It's being a couple of weeks since I've finished this game and it does not get out of my head.
I've always enjoyed Castlevania and games which can be referenced as Metroidvania, but for some reason I've never got interested in playing Metroid, maybe because I was a Sega/Sony kid
But some weeks ago I was looking to play something "new" and was not in the mood for the vampire franchise, so I tried my luck and went to play Super Metroid with basically no expectations and suffice to say it blew my mind.
I was really surprised that it had almost everything a Metroidvania has and one generation before SOTN, I didn't expected this from a 16 bit game and I say this having owned Video Games since Atari 2600
I don't have much to add but if you are into retrogames and for some dumb reason, like mine, you still haven't tried Super Metroid, than please give it a chance.
It boggles my mind that people say that Metroid Dread is better than Super Metroid. How can someone say something so wrong so confidently?
Dread is a downgrade in nearly every way to Super Metroid. Infact, I'd say the only other Metroid game that holds up to Super is Metroid Prime. Not that Dread or the other games are particularly bad, but nothing has beaten Super Metroid yet.
The movement mechanics in dread are definitely the absolute best we've gotten out of a Metroid game. I love my super Metroid and all, but let's not pretend it's controls feel... Dated
The movement mechanics are faster in Dread, but that doesn't mean they are better. Super Metroid offered button remapping, a feature that even modern games sometimes fail to provide. Some technical aspects allowed for real creative sequence breaking that is simply unrivalled in nearly every other game in the 2D sidescroller action adventure genre.
Dread also has a pretty severe linearity rivaling Fusion and Other M. Super Metroid still beats Dread. Super Metroid is timeless, nothing about it is dated except for maybe the music being MIDI based. Everything about the game combines into a single cohesive whole that modern games still attempt to emulate, with varying degrees of success.
What about Zero Mission?
Zero Mission was good, and an improvement over NES Metroid in literally every way except historical significance. But it still wasn't better than Super Metroid.
I agree. I played 200+ hours of dread when it came out. Loved it.
After moving on to other games and replaying Super and AM2R, and beating Axiom Verge a couple times, I took Dread for another spin and... Downgrade is a good term for it like you said. I'm not excited at all for the next one anymore.