Project AM2R - Another Metroid 2 Remake

Next Saturday, the awesome people at Speed Demos Archives will be hosting a Metroid Speedrun Marathon. The cool thing about this marathon is that AM2R will be featured, along all the official Metroid games. The event will appear at the frontpage of Twitch.tv , professional speedrunner Dragondarch will be speedrunning the AM2R Demo v1.3. Here's the schedule , and the Twitch Feed that will be streaming the event. I'll do my best to attend, so feel free to drop by the stream chat. So, you don't want to watch the new demo on a stream because of the spoilers? We can fix that: DEMO 1.3 DOWNLOAD New in this version: - Acess to a new area - XInput support for XBox 360 controllers (Includding triggers) - Improved button hints in-game - Centralized menu control with dedicated buttons - Redone lighting engine - Aim Lock - Analog walking - Morph Button - Many engine improvements and optimizations

I know the DLC joke couldn't match last year's, but I had a lot of fun writing it. Too bad I couldn't make a screenshot of the cat launcher in time... Anyway, the new demo is almost ready for a release. The miniboss of Area 3 had several revisions, and it's still being tweaked during the final playtest sessions. As usual, as things get fixed and features are added, other things break. Sometimes it feels like a never ending loop. But things look pretty stable nowadays, just a couple of (hopefully) simple bugs left to fix. I know I entered into a "feature lockdown" to focus on the contents, but there was a feature that was requested a lot: Centralized menu controls. Now, first time players might find the subscreen controls a bit confusing (almos nobody reads the commands at the bottom of the screen), so I limited all the actions involving menus to 2 dedicated, customizable buttons. This is a small detail that makes things much more intuitive. Anyway, as ...

The final testing phase of the new store system is almost over. After yesterday's stress test, the servers seem to be stable enough to handle the load of the release day. Also, there were some changes in how the currency is stored. Now, instead of paying directly for items, you can buy " Galactic Federation Credits " that can be used to redeem the items, be gifted to other players, or bid at the casino area. Also, the in-game store has been finally added. You won't have to minimize the game and visit the store page each time you run out of missiles. Now the entire AM2R item store is available from the pause menu. Right now all the support crates that contain the items spawn at the landing site, but there are plans to expand the drop locations.   Bear in mind that the current store screens are in-development, there will be a better looking background and a bigger selection of items. Speaking of items, Reserve Tanks were added. These add 100 energy each...