Project AM2R - Another Metroid 2 Remake

Most of the work these days was spent on the soundtrack. You might remember a couple of posts ago that I lost the data of one of my hard drives. Well, fortunately, most of my sample libraries and custom sound banks were in the other drive. All I have to do is redo the songs using the sounds I already experimented on and chose. Starting from scratch was tough at first, but remaking something that was good before made it even better, taking a fraction of the original production time. Also, having heard Harmony of a Hunter many times opened my head with ideas of how diverse the Metroid songs could get. You´ll be able to hear a preview pretty soon. In the meantime, I´d like to ask for your help. I´m working on the intro sequence, and my English is quite limited. So, if you have ideas for a short introduction text, I´d love to hear them. Simply head over to THIS THREAD on the forums, follow the guidelines, and write your suggestion. Thanks! PS: Comment moderation has been re-ena...

Metroid just turned 25 yesterday! It´s amazing how gaming was changed after the release of the original Metroid, 25 years ago. Platforming exploration was born, and Samus was the first strong heroine of gaming history. To celebrate the occasion, the great people of shinesparkers.net produced an awesome tribute album with songs of the entire Metroid saga. Darren, the project director, was kind enough to let me participate with one track. There´s a lot of variety of styles, and some neat surprises. If you haven´t downloaded it yet, get it here: Harmony of a Hunter I participated with "Danger in old Tourian", my own version of the Space Pirates song in Super Metroid. Instead of making epic orchestrated arrangements, I decided to go for the atmosphere, and try to recreate what my feelings were when I first heard the song. The rest of the album is simply impressive, it shows how professional and dedicated the Metroid fan community is. Thanks to all the people who contact...

Before you freak out with the title let me tell you this: AM2R IS SAFE, I keep weekly backups of the main project folder in different media types. A couple of weeks ago one of my SATA drives stopped working. It was the main project drive in my studio PC, so all of my current audio projects can´t be read anymore. As I usually backup audio projects as soon as they´re finished, I have some very angry customers who lost their on-production album. Also, one of those projects was the AM2R soundtrack. While I have some test mixes in my laptop, most of the music engine work was done using placeholders (the original Metroid 2 soundtrack). I was already tired of hearing the songs during production, hearing them all the time in-game during testing would be even more tiresome.  Now, I did some testing on a friend´s house. We tried replacing the drive´s controller board, using parts from the same drive model. The motor starts, there is drive activity, but it´s not recognized by the bios (...

Before I start with the progess of these weeks, I want to tell you about a special event. The guys at Metroid Headquarters are celebrating their 7th anniversary, and they´ll be doing a 101 hour Metroid Marathon, streaming live playthroughs of all the Metroid games on their hardest difficulty, with 100% items and scans. These awesome guys will be collaborating with Child´s Play , the famous and respectable charity. The marathon will start on Monday, July 11th at 8pm CST. For those who will watch it, I´ll be ocassionally on the chat room (I´ll try to tune in the entire Metroid 2 part). Regarding AM2R, there was some progress. Mostly playtesting and balancing issues with many enemies. Some Alpha Metroid fights were tweaked, mostly the first ones. Fighting Alphas with a limited supply of missiles and only 1 energy tank can get pretty hectic. A new save station was added near the bottom part of the first area, for those who want to retreat from any of the Alphas there and res...

I was able to work on AM2R quite a lot these days. The most interesting addition to the already complex game was a cutscene system. Before, all the small puzzles had their results in real time. So, in order for the player to see the outcome of his/her action, the entire puzzle had to be constrained to a single screen (sometimes a little bigger). Now, when an important event is happening, it takes control of the camera and shows the event properly. Cutscenes done so far are very short right now, and can help make bigger puzzles (don´t worry, the level design doesn´t depend entirely on them). Many small tweaks and improvements were done in a lot of rooms. New level tools were done to provide Metroids proper ways to avoid cramped areas, helping them follow Samus more effectively. There were small places where you could hide and rethink your approach, but now Metroids give a fierce chase. You can´t hide anymore!  The rest of the progress was mostly changing some naming conventio...

Fortunately, things are going back to normal. I´m starting to have some free time to invest in the project. Most of these weeks work was spent on tweaking and tuning the level design of areas 1, 2 and 3. Many small bugs in some scripted events were fixed, and some elements that were done years ago were redone. Besides being a tech demo and a great chance to find bugs in the engine, Confrontation has set the standard of level and background detail that AM2R aims for. There are many places that still look too simplistic (mostly the caves connecting the different areas) that need work. Also, some new tilesets were done to replace some old, outdated tiles. Speaking of Confrontation, the super secret room was found by Hemse. Head to the forums , for instructions on how to get there. The secret prize... AM2R will feature a secret "Hemse Mode" with new gameplay twists. Congratulations! Thank you for following the project, and like always, comments and suggestions are welcome.

First of all, I want to appologise for my absence these weeks. I had to take care of some personal matters, leaving me almost no free time or energy to work on the project. Progress these weeks was almost non-existant, except for some scarce work on the sountrack. Things should become normal again soon, and blog posts will actually show some progress. In the meantime, I re-uploaded Confrontation 2.5, since almost all the mirrors were deleted. I repackaged it to include 2 more translations (Hungarian and Norwegian) and 2 mods (Zero suit and 8-Bit GameBoy). Thanks to all the great people that make Confrontation a better game. Metroid: Confrontation v2.5 MediaFire - FileFactory - EasyShare Download Mirror 1 - Thanks Matt! Download Mirror 2 - Thanks Steven! Still not convinced to give Confrontation another go? There´s a small super secret room that nobody found yet. So if you thought you knew every inch of the game already, there´s some hardcore exploration still to b...