Ι don't understand why it is considered bad for a game to be hard. I also love Prime but thankfully you could turn hints OFF. With them ON its like hand holding again.
I think that hand-holding and actually telling you mission objectives are different things. Hand holding would be telling you exactly where to go, how to get there, etc. Metroid Prime does not do that; it just tells you what room you should be heading towards, and nothing else. You have to figure the rest out yourself. It's pretty much perfectly balanced. With hints off, though, it would have been quite frustrating (and probably would require a walkthrough at some point, either that or I might have stopped playing sooner). No way would I ever play it that way. Sometimes I didn't need to be told where to go, but but other times they were useful.
Some people love the idea of exploration. Exploration means that you will get stuck, that you have to think a little, to backtrack etc. If a game based on exploration doesn't make you fear that you might get lost if you are not careful, then it's a badly designed "exploration" game.
The idea of wandering around lost without any idea of where I'm going or what I should be doing is NOT fun, and I don't want to have to do that. If I have an objective, okay. But wandering around, maybe without a map or without a good enough map, and without knowing where I should be going, or what I should be doing? That's awful, and I HATE doing that in games. I like exploring while I'm going through an area the first time, as long as there are maps and such so that I know where I'm going if it's not a linear game, but that stuff is something entirely different. And yes, that's a major complaint of mine about some RPGs, and gets me to drop games. And it's worse when, like in some parts of Super Metroid, there's really no way to know where you should be going unless you happen to attack the correct wall or something like that. Come on. You can't see how that is questionable game design? There's a reason why that went away, and it's not just because gamers want straight-line games, or something. It's because that kind of design isn't exactly universally loved. I mean, even one of the worst such offenders, Milon's Secret Castle, got a much more straightforward game as its SNES followup. I haven't played that game so I don't know if it's better than the first one, but the point is the design change. And Super Metroid did tone that stuff down a lot versus the NES game... they just kept in some elements of it.
Oh, and you can certainly get lost in Metroid Prime and the GBA games, for sure. Other M is probably the only one where you really can't. Getting that balance right is very difficult, certainly, but some games manage to get it right...
Metroid is a game that tries to put you in the boots of someone who has to explore a creepy planet, completely alone. You will get lost but thankfully not very much. You are supposed to be lost for a bit. Its part of the atmosphere. You are not suppose to find everything in front of you. OtherM did that and it sucked.
Zero Mission and Prime did it right. Super Metroid's more archaic than those games in design, and that's why I didn't have quite as much fun with it. I still liked it overall, though.
Some of the responses to this are pretenious and suck ass.
Some these people are kids playing Super Metroid for the first time! I thought players on NeoGAF would be excited to see the next generation actually WANT TO PLAY a Super Nintendo title. And yet I see a good portion of dragged out mockery.
Don't get me wrong, Its funny. Im not saying you can't have fun with it (Its a great meme) but some of these response's are degrading. Why are others trying to humiliate young players from exploring this hobby? A good community doesn't haze its young members. At most, it scolds them when they aren't behaving as a member with class.
The growing problems with the gaming community is directly caused by the gamers themselves, I can't help but notice.
I agree with all of this.
(( I was 4 years old.. None helped me to beat this game..
