But to me and many other people who grew up with this game, they're not. They weren't a problem then and they aren't a problem now.
That's exactly the point. You grew up with it, so you're always going to remember the game fondly. Back then, the problems the game suffered from- repetitive backdrops and enemies, cheap, glitchy hits when going through doors, etc.- were commonplace and wouldn't have been held against the game. A new player today, without the experience of the playing games at that time and seeing the Metroid when it was groundbreaking, is exceptionally unlikely to have the same opinion. Nothing is ever going to change your mind about Metroid because your opinion of it solidified at that time, back when the game was still cutting edge.
What I find insufferable about you is your insistence that because our tastes don't align with the mainstream we must be in denial. I am not in denial--I just prefer the design of the original, period.
My goal here isn't to get you to say "Metroid is a bad game and I'm in denial." I recognize why a lot of people like it, and I think there are legitimate reasons to. What I take issue with is that you won't accept that it's obviously a primitive game that has aged more dramatically compared to what came later. You can still love it for what it is, but the fact that you're not willing to recognize the limitations the game had when they're so overwhelmingly obvious does make me feel like your nostalgia is coloring your opinion of the game, specifically in terms of how it compares to the later entries. You can like it and still admit that time has revealed some shortcomings.
Or... maybe it suggests that I haven't done a full play through of the game in over five years!
I didn't play Super Metroid for a period longer than that while in junior high/high school and I still could have drawn you a map of ever room, every environment, every hidden block. That entire game was etched into my mind after just a few plays.
Here's why:
All of these images are from the same area in Super Metroid- Brinstar, yet each is radically different. In fact, the differences between rooms in Super Metroid are often bigger than the differences between entire sectors in the original Metroid. And the game changes these up so rapidly that you don't really stay in any one setting for more than a room or two; it's almost to the point where I wish they'd repeated rooms a little more, just so I can take more of it in. It makes the world memorable. Even without using the map, it would be far easier to place exactly where you are in the world at any given time just from looking at the screen, because the environments are so distinct and varied and practically no architecture is directly repeated except for the save/energy rooms.
It's a huge difference from the original Metroid, where you'd often feel lost just because everything looks pretty much the same. Your only real sense of direction came from memory.... you have to keep track of what doors you came from and try to navigate through feel, since there were very few landmarks or unique visual cues to help you track your position along the way.
I can imagine that you might respond to that inarguable point by saying "well, I like that kind of exploration better," but to me exploration is only compelling if you have a world worth seeing. In the original game, I felt like I pretty much always knew what I was going to see up ahead- more rooms that looked the same as the one I was in. There wasn't really much joy in seeing the same rooms unfold over and over again.
All of the later games gave you much, much more to see and felt more like real alien worlds in comparison.
And as we all know, you are the arbiter of what people like and don't like and what should be played and shouldn't be played. Piss off.
Calm down. It's a video game. But just read through this thread alone... I don't have to be the "arbiter" of opinion, it's obvious that most people feel this way about the game today.
1. The "false secret paths" being talked about here aren't at dead ends or anything like that. They are literally just a block or two on the floor of some rooms along the way that can be bombed but don't lead anywhere. They take a few seconds to check and don't require traveling out of the way at all. Here is one -
There aren't even that many of them really, at least in comparison to the legit ones that litter Norfair. By the way, that pic is the ONLY false path before you can't progress further in Norfair without going through a legit one, so being discouraged from checking makes even less sense.
2. Metroid 1 does not have any dead ends that do not have power ups or secret passages. None.
I still qualify those false blocks as dead ends. Just because they don't take much time to climb out of doesn't mean that they aren't frustrating non-starters. Pretty much every connecting room in Norfair's bubble areas have the same false blocks in the bottom, and several of them do lead to absolutely nothing.
Also, you're wrong about the dead ends always leading to a powerup or passage. Check the shaft to the left of where you get the ice beam in Brinstar, for instance. Not only is there nothing there, but it's a huge pain in the ass to get out of. That's not rewarding you for exploration; that's
punishing you for it.
http://www.nesmaps.com/maps/Metroid/MetroidCompleateMap.png
5. There are two reasons you made it through Norfair okay without apparently thinking much about what you were doing - 1. The most confusing part of Norfair is optional, I believe only ONE secret passage is actually required (although exploring there is recommended), and 2. Almost every bubble surface that isn't a wall in a vertical shaft or a ceiling/floor in a horizontal shaft has a secret passage in it. So you can safely bomb/shoot every bubble surface in Norfair blindly and make it through without too much trouble.
Would a player know this on their first playthrough? Through the eyes of a new player, who is going to have to test and prod this world to find their way forward, don't you see how constantly uncovering little blocks that lead to nothing and having to bomb these same blocks in every room until you find the one that actually leads somewhere might be tedious?
