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metroidprimepics · 2 years

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Eventually I will run out of things to talk about. But until then, more trivia. Mostly creatures/bosses.

Prime

I don’t know when you would ever see this normally, but the elevators in West/East Towers (access to Control Tower, the outdoor arena area) have a rather elaborate full mechanism underneath.

Rain only appears in a cube around Samus. This is a metaphor for her life.

For some reason there is collision information at the bottom of Impact Crater - but only the version surrounding the Artifact Temple room specifically. It’s not terrifically accurate to the visual geometry - the ball is rolling quite a bit above the “ground” - but it’s still there... For some reason.............

I'm a little endeared with how Space Pirates look like a completely different species in each game with no explanation whatsoever. Anyway, the ones in Prime have these almost invisible lines of orange hairs on the limbs, which is very charmingly buggy.

Also, this one was kind enough to stand still for a height comparison. (Their AI doesn’t handle noclipping very well - often they just don’t attack when approached from the air.)

...

I spoke a bit ago about Metroid Prime’s additional eyes, which are not very easy to see in game.

They’re actually rolled back into her carapace in the intro cutscene before the fight, so it’s not surprising that you don’t really notice them.

After said intro cutscene, she is fully spawned in the room below and idle animating with no weapons systems active. Kind of a look, honestly.

Back to the eyes. Even if you saw the eyes, you would almost certainly not notice this behavior, but... They’re actually programmed to follow the player’s position exactly. The camera may be down here, but Samus is still in the room above and to the right, so that’s... where they’re looking..............

In later parts of the fight Metroid Prime uses this “tractor beam” attack, which actually emanates from the front two eyes. Somehow, I’m getting Gritty vibes.

...Impact Crater in general has always felt a little rushed to me, like it was thrown together last minute to just finish the damn game. (The boss rooms in particular are... hmm.) I still love it, though.

And there’s still all kinds of details, like these transparent areas with ... creatures? Swimming in them?? In concept art they’re mentioned as protozoans.

Let’s noclip in. They look like microbes or plankton. But big!

In a possible nod to these guys, the core access rooms in Corruption’s Leviathan Seeds have these floating clouds of similar creatures (labeled as “Phazon Cells” in game data). (Well, maybe less a nod and more a flex, really, especially when you consider that these games came out less than 5 years apart.)

Echoes

While I was cleaning up, I found the first of these screenshots I took:

Yeah.

Anyways,

Ingclaw butt.

Absurdly detailed Amorbis butthole. Why?

You ever remember you can bring up a nice, rotateable model in an short idle animation in the Logbook? Cause. You sure can do that in 2 and 3. OK.

Each of Dark Amorbis’ segments is separated by a bright red disc.

Part of the Spider Guardian’s model clips through its head on one side - you can see a little speck of bright red, plus some hairs. Or rather, the outer shell is accidentally concave...?

This only applies in this “swimming”/damage animation - it looks fine when rolling around. Probably just has a vertex off or something. You can’t see it in the fight. It’s fine.

Also, it’s perfectly possible to hit it with gun.

However, only the normal Power Beam shot actually deals damage - other weapons only stun it.

Additionally, while you technically can kill it this way, the normal death cutscene won’t play afterwards. That cutscene is what’s actually responsible for spawning the Spider Ball upgrade, so... No Spider Ball. Kind of defeats the purpose of defeating it, really. You still get a purple credit in Trilogy, at least.

Regular pillbugs have gorgeous spiral undersides.

Echoes’ troopers were less cooperative. They appear to be... big...?

That round thing in her chest (heart?) is visibly beating. Seems like a design flaw, but I guess that’s why this one isn’t a commando.

Speaking of which, these ones aren’t programmed to attack. They’re also quite a bit bigger.

I have invulnerability on when taking photos. Normally, enemy attacks just fizzle out when they land.

However, Quadraxis’ Annihilator shots bounce off of invulnerable entities. This trait is shared with Samus’ weaponry (you’ve probably seen this behavior with doors, or with largely-invulnerable enemies like Quadraxis itself). Maybe its attacks use the same code? Sadly, I can’t seem to get it to aim at the Annihilator door to the temple access.

Sort of an aside, but I feel like we’re missing out on beam deflection puzzles. Bouncing shots off things is fun [citation needed], and it was clearly already possible in the Prime engine... and in Super Metroid, too, weirdly enough. But I guess it’s just never occurred to anyone to use deflection for puzzles? Or maybe that kind of mechanic was deemed too spatially challenging for an all-ages series. It’s never too late though! (I think some SM hacks use it, at least...)

Corruption

Planets, while lovely-looking, aren’t actually spheres. They’re made up of lots of mostly-flat layers...

One time I fucked up the event flags in this game so hard that Unit 217 disappeared. Please use noclip responsibly.

This is where where the umbilical cord of a Leviathan core attaches to the seed. Looks like sliced roast beef.

On Bryyo, in the North and South Jungle Hall rooms (here and here), there is collision information and even some texturing on otherwise inaccessible areas.

Maybe these bits were meant to be accessible at some point...? You can easily jump up to the grates from the bulkhead, you just can’t get up to the bulkhead normally.

The wind turbines (there’s one in the background here) match the Space Pirate design from Echoes.

There’s some weirdass jittery floating things in the Bryyo jungle atmosphere, too. They don’t seem destructible or aggressive. I can’t find anything else about them, though.

Edit: According to @ bearborg, they’re labeled as spores ingame. Probably from the fungi!

Going to upgrade the weird butthole count in this trilogy to “two” with the Korakk Beast here. Sorry.

By the time you fight him, Rundas’ whole body is visibly laced with Phazon hyphae. But there’s even some clustered growths behind his "face”, underneath the PED. I think if you get close enough to him to see these, you probably have other things to worry about... Poor guy though.

The Berserker Lord’s beautiful face, with the distinct horizontal row of eyes confirming that is a heavily modified Urtraghian Space Pirate. Same goes for the Knight, it’s just easier to see with Phazon all over it. I just... really was not sure.

Another “you probably have bigger things to worry about” detail, this spike-filled area in 313′s brain. It’s almost like a sub-brain? Looks uncomfortable.

I tried to get a nice aesthetic shot of the opening cutscene for the Mogenar fight. At first glance, I thought this looked nice. However, upon closer inspection...

Is Samus... hovering?

Yep. The ground is well out of frame in the actual cutscene, so you’d never be able to tell.

I get why the cutscene artist did this - she wouldn’t be in the shot otherwise because the Mogenar is so far away, but actually moving her closer would force an awkward upward angle on the Mogenar. Because it’s, you know, huge. Still, I’m never going to be able to unsee this.

#misc_

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metroidprimepics · 11 months

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Well, that was the end of the queue. Now on hiatus!

If the interest catches me again, I'll do more. If not, then hey, it's not like the posts are going anywhere.

I have no interest in Metroid Prime Remastered or future remastered versions. However, digitalfrontiers and zovis have taken some great screenshots, so if you're interested in that maybe check out their tags. Happy to give a promo if you're doing anything similar!

Anyway, thanks for appreciating my silly hobby. See you next mission 👍

#misc_

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metroidprimepics · 2 years

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Supper Metroid broth. (Actually, it’s Prime games, but...)

Thanks again to @ bearborg for various corrections and additions!

If you enjoy these posts, then you might enjoy this thread of what didn’t make it into the games.

I’m personally fond of this scrapped cutscene from Corruption, likely from the prologue sequence:

Sadly a lot of the links are broken or only half-working, including the video version of the above.

Prime

In Magma Pool in Chozo Ruins...

...there’s a fair bit of unnecessary detail underneath the opaque magma. Morph Ball for scale. Maybe the room was initially modeled empty, and then the lava was added later...?

Edit: The room was originally filled with water!

This actually tracks well with the water present in the adjacent Meditation Fountain and nearby Ruined Fountain. Either way, it does seem like it was switched to lava later in development, probably for gameplay reasons.

There are also non-interactable fish present in the water, labeled Chomper Fish. More on those later.

You don’t really need Thermal Visor on for most of the game, but I do recommend flicking it on every now and then, because it’s quite well-considered. For instance, the beetles hiding underground (this is from this halfpipe) show up as warm spots. (The icy beetles in Phendrana do not - I guess those ones are cold-blooded?)

In the room in the Phendrana lab where you encounter the first actual Metroid of the game, there are displays on the wall featuring diagrams of Hunter Metroids.

Specifically, it’s edited versions of the righthand piece of concept artwork. Cute foreshadowing, going with scans in the same lab which mention Hunter Metroids by name but don’t describe them.

In Chamber Access, which you pass through leaving after getting Gravity Suit, there’s a frozen pool in the floor, and...

Inside the pool are dead fish - the same model as the fish in the unused version of Magma Pool. It’s not like they’re invisible from above, but pretty hard to notice or appreciate.

Not something I found, but apparently there’s even one in the lab. Someone must have really liked this fish.

Echoes

Collapsed Tunnel in Temple Grounds.

The main tunnel is... collapsed... so you only ever go through the smaller tunnel to the side.

But the main tunnel is in fact fully modeled, since you can see it through the gaps in the rocks. It’s... there’s really nothing interesting in here, it’s just a tunnel...

I do have to wonder if at some point the blockage was going to be Power Bombable, so you could pass through easily in lategame. Power Bombing that corpse would probably bother people though...

Invisible detail inside Samus’ gun. Not invisible, just used in idle animations! Same goes for the equivalent in Prime 1. I don’t stand still very often, apparently.

Poke.

Corruption

I’ve taken this screenshot at native resolution, while standing on the ground. Can you spot what I’m about to talk about?

(For further effect, imagine the game is also being displayed through a component video cable, which is plugged into a CRT, which is several feet away from you.)

...

...If you guessed “those tiny light dots in the distance that look like dirt on the screen” ... you’re right! Computer, enhance.

That’s better. This is another one of Corruption’s fish “““birds”””, the Vaporwing. They’re basically unnoticeable when playing normally - it doesn’t help that they’re basically only found in this room, Arrival Station. I had read about them but had never been able to notice them when playing normally.

Vaporwings kind of look like Rinkas (the ring enemies in Tourian/CU chambers), but unused logbook data states they were designed as pets. I think they’re cute!

Some more fun Skytown tricks. This tram (to West Skytown) appears to extend far into the distance,

But it just extends really far out (stretching as well) and then the textures fade out to transparency. Looks great though!

Also all the pods in the distance are flat images.

There are a couple Reptilicus skeletons in the entranceway to Bryyo Ice, as well as in Bryyo Ice proper (in the appropriately named Imperial Crypt). They’re pretty detailed in a way that looks like the artist used an actual reference, likely some kind of dinosaur.

This prisoner has slightly more bones than the other one (or the dead emperors), so I’ll look at him.

Skull, replete with three eye sockets.

You know, because Reptilicus have three eyes. Something which I definitely noticed. The middle eyesocket is pretty small, so it might be a parietal eye? Unclear.

Otherwise resembles a relatively anthropomorphic dinosaur. (I’d love to be more specific, but like... I’m not qualified.) Those teeth would be great for catching things but too long and pointy for chewing. All chunks diet!

The whole “four arms” thing has somewhat more consideration put into it than you’d expect, with two sets of scapulas and a four-pronged collarbone. The lack of a sternum is consistent with dinosaur anatomy, as is the ribcage extending all the way down to the hipbones.

What I mistook for gonads last time was probably this bone, which can sort of... jut out in a way which looks funny. To mammals.

Detailed spinny plinth for the portal, because... because??? When would any normal person ever look at this. Why isn’t it just a flat texture. Give it up for whoever did this.

Two things about this screenshot:

1. While most enemies are represented by just a single orange dot in the radar in the upper left, Omega Ridley has a fully-animated Ridley-shaped array of dots. It really helps with figuring out what he’s doing during his flying phase.

2. There’s no lock on the doors in the Leviathan seeds. So if you could get up there... then you can just leave! Just walk out! If it sucks, hit da bricks!!!

Leaving and coming back seems to restore the boss’s health though.

This attack is just really silly-looking.

Hunters

I’ve somehow managed to bludgeon Desmume into sort of doing most of what I want, thanks to its layer-hiding features and this deeply crusty Lua script. (No insult to the author - I’m grateful for anything, really.) So, numerous issues aside, now I can get accurate fog, lighting, etc.

If you or anyone you know is versed in DS game hax, please get in touch, since I could use some help making Hunters display correctly in custom aspect ratios. 4:3 is usually fine though.

While obviously I’ve improved the resolution, Desmume also has the option to use “texture smoothing”, i.e. applying a filter to textures. The difference is more noticeable in textures that are up close, where you can really smell the pixels.

Smooth is possibly how the game was intended to look in 2004 (based on renders by the game’s environment artists), and it would match the other Prime games more. However it’s 2022 and I feel that the Quake 1 look is what’s won out aesthetically. It’s not a huge difference either way though.

There was a pretty decent 3rd person mode hack included with the cheat database I downloaded.

Full range of motion. The low-poly models in this game are really charming and surprisingly faithful to the series aesthetic. I’m really glad there weren’t any other DS line Metroid games that tried to do like, a weird chibi thing instead! 😂😂😂

...I’m reluctant to give too much kudos, though, since the lead character artist also made a version with... a very “breasty” breastplate.

Wow! I hate it!

THANKFULLY this model is not present in game data. These turnarounds (and a couple other renders) were uploaded to the artist’s now-defunct personal website.

In the regular first person mode Samus is just a gun, as usual.

A fun performance-saving trick: Hunters tries really hard to only render what the player can see, such as just the small sliver of the area you can see through doorways, openings, etc. (By no means a technique unique to this game.)

It does get weird when the camera is offset from the player though, which limits what I can do quite a bit.

On Alinos, there’s this extremely tempting “Hole”. It has a health restore in it! Surely nothing bad would happen if you went in it! (This is exactly how I approached it on first playthrough.)

The “Hole” contains a massive, labyrinthine pit of hot acid.

For scale, Samus. The hurt noise plays the entire time you navigate this room.

...I kinda just wanted to get a full view of it...

In another one of Hunters’ finer moments, you are forced to take a slow-moving platform across Arcterra’s long and winding Drip Moat, briefly turning the game into a very dull rail shooter.

However, after cheating my way out of the platform’s iron grip... yeah, the lip around the edge of the moat is totally standable.

The morph ball’s rolling animations don’t seem to work, but otherwise it's fine. So... that’s great.

Other M

For better or worse, it won’t happen again.

Mostly for technical reasons - apparently I’m not authorized to remove the HUD, even using Dolphin’s texture replacement features, so it’s not exactly fun as a photo simulator. (Having beaten it, I can say it’s not particularly fun as a regular video game either.)

Edit: It appears it is possible to remove the HUD via Dolphin’s graphics mod feature, proving once again that Dolphin is the most powerful emulator on earth. Still not happening again. Probably.

Anyway, since I never uploaded it - here’s Samus encountering her real archnemesis, the gender binary.

#misc_

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metroidprimepics · 1 year

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I'm sorry if you've been asked this before, but what is your favorite "room" from each game?

I haven't :3c

Prime: Meditation Fountain. Not the showiest room by any means but incredibly sweet.

Hunters: Fuel Stack. Yes it's a bit frustrating to navigate, but... it looks cool!

Hunters and Prime both have this pattern of extremely vertical rooms, which seems to be echoing the map design in the original Metroid. Which from what I understand was originally a response to the NES' technical limitations with scrolling in multiple directions - the rooms could really only be Horizontal or Vertical, not both.

It turns out this choice also works out well for the limited memory of the DS, since the vertical layout makes it easier to split the room into discrete chunks that can be culled when out of view. So it's both fairly detailed (by DS standards) and technically sound; I don't recall having framerate issues here.

TL;DR it's fun seeing a technical limitation turned into a selling point.

Echoes: Hall of Honored Dead. I had to really think though, this game is gorgeous.

Corruption: Every room in Corruption is my favorite room. But I do really like this save station in Elysia. I didn't play the other Prime games until recently so I had no idea it's a callback. It's nice both on its own and with that connection.

Big setpieces are nice, but it can be exhausting to have every room be jam-packed with Content. Some of my favorite places are interstitial hallways and functional rooms like save rooms or elevators. A moment to breathe.

Thank you for the ask!

#misc_

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metroidprimepics · 2 years

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#Metroid #corruption_#misc_#(Bonus of one of the dioramas.)

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metroidprimepics · 1 year

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Well, that sure was an unplanned hiatus. My tumblr account (and attached sideblog) was terminated about a month ago for unknown reasons. It has been unterminated!

That being said, I was just about done here anyways. I'm going to let the queue run out and then this will stay up as an archive. Or until the disease strikes me again :)

#misc_

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metroidprimepics · 1 year

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Someday there will be images from Metroid Prime 4 on this blog, and I look forward to that day dearly ^^

Admittedly... after so many years of development hell, I can't bring it in me to get excited anymore. It'll happen whenever it happens. When I see an actual trailer with gameplay footage, then I'll get hype. (I'll probably explode.)

That being said, if the technical capability to take interesting screenshots exists, it'll be on here! Maybe!

#misc_#Most 3D games are unplayable for me due to accessibility issues #So I have no guarantee I'll even be able to play it...#I mean. Probably

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metroidprimepics · 11 months

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Which game is your favorite of the trilogy?

I think Echoes is the best in terms of technical quality, but my personal favorite is Corruption. Some of it's definitely nostalgia (it's the only one of the trilogy that I had growing up), but I would probably still like it the most today. I love all the gross Phazon stuff...

#misc_

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metroidprimepics · 2 years

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Lizards, bugs, and other oddities...

Prime

I don’t have the technical knowhow to extract unused models. Luckily I don’t have to; you can check out rotateable various unused models here. (The banners and protozoans are in the final game, in various rooms in Chozo Ruins and Impact Crater respectively.)

Random pic of Samus that I didn’t think was worth its own post.

Since it’s kind of hard to tell which way Metroid Prime is facing while hanging, I figured I’d clear that up. She’s hanging head-down - the “face” is on her back.

Unfurling, from the side.

Back view in battle.

Echoes

Even with noclip off, the morph ball is often partially embedded in the ground, though you can’t really notice from the standard camera angles.

More weaponry with deflection behavior, from the dark troopers.

You can see the Great Temple from the outside in a couple areas, but it’s so far away you can’t see much. Here are a couple more views.

The light grey on the outside of the elevator shaft here is shimmery, like the cocooned masses of “nutrient-grade biomatter” in the area. Overall it feels like the structure was grown rather than built directly.

The patterns on the moths in this game remind me of the Apollo butterfly. It’s not a super obscure species, so it might have been an inspiration... or it just could be a coincidence.

Corruption

I’m haunted by the fact that Reptilicus have three eyes. Bearborg suggested that I might not have noticed because a) the textures are kind of crungy and b) the third eye is often missing in statuary. Maybe the eye isn’t important!

The textures are definitely not great. But with the statues... It turns out that basically all of the statues with any amount of detail do have a third eye.

The first room past the landing site, Imperial Hall, has a bunch of busts, all of which are unique (?!?!?!), and...

...the vast majority of which have plainly visible third eyes, or eyeholes in what looks like headgear. I thought these were nostrils, but they’re in the wrong spot, and the inside is the same material used for the main two eyes. It does look hard to see out of, but again, this might be a bonus parietal eye.

The official scan lore is that these busts represent various emperors. But... you might have noticed what look like preserved Reptilicus heads beneath the bust. According to that blog post by designer Matt Manchester (who has so far haunted me with weird solar system models, odd collision, and the skeletons from last time), these busts were intended to represent Bryyonian gods. This would better explain the heads - sacrifices? Offerings?

Looks devotional to me! Not really the kind of awe that emperors tend to inspire, especially in a civilization that no longer has emperors.

You can also clearly see the third eye on these. The four nostrils (...I guess heat pits are a possibility as well...) are much further down on the snout.

And on the second level... well, take a wild guess what this guy is meant to be god of. If these are emperors/empresses, then why would just one of them be undecorated and dead-looking?

I don’t have anything to say about the other busts, but they are neat to look at, so I’ve compiled some better-lit pics of them in a separate post, with Matt’s lore.

The Fuel Gel-powered bomb slots in the Gel Processing Site later on partially reuse the “preserved head” model. I’m sure it’s just for modeling efficiency, but it is kind of gross.

Some ceremonial armor in the same room.

I can’t imagine why the back of this is modeled in any degree of detail, since it’s basically impossible to see without some extra light, but... it sure is!

Yep, that’s three eye holes...

Another suit of armor on the right is missing its cage-like guards on the eyes and mouth.

Some various other statuary...

The golems generally don’t have a very clear third eye - Mogenar boss excepted -

...but they sometimes do have structures that resemble the eyeholes on some of deity busts. I always assumed these were nostrils.

It wouldn’t be that shocking anyway if they didn’t, since it’s not like they have two sets of arms either. But nevertheless... there’s those eyeholes.

Even the most geometric statues again have something there.

This mostly confirms that I could use another eye myself.

..............Anyway, here’s some other random stuff.

You can stand wherever you want on the Bryyo Cliffside landing site.

The juggling minigame on the Olympus is nice.

But while I was doing that I noticed this weird orange spot. What is that?

Hole in the textures. I don’t think you can look up that far with Actual Wii Controls though, so it’s Fine.

The Command Courtyard on Urtraghus (the first area with acid rain, early on in the area) has a wet, reflective floor, which looks pretty nice. But if you look very closely, you might notice that the container on the right doesn’t have a reflection.

This is because the “reflection” is just a flipped copy of the area, which you can see through the (transparent) floor. The rain landing effects are also doubled, which really helps sell it, but entities are not.

This is a completely standard way to handle reflections in games, especially for the era (real-time raytracing is just barely a thing today, it was completely ridiculous in 2007). But it is funny to see!

I finally bothered to find an infinite health cheat, and it seems that whatever function the game uses to vent e-tanks at the start of Phaaze does not know how to handle it. No more corrupted Hypermode! Which is convenient for me, since I can dig around a bit more without having to worry about the timer.

This delightful eye door (no official name) is a little hard to see ingame because of the plating.

Scooting the camera underneath the plates ... yep, it’s a veiny eyeball thing.

The stalks of its waggly bits are animated too, even though they’re basically invisible from the outside.

It’s hard to capture just how big the Aazelion is, especially since Samus is just a gun. Please try and extrapolate from the gun. It’s huge.

Phazon Metroids can noclip too, sometimes. I mean, yeah, canonically they should be able to do that, but ingame they aren’t supposed to exit the boundaries of the room like this.

youtube

This can also happen in normal gameplay, apparently. You can see how the animations get jittery and weird - it’s not intended behavior at all.

...Anyway, what I was trying to get a look at is the Leviathan womb here. (...pregnancy... horror...)

There’s this mouth-like structure hanging down from a conical hollow in the center of the womb. The hollow goes surprisingly deep into the womb.

Texture of the inside, looking from below. (Second pic is clipped inside of the hanging structure.)

The infant leviathan swimming inside the womb (and featured on the file select screen in the original release) is pretty detailed, although you can’t really see this when playing normally, since the womb is pretty thick and you’re probably more focused on killing it. It slowly shifts between having a solid, shimmery exoskeleton (above), and...

...having a transparent blue body with pinkish organs. Very much like Dark Samus in Echoes, which I can’t imagine is a coincidence.

#misc_#I was hoping to rewrite some things to be cleaner but Tumblr is letting one of every three edits go through so. Off it goes

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