Metroid (NES)

Metroid's release in 1986 marked the birth of one of Nintendo's most successful franchises. In Metroid, you play as the bounty hunter Samus Aran, who is one of the first major female game characters.

Let's address the negative aspects of the game first so we can go ahead and move to the positive. At the very beginning of the game, you have the option to go left or right. I don't know if it's just I or if most people do this, but I usually choose to go right. If you go right, you'll be running around for hours trying to figure out why it won't let you proceed. Not until you try going back and going left do you figure out that there's a random orb onto which you have to jump in order to proceed over to the right (the left is a dead end). Another problem is that you don't start off with full health. You start with like 30 hp I think. As for the music, it's pretty epic, but it repeats over and over and over and over again and it drives you INSANE. A lot of the time, you're in some massive collumn that keeps going up for like a gazillion miles. At this point, the levels become somewhat non-linear, which is just confusing as anything. When your health gets below like 20 or so, this god awful beeping starts, and it won't stop until either Death welcomes you into his warm embrace, or you find enough health to shut the freaking thing up.

Anyway, now on to the good aspects of the game. Metroid has a fun, addicting quality that will make the controller hard to drop. One aspect of the game that makes it a bit easier than some games to play is that you can aim up as well as left and right. Unlike some games, the boundaries are well defined and the graphics aren't confusing.

Presentation - 8. For an NES game, the title screen is fairly epic, especially with the epic background music

Graphics - 8. Good ol' 8-bit graphics, but not confusing.

Sound - 5. Here's the game's major drawback; the music is great...for the first 90 seconds. After that, you'll want to break the cartridge.

Gameplay - 9. The gameplay is epic and addicting...Oh yeah, and fun, too.

Lasting Appeal - 9. Oh, you'll keep coming back to this game over and over again, no doubt.  I mean, it's Metroid; it's a legendary franchise for a reason.

Overall Score - 9.5