Title says it all. One of the common complaints I’ve heard about Super Metroid (especially in comparison to Zero Mission and/or Fusion) is that the game is too slow. The word clunky also gets thrown around, but I never take that as a valid complaint against anything because it’s vague as fuck. This complaint always bothered me, as I always considered the later games to be slower.
Well, I eventually took the time to actually check that shit. I recorded how long it takes Samus to get from one end of a one map square wide room to the other in all 3 games at varying speeds (Walk, Run, Speedboost, Shinespark, and lastly Ballspark for shits). This is what I found out:
Super’s walking speed is marginally slower than Zero Mission’s, which is in-turn, slower than Fusion’s by a fair amount.
Every speed from Running and up, Super is faster. By a sizable margin.
Zero Mission & Fusion have a Walk speed. The problem is that they basically have Autorun turned on. Also, the speed increase is small instead of how large it is in Super.
Zero Mission’s Ballspark is humourously enough, the fasted speed you can go in said game.
At every speed, Fusion is faster than Zero Mission. This makes Zero Mission the slowest of the 3 games.
If you’re curious, I recorded some of my testing footage, and then also made some videos where I spliced clips together. Though this was more to test my video editing software than anything else. It can be downloaded here.
That’s all. Just wanted to get that out there. Super’s the fastest Metroid. Peace.
That’s an interesting experiment, very interesting.
I never got the argument myself, either. I never played any of them and went “fuck, how slow am I?” and of the three, Super Metroid is, in my opinion, the best by a mile. I love both other games, don’t get me wrong, but in terms of gameplay Super Metroid just wins. In terms of icon(icness?), Super Metroid towers above most games.
I think you mean in terms of being iconic. But in any case, I feel the same way.