When 2 Bits Suddenly Turns Into 8

Bloodborne may be my favorite video game of all time, but my favorite series is Metroid, arguably neck and neck with The Legend of Zelda. Ever since I first played Metroid Fusion when I was 12, I've been hooked on the series. And yet, there are still three games in the series that I haven't beaten (or at least played the majority of). The original Metroid and Metroid Prime: Hunters will happen someday, but today I want to talk about Metroid II: Return of Samus.

Metroid 2 is a game I've dabbled a little in multiple times over the past seven years or so, but never made any headway in. It didn't matter how I played it: Emulator, virtual console, color hack. I just couldn't get past that first area. It felt clunky, boring, visually unvaried, old. And that's saying something, for how much I love retro games.

Then, just over a year ago, AM2R: Return of Samus finally released. I played it. I loved it. I loved it a lot. I wanted to play the original Metroid 2, again. So I dusted off my 3DS, booted up Metroid 2 on the virtual console, and... played up until right after the first earthquake, before promptly giving up again.

Hey, that counts as progress, right? No? It damn well should.

So after way too many false starts, the announcement of Metroid: Samus Returns finally convinced me that I had to beat Metroid 2 before its release. So in classic Bit fashion, I waited to play it at the worst time possible: A week before Samus Returns' release, at work at my overnight diner job, when there were no customers or managers on the premises. If you're reading this, Boss Lady, hi!

Maybe it was the perfect, dark stillness that only a 4am in September could bring. Maybe it was the lack of anything better to do (I had already read through Berserk, Volume 2 in the same sitting. Great manga, by the way). Or maybe it was the act of me losing my sanity faster than a Bloodborne hunter with 99 insight, surrounded by brainsuckers and amygdalas in the Nightmare. But whatever the cause, I wiped over the literally 5-year-old save state and started playing. This time, I didn't stop. As of the moment of writing, I'm early in what the wiki calls phase 4 of the game. So roughly a third into it.

Originally this started as a series of tweets, which I intended to later turn into an innocent-enough Facebook post. But that quickly turned into wanting to post a Facebook note for some reason, which turned into me deleting 10 years of Spider-Man-3-levels-of-embarrassing emo notes I had written, which turned into me getting frustrated at how clunky Facebook notes was, which turned into dusting off my old Blogger to make it a right-proper blog, which turned into me deciding this was an origin post and the Metroid 2 article would come after (a decision I didn't make until halfway through this poorly-written run-on sentence).

So yeah. I'll write your eyes off, but at least I have the self-importance, that is, the common decency, to make it two professional-ish looking blog posts for you to waste your time on, rather than one atrociously long Facebook post based on a tweet.

Wait, does that mean I made a blog because I found my own narcissistic tweets about a 25-year-old Game Boy game so inspiring? I know I'm a millennial, but goodness!

Thanks for stopping by, by the way. It means a lot. Enjoy your stay.