Happy 30th, Samus Aran! Enjoy a fan-made present. (credit: AM2R)
Thanks to Nintendo’s rise to mid-’80s fame, the gaming company has enjoyed many recent “30th anniversary” celebrations for its famed series. But while Super Mario and Zelda enjoyed official fanfare over their respective “pearl” milestones, the company’s most famed bounty hunter, Metroid‘s Samus Aran, hasn’t gotten as much official attention for her debut launching on Japan’s Famicom Disc System in August 1986.
Luckily for Metroid diehards, a group of enterprising game makers have stepped up with the launch of a free anniversary present years in the making: AM2R, or, Another Metroid 2 Remake. The free game, which had a demo tease launch a few years ago, is finally in a 1.0 “full” release state on Windows (to be followed “soon” by a Linux build). This is a full reimagining of the Game Boy classic Metroid 2: Return of Samus—meaning, this is more than a colorized upgrade from its original, “green-scale” release.
This years-old trailer offers a nice, spoiler-free taste of what Metroid fans can expect from AM2R.
Aesthetically and mechanically, AM2R will delight anybody who enjoyed the Game Boy Advance’s Metroid: Zero Mission, which itself was a looks-and-mechanics remake of the very first game. The sequel now gets the same mix of updated mechanics, redrawn artwork, newly arranged songs, and slightly remixed content, along with a deep, newly written “codex” of lore, story, and analysis of everything Samus discovers in her mission to take out a new slew of augmented Metroid creatures.
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Source: Ars Technica – Fan-made Metroid 2 remake celebrates series’ 30th year before Nintendo does