Thursday, 16 October 2025

Video Games

Metroid: Zero Mission

After about 40 minutes of time in-game, I'm beginning to get the hang of how it works... but not really of the controls. Other than running left and right, they feel almost completely unintuitive to me — I'll just as often jump when I mean to fire or fire when I mean to jump as do the thing I actually meant to do, not because I think the buttons should be the other way round, but because they're just not different enough for such fundamental actions. My kind of slightly slow, "take my time over a move" approach mostly works fine while exploring or shooting minor enemies, but I don't think it's going to work well in anything actually action-packed! And this is meant to be the easiest Metroid — I don't think I'd want to play a harder one on the 3DS (as much as I love the console generally).

I may have to think about remapping those buttons, that might help; perhaps putting shoot onto a trigger-like shoulder button. But the 3DS shoulder buttons aren't great for quick action (the screen kinda gets in the way; and it might just be my device, but it's slightly 'floppy', so moving it around a lot can cause it to jiggle and get in the way even more), so I don't know if that'll work. I'll see how it goes, I guess.