the hack never tells you and I only know it because a review mentioned it. Screw attack drains one full e-tank per activation, which makes it useless for most situations.
In summary I'd call this hack an undercooked experiment. Play it if you really want to see the custom stuff, but otherwise I didn't enjoy the gameplay much.
Speedrun/Race],
rated by SpineShark on Jan 09, 2024 (
Unknown],
rated by SpineShark on May 09, 2024 (
