| Another ZM | ||
Release date: Feb 02, 2021 |
Author: XY riny
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Genre: Exploration [?] Game: 
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Difficulty: Vanilla [?]
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Average runtime:
5:47 Average collection: 83% |
Read Me: Author's Description |
Forum Thread: [None] |
Rating:
 
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Description
Chinese ZM romhack made by XY riny. Readme has more details, screenshots later.
Screenshots
Ratings and Reviews
I never had such a bad time with a hack...
its a really big half hack, with a completely changed world layout but at the same time
super player unfriendly.
finished.
do not recommend.
its a really big half hack, with a completely changed world layout but at the same time
super player unfriendly.
finished.
do not recommend.
2(.5) - Kind of good, but marred by questionable design decisions.
tl;dr - Open ended hack. Very rough around the edges. Overall bad-ish, but tolerable. Frustration =/= Challenge.
Pre-note:
@Contendo Read the damn readme. It's there for a reason.
>About difficulty: It's a little harder than the original ZM...
With that out of the way:
Got all 3 unknowns, plus the pirate base secret item.
Difficulty: It's difficult to decide whether this hack should be considered vanilla or veteran difficulty. It's somewhere in the middle. Some parts are on par with vanilla, whilst other parts are down-right disgusting (see tourian. Also how the hell do you no-hit deorem.) Game also suffers from some "Bomb Fucking Everything" with unhinted breakable tiles. Or worse, breakable tiles hidden behind layer 0.
Visuals: Hit and miss; mostly miss. Mostly basic, and painfully obvious which vanilla rooms were used where. Tiling errors, iffy tiling, visual curve balls (ie. super heat tiles in rooms that aren't super heated,) using background tiles as foreground (and in other rooms, the same background tiles are not foreground,) and various door-camera related issues (camera doesn't stop at certain doors. a minor issue.) Adding pink tiles for super heated secrets was nice, but on the flip side, having vine rooms be super heated with no indicator other than the map is a no no, for me.
Gameplay: Air control is ass. Speed keep is neat as a feature, but a little finicky to use. Mid-air morph is nice. It took me a long time to realise you can space jump in liquid, a feature I'm ok with (no this was not mentioned in the readme, but probably mentioned somewhere in zmht @shrug .) Instant door transitions were jarring at first, but won't complain about it. Less time spent in doors, the better (a smart move in the long run, as there are some misaligned doors.)
Progression: While the hack opens up after bombs, there are definitely wrong answers in which way to go (conner found himself gonig to tourian, just after getting bombs, and it did not look like a fun experience.) Some areas feel like they should be explored much later than they are accessible. It's also easy to overlook some progression items.
Puzzles: I'm not a fan of needing (or being encouraged to use) savestates to solve puzzles. Only once I ended up using savestates, and luckily, any of the bullshit puzzles are for optional items, and never (from my experience) included in main progression. Some of the optional puzzles were neat, whilst others should have stayed on paper. Don't sell 100% on frustration.
Other (without addressing anything that's already in the readme) :
- Climbing a respawn bug pipe is asking to get hit. No.
- Not breaking all the zebatites, and re-entering the room, will cause the lot to despawn.
- The first metroid section of tourian is ass.
- Being told space pirates stole our items, only for morph ball's pickup text to question why chozo leave stuff everywhere? Which one is it, riny? Did space monkeys steal our shit, or no?
- Fake PB that didn't get removed in chozodia.
+ Spreading refill saves across zebes was neat.
- Placing 3 super drops just before the grey pirates is a no no. Simple fix is to change the beam vulnerabilities to something else. Plus they die in 1 super, removing any challenge from the fight.
Readme things:
/ Gravity Suit - The game hangs up for a short while (no idea why,) but becomes playable again after the delay.
/ Mecha Ridley Escape - Timer machine broke (only shows up in MR's room. No idea if it's still ticking down in other rooms.)
/ BGM - May be referring to the Pirate Tension theme being played everywhere, if spotted by a pirate in chozodia.
/ NBMB crash when exiting chozodia - Pass. @shrug
tl;dr - Open ended hack. Very rough around the edges. Overall bad-ish, but tolerable. Frustration =/= Challenge.
Pre-note:
@Contendo Read the damn readme. It's there for a reason.
>About difficulty: It's a little harder than the original ZM...
With that out of the way:
Got all 3 unknowns, plus the pirate base secret item.
Difficulty: It's difficult to decide whether this hack should be considered vanilla or veteran difficulty. It's somewhere in the middle. Some parts are on par with vanilla, whilst other parts are down-right disgusting (see tourian. Also how the hell do you no-hit deorem.) Game also suffers from some "Bomb Fucking Everything" with unhinted breakable tiles. Or worse, breakable tiles hidden behind layer 0.
Visuals: Hit and miss; mostly miss. Mostly basic, and painfully obvious which vanilla rooms were used where. Tiling errors, iffy tiling, visual curve balls (ie. super heat tiles in rooms that aren't super heated,) using background tiles as foreground (and in other rooms, the same background tiles are not foreground,) and various door-camera related issues (camera doesn't stop at certain doors. a minor issue.) Adding pink tiles for super heated secrets was nice, but on the flip side, having vine rooms be super heated with no indicator other than the map is a no no, for me.
Gameplay: Air control is ass. Speed keep is neat as a feature, but a little finicky to use. Mid-air morph is nice. It took me a long time to realise you can space jump in liquid, a feature I'm ok with (no this was not mentioned in the readme, but probably mentioned somewhere in zmht @shrug .) Instant door transitions were jarring at first, but won't complain about it. Less time spent in doors, the better (a smart move in the long run, as there are some misaligned doors.)
Progression: While the hack opens up after bombs, there are definitely wrong answers in which way to go (conner found himself gonig to tourian, just after getting bombs, and it did not look like a fun experience.) Some areas feel like they should be explored much later than they are accessible. It's also easy to overlook some progression items.
Puzzles: I'm not a fan of needing (or being encouraged to use) savestates to solve puzzles. Only once I ended up using savestates, and luckily, any of the bullshit puzzles are for optional items, and never (from my experience) included in main progression. Some of the optional puzzles were neat, whilst others should have stayed on paper. Don't sell 100% on frustration.
Other (without addressing anything that's already in the readme) :
- Climbing a respawn bug pipe is asking to get hit. No.
- Not breaking all the zebatites, and re-entering the room, will cause the lot to despawn.
- The first metroid section of tourian is ass.
- Being told space pirates stole our items, only for morph ball's pickup text to question why chozo leave stuff everywhere? Which one is it, riny? Did space monkeys steal our shit, or no?
- Fake PB that didn't get removed in chozodia.
+ Spreading refill saves across zebes was neat.
- Placing 3 super drops just before the grey pirates is a no no. Simple fix is to change the beam vulnerabilities to something else. Plus they die in 1 super, removing any challenge from the fight.
Readme things:
/ Gravity Suit - The game hangs up for a short while (no idea why,) but becomes playable again after the delay.
/ Mecha Ridley Escape - Timer machine broke (only shows up in MR's room. No idea if it's still ticking down in other rooms.)
/ BGM - May be referring to the Pirate Tension theme being played everywhere, if spotted by a pirate in chozodia.
/ NBMB crash when exiting chozodia - Pass. @shrug
Played this for about 10h42m
Map is huge, interconnected, doesn't resemble vanilla much and opens up with very few progression items. As a result, I think I've spend first half of playtime just wandering around aimlessly.
I'm tempted to think that more strict "obvious gating" could improve play experience.
A lot of rooms also looked much alike(partially because gba resolution I guess), especially in huge rooms in crateria.
As TheAnonymousUser said above, air control is terrible. Maybe one can get used to it, but after all this time I haven't. Only learned to mitigate it a tiny bit when it was strictly needed. Landing from jumps always felt like samus was landing on ice.
The "mechanic" that you can prevent speed counter from resetting by spinjumping felt neat - at first. Later, when there were optional puzzles that "required" spark/boost chaining it felt like an utterly broken thing, because often, instead of doing a puzzle the proper way, you could just go to the end part, build speed on like 7 tiles of flat ground and bypass most of the puzzle(also robbing you of satisfaction of managing to do it).
I would have preferred traditional shinespark chains.
That all being said, it's a good hack. Lots of exploration, alternate paths, open progression, some neat puzzles. I feel like I'll like it even more on 2nd playthrough when I get around to it.
Map is huge, interconnected, doesn't resemble vanilla much and opens up with very few progression items. As a result, I think I've spend first half of playtime just wandering around aimlessly.
I'm tempted to think that more strict "obvious gating" could improve play experience.
A lot of rooms also looked much alike(partially because gba resolution I guess), especially in huge rooms in crateria.
As TheAnonymousUser said above, air control is terrible. Maybe one can get used to it, but after all this time I haven't. Only learned to mitigate it a tiny bit when it was strictly needed. Landing from jumps always felt like samus was landing on ice.
The "mechanic" that you can prevent speed counter from resetting by spinjumping felt neat - at first. Later, when there were optional puzzles that "required" spark/boost chaining it felt like an utterly broken thing, because often, instead of doing a puzzle the proper way, you could just go to the end part, build speed on like 7 tiles of flat ground and bypass most of the puzzle(also robbing you of satisfaction of managing to do it).
I would have preferred traditional shinespark chains.
That all being said, it's a good hack. Lots of exploration, alternate paths, open progression, some neat puzzles. I feel like I'll like it even more on 2nd playthrough when I get around to it.
Another ZM is a mixed bag that desperately needs a few more layers of polish, because underneath the recycled content, countless tiling errors, off-kilter difficulty curve and lack of direction lies a pretty solid hack that should be experienced by anyone who wants more Zero Mission.
Most noticeable right off the bat, however, are the changes to the physics; Samus retains her momentum after landing from a jump, and her air speed seems to have been tweaked to accommodate this change. Thus, she can retain her speedbooster after jumping and landing, even when in Morph Ball form.
Mastery over these new mechanics is a must for 100% completion, as some pickups are hidden behind obstacles that can only be overcome through clever use of these abilities. This is, however, undone in many respects due to the last change: Samus will retain any speed boost she has built up if you jump and turn around in the air. You only need a few tiles and some space to jump to build up a shinespark in a place you would be unable to otherwise. As others have mentioned, this exploit might rob some players of the enjoyment of "properly" solving a shinespark puzzle, but it should also be noted that this might also be something of a saving grace for others. Indeed, some of the shinespark maneuvers the game asks of the player without taking advantage of this exploit are needlessly finicky, so an option to bypass them is welcome in some circumstances.
The added mechanics also introduce a few problems of their own. Landing from a jump does indeed feel like you're running on ice, as people who are used to the original's physics will find themselves careening off the side of some blocks. Samus' air speed is slightly slower than her landing speed, so a sudden boost after hitting the ground took me by surprise more often than it should have. Additionally, during certain points in a Morph Ball, Samus would sometimes retain some momentum even while I was not touching the D-Pad, causing her to slide with no input from me whatsoever.
More welcome changes are the ability to wall jump even after obtaining the Space Jump, the ability to space jump while suitless underwater, and the ability to retain momentum while jumping into a Morph Ball like how it functions in Super Metroid (though unfortunately I did not find quite as much use for this change as I would have hoped). It is clear that, on some level, the creator took strides to add in quality of life changes where they could, but fumbled in the execution and introduced a number of different problems.
Difficulty-wise, this hack is almost assuredly more challenging than Zero Mission. The bosses in particular, with some exceptions, have received massive buffs; Ridley can no longer be bum-rushed with missiles as he is now immune to them, Diorem, Kiru Giru and the Acid Worm have some pretty awful arenas in which to fight them, and Mecha Ridley takes an ungodly amount of punishment when you have 100% items. Exploration is much more open-ended, without much direction to lead the player to major powerups, particularly in the beginning where it felt as though I was just stumbling into upgrades. The shinespark puzzles - the ones you cannot trivialize with the aforementioned exploit - are much more difficult, and some of the solutions are downright stupid. Special mention goes to the ball spark that has to be performed on a crumble block, the Super Missiles that require you to know that Samus can somehow ball spark through gates, the power bomb tank that requires kiting around a Space Pirate to obtain, and the other miscellaneous items that require you to navigate some really tight spaces with crumble blocks that eat your jump inputs.
The world itself is quite big, and is, as far as I know, the biggest "complete" Zero Mission hack out there. The world is nicely interconnected, with plenty of passageways that lead into new areas, which makes the actual process of exploring this new Zebes more rewarding in itself. Unfortunately, some of that size is due to the author recycling rooms from the original game, as some rooms are lifted wholesale. Most of it, however, is totally new, perhaps more evidently so because many of the new rooms have amateur tiling errors. The GBA Metroid games have a mahogany outline that makes tiling errors pretty obvious even at a glance, as even a casual player can notice a mismatched or entirely absent outline. Some Layer 0 effects are messed up or are badly applied; the most egregious instance occurs early on when the player can fall through some fake lava, only for the layer 0 effect to fade out slowly enough to reveal a sharp, floating box of lava that looks horrendous in-game.
Another ZM also has some issues signaling its secrets to players. Some breakable tiles are hidden behind layer 0, which might lead some players to sidle along the walls to see if their bombs broke something that wasn't shown to the player. There was an instance in Kraid where an entire wall can be bombed away, but is hidden until you pass through it. Another instance happened in Chozodia, where the path forward was hidden behind a random missile block in a random corner of the room. This happened more often than it should have, and I begrudge no one for being tempted to open up the hack in MAGE to see what they are supposed to do.
None of what I have described is unworkable, however. Some well-needed polish could transform a frustrating experience into a really damn good romhack, because the potential is there. I enjoyed my time with it, despite the missteps.
I'd rate this hack a 3.5 if I could, but the metconst overlords decree that 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 are the only valid scores. It is time we cast off this yoke and step bravely into a world of increased granularity. Join me in the ten-point scale if you wish to ascend. Consign yourselves into obscurity if you do not.
Most noticeable right off the bat, however, are the changes to the physics; Samus retains her momentum after landing from a jump, and her air speed seems to have been tweaked to accommodate this change. Thus, she can retain her speedbooster after jumping and landing, even when in Morph Ball form.
Mastery over these new mechanics is a must for 100% completion, as some pickups are hidden behind obstacles that can only be overcome through clever use of these abilities. This is, however, undone in many respects due to the last change: Samus will retain any speed boost she has built up if you jump and turn around in the air. You only need a few tiles and some space to jump to build up a shinespark in a place you would be unable to otherwise. As others have mentioned, this exploit might rob some players of the enjoyment of "properly" solving a shinespark puzzle, but it should also be noted that this might also be something of a saving grace for others. Indeed, some of the shinespark maneuvers the game asks of the player without taking advantage of this exploit are needlessly finicky, so an option to bypass them is welcome in some circumstances.
The added mechanics also introduce a few problems of their own. Landing from a jump does indeed feel like you're running on ice, as people who are used to the original's physics will find themselves careening off the side of some blocks. Samus' air speed is slightly slower than her landing speed, so a sudden boost after hitting the ground took me by surprise more often than it should have. Additionally, during certain points in a Morph Ball, Samus would sometimes retain some momentum even while I was not touching the D-Pad, causing her to slide with no input from me whatsoever.
More welcome changes are the ability to wall jump even after obtaining the Space Jump, the ability to space jump while suitless underwater, and the ability to retain momentum while jumping into a Morph Ball like how it functions in Super Metroid (though unfortunately I did not find quite as much use for this change as I would have hoped). It is clear that, on some level, the creator took strides to add in quality of life changes where they could, but fumbled in the execution and introduced a number of different problems.
Difficulty-wise, this hack is almost assuredly more challenging than Zero Mission. The bosses in particular, with some exceptions, have received massive buffs; Ridley can no longer be bum-rushed with missiles as he is now immune to them, Diorem, Kiru Giru and the Acid Worm have some pretty awful arenas in which to fight them, and Mecha Ridley takes an ungodly amount of punishment when you have 100% items. Exploration is much more open-ended, without much direction to lead the player to major powerups, particularly in the beginning where it felt as though I was just stumbling into upgrades. The shinespark puzzles - the ones you cannot trivialize with the aforementioned exploit - are much more difficult, and some of the solutions are downright stupid. Special mention goes to the ball spark that has to be performed on a crumble block, the Super Missiles that require you to know that Samus can somehow ball spark through gates, the power bomb tank that requires kiting around a Space Pirate to obtain, and the other miscellaneous items that require you to navigate some really tight spaces with crumble blocks that eat your jump inputs.
The world itself is quite big, and is, as far as I know, the biggest "complete" Zero Mission hack out there. The world is nicely interconnected, with plenty of passageways that lead into new areas, which makes the actual process of exploring this new Zebes more rewarding in itself. Unfortunately, some of that size is due to the author recycling rooms from the original game, as some rooms are lifted wholesale. Most of it, however, is totally new, perhaps more evidently so because many of the new rooms have amateur tiling errors. The GBA Metroid games have a mahogany outline that makes tiling errors pretty obvious even at a glance, as even a casual player can notice a mismatched or entirely absent outline. Some Layer 0 effects are messed up or are badly applied; the most egregious instance occurs early on when the player can fall through some fake lava, only for the layer 0 effect to fade out slowly enough to reveal a sharp, floating box of lava that looks horrendous in-game.
Another ZM also has some issues signaling its secrets to players. Some breakable tiles are hidden behind layer 0, which might lead some players to sidle along the walls to see if their bombs broke something that wasn't shown to the player. There was an instance in Kraid where an entire wall can be bombed away, but is hidden until you pass through it. Another instance happened in Chozodia, where the path forward was hidden behind a random missile block in a random corner of the room. This happened more often than it should have, and I begrudge no one for being tempted to open up the hack in MAGE to see what they are supposed to do.
None of what I have described is unworkable, however. Some well-needed polish could transform a frustrating experience into a really damn good romhack, because the potential is there. I enjoyed my time with it, despite the missteps.
I'd rate this hack a 3.5 if I could, but the metconst overlords decree that 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 are the only valid scores. It is time we cast off this yoke and step bravely into a world of increased granularity. Join me in the ten-point scale if you wish to ascend. Consign yourselves into obscurity if you do not.
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