Samus Entering the Realm

This post deals with a pose that you only see when you start the game or enter/exit an elevator situation. I'm talking about the front-facing pose we are all quite familiar with. I have an image that should give you an idea what needs to happen here.

Yes, you are seeing correctly. M1's Samus is 16 pixels shorter than M3's Samus. If you look into the deeper layers of these two games it actually makes sense since the doors in M3 are 4 tiles while the doors in M1 are 3 tiles.

Well, If Samus is so big in M3, then surely we can easily see the difference. Let us look at that. Now, I just took some slices of what I'm flipping through because it's late and I'm not willing to really work towards something super accurate (I don't know how tall she stands when she faces left or right) but this should give us a size description.

See? She cannot even fit through the walls there. So we have a serious problem on our hands. I can think of a few things to do. Both ideas require a considerable amount of work but either should work as far as I've thought it out.

First, we just resize all Super Metroid Samus sprites (including all creature sprites etc) to fit into the dimensions of M1. Second, we divide the screen in half and add an extra tile. We take every tile below that dividing mark and duplicate it on that line (pillars rise and blank spaces stay blank) and then we extend the door sprite to be the same size as it is in Super Metroid which is 4 tiles.

As I said, both of these require a lot of work. Resizing Samus requires touch-ups on all pixel art of her so that it looks proper and I'm not even sure that part's possible. I may have to actually rework the sprite entirely and I do not want to do that. If I resize every room to compensate for Samus' new size, then I will need to do considerable planning in terms of layout. I will have to make sure this idea will actually work.

Regardless of what happens, the project must go on.

Sizing Things Up

The first thing we have to assess is the screen size differences. So let's take a look at the working areas of both M1 (NES Metroid) and M3 (Super Metroid) respectively.

We can notice from this image that the screen is 16x15 tiles. If each tile is 16x16, then we end up with 256x240. Our total pixel area ends up being 61,440.

Ok then, let's look into Super Metroid. I chose that screen because there is an existing analogue in the game that we can just work with without any modifications.

This image shows something a bit different. While the X axis is still at 16 tiles, the Y axis is actually at 12. This would be a bit surprising if this was all you saw but in Super Metroid (M3), the energy and map has its own section instead of being overlaid. I bet you never would have guessed that while you were playing Super Metroid, you were actually playing on a smaller screen than the NES Metroid.

Going back to the dimensions, if we have a 16x12 screen, we have a 256x192 screen. Our total pixel area is 49,152.

If M1's total area was 61,440 and M3's total was 49,152 then we have a difference of 12,288 pixels.

At any rate, this topic does require a revisit because there is so much hinging on the concepts derived from it. We will have to look at the size of Samus in her various forms and then the size of enemies in their various poses against their respective counterparts. As for the tiles themselves, they are all just 16x16 pixel tiles as you would expect.

Introduction

Hello and welcome to my blog. Although I understand that the subject matter of this blog will for the most part be boring and tedious to most people who may stumble upon it, for some it will be a joyous dive into the world of Metroid.

We are going to analyze the intricate details of Metroid for the NES in order to create a remake of the very first game staring our heroine Samus. My intention is to actually faithfully recreate every aspect of the first game with Super Metroid graphics. I do understand that there may be some tiles that are not fully realized in Super Metroid and therefore I will have to create them myself.

Now, I know that Metroid 1 has already been "recreated" as Metroid Zero Mission. However, they took many liberties in that game including a guided mission system and rearranged rooms. My game will have none of this. My intention is to fully recreate the game tile by tile and game mechanic by game mechanic.

It is interesting to note that while I could substitute graphics of the NES Metroid ROM and repackage it as a SNES rom, I will be reprogramming everything from the ground up.

So, let us embark on a fantastic journey of fan love. I hope you enjoy my blog on this endeavor.