Series starts here.
I called for my brother. It was time to hunt down Mother Brain.
But my goodness, when I entered the final area, my palms were sweating buckets and my hands were shaking so bad, I couldn’t do it.
The music was heart-rending. It made me feel like I was bubbling to death in a vat of acid.
And the titular metroids moved across the screen in a blink, attaching themselves to Samus relentlessly, sucking out her life energy and refusing to let go until she was dead (unless she unloads a serious payload of bombs to their undercarriages).
And even then, you, the player, must have enough nerves to stay still while you bomb. If you panic and move around like I did, you’ll probably die.
That was my emotional state at the time, a snapshot of how important Metroid could be to a 1980s kid compared to everything else in the world. It was a more innocent time and place.
You really do have to keep your cool to dispose of these guys. Not only do you need to know how to effectively bomb them off of you, but you MUST know (or in my case, learn) to freeze these enemies and follow it up with 5 missiles to dispatch them. There is no other way.
If you managed to make it to the final area with the Wave Beam equipped, you’ll have no choice but to try and run away from these enemies or go back and re-acquire the Freeze Beam.
Luckily, metroids drop a ton of Energy and Missiles when they die (another reason to not spend hours farming health and missiles). This is by design, to prepare you for the final confrontation with Mother Brain.
The path to the final boss is short, but nerve-wracking. You need hair-trigger reflexes to deal with the enemies here, performing the right moves in the right order and doing it all efficiently enough to have the missiles and Energy necessary to handle the final confrontation.
The last approach has “zeebetites” barring your path (I finally knew what zeebetites were!). Each required a payload of missiles to destroy and if you didn’t destroy them quickly enough, they’d regenerate and become an even worse drain on your missile supply.
Then you reach the real thing. The questionmark in the manual. The Mother Brain.
It doesn’t look like a brain at all. In fact, it’s more of a heart and even looks like it’s pumping blood. (Fun fact: None of my friends believed me when I told them what it looks like, and Captain N: The Game Master certainly didn’t help things later on.) The more missiles you slam into this thing, the faster it beats, the more it feels like you’re about to give this entire planet cardiac arrest.
I remember thinking this was the heart of planet Zebes itself, the life force behind all the hostile aliens on the planet.
And if you thought I was nervous before, that was nothing. I kept falling into the tiny pool of lava in front of Mother Brain like a klutz, which is practically a death sentence if you’re nervous. It can be a real challenge to safely jump out of there. And I was so nervous, I even managed to drop the controller multiple times.
It was hopeless.
I guess my little heart couldn’t handle it. At times, I couldn’t even be sure whose heart was pumping faster, mine or Mo’-Brain’s. And so, I had to take another break from the game.
But this was another one of those “very next day” scenarios. I collected myself, came back swinging, and took out the heart of planet Zebes on my next try.
Only to find it triggered a self-destruct sequence for the entire planet (terrific!), and I was given these tiny little platforms to escape. My poor lil’ heart.
I’d never seen ANYTHING like this in a video game before. In general, timers were either a central and ever-present part of the game mechanics or they weren’t there at all. I’d never seen a timer used as a storytelling mechanism before.
Once again, I found myself shaking and too nervous to do the deed, falling over and over again until it was painfully obvious I wasn’t going to escape in time.
Each time, I knew if I failed, I’d have to start all over. That meant going all the way through the final area and defeating Mother Brain again and again.
It took me about three or four tries before victory was mine.
Well, no space pirates, I guess. All that was left was to sit back and enjoy the ending…
Nick Enlowe 