Metroid (box) review

Foreword
I recently bought NES Metroid for GBA. Yes, I know there are 'free' unlockable versions available in MZM/MF, but I'm not too eager to play games where the only choices I have are: Straight ahead, or right (where there is a forcefield telling me to come back later). I liked it back in the day where you were responsible for your choices in the game, but that's another issue. I'm here to review the GBA port of the original NES Metroid.

I'll start with an extensive review of... the box! It pretty much sucks. Let's take a closer look at the chaos of so called 'important notices' that no one ever reads. Sorry for the crappy digicam shots, I took them in a hurry.

FRONT

Left margin: I'm guessing they put the NES CLASSICS 9 banner on the side to get a standing format with the rest of the cover. Sort of works, but the plus sign with a 9 in it doesn't look to hot. The 9 barely reads, and how are they gonna do when they get to 10? It'll get cramped. I didn't see the red 9 against the black at first. After some pondering I figured out that it's the 9th game in the nes classics series. Are they going for some sort of collectivity here? Not sure if that's working.

Top: So, at the top we have the GBA logo. Now we know it's a GBA game, which is all good. Center: Then there's the cover pic and logo. Works pretty well I think, but they clipped of the corner of the M on metroid with the bounding box. Bottom: Nintendo logo. OK by me, but then we get 2 stupid little decals. One is in german and I can not read it. Then we get a soccer mom lobbied fascist rating. Nintendo probably wants a low number there, but c'mon, a 3 year old can not play this game. You need to be atleast 7 to enjoy it I'd say.

BACK

Text: Here I'm getting discriminated. Six languages and no swedish? Actually I think they should've gone for just english here, and left some room for other stuff and a larger font size. The text itself is quite to the point though.

Top right: Here's a table that explains how the game doesn't work on older GB handhelds. They could've just written it in plain text. Screens: The screenshots are too small. The second Mother Brain lair screenshot is very good, full of action. However the last two are just empty and dull. Not representative of the game. Bottom: A barcode taking up space. Then we get another important notice in german that I can not read. Then there's the seal of quality, a nintendo logo, and some (c) & TM stuff. Could've been arranged better.

SIDES

Top: The top is the most likely side to show in the store, especially if the boxes are standing in front of each other. Good thing to put the Metroid text here, but then there's some other stuff that the customer isn't interested in when flipping through the boxes.	Bottom: Redundant info in many languages about how the game does not work with older GB handhelds. We already know this from the back of the box, and I doubt anyone reads this cluttered text.
Left: Here we're told to 'retain the packaging' in a lot of languages. No idea why. CE. I think CE stands for Consumer Electronics, and that's it's some sort of quality marking. Again, I don't think anyone reads the text. Anyways, to the right we have an awful fake sprite. Too many colors to be NES, and the motion blur on the shot looks inconsistant. I think the image from the old US box cover. Those often excelled in butt-uglyness.	Right: Now we get another important notice, this time in French. Something about precautions. The important white box says that there's warranty/precautions information inside the box. It's surprising how alike the words precaution and warranty/guaranty is in different languages. No one will ever read these two boxes.

Conclusion
The box is too littered with important notices that no one will ever bother to read them. There's no system in how stuff is placed. If they kept the important stuff in one place people might read it. Since a lot of the information is redundant, it could be compacted a lot.

Sooo...
...I could not resist making my own box. The front should capture the viewer, who picks it up, and looks at the back, where the important information is. All the mumbo-jumbo the consumer doesn't care about is on the bottom of the box. The sides are just decorative.
When designing a box you have to consider the three different types of customers.

• The kid. Only looks at the screenshots.
• The parent that has no idea what it is. Will probably look at the age recommendation and read the text. Parents do not understand screenshots.
• The retro enthusiast. Looks at everything, neat details can score bonus points.

Anyhow, here's the box I would've liked to see, free from silly decals and important labels, yet all the information is there. By the way, if you look at the original NES boxes, they are very clean. I'm not quite sure where all the labels come from.
The cover could use a better typeface than I had available. I didn't pick orange because it doesn't read on grey if you're colorblind. I'm pretty happy with the left margin though.
I think I picked three pretty interesting screenshots with larger figures on. On screenshots this size it isn't much use showing the regular small enemies. Since I didn't want to go over the top with game gfx (from the NES btw), I added a piece of artwork, one of the best pinups I've seen out of the NES ones.






Onto the manual
Well, I'll keep this short. I did shell out 230SEK (33USD), and I expected a little more. The manual is greyscale whilst the original was in color. The images are too small, and some have borders even though the backround is white. My main gripe however, is that there's no extra freatures. Some concept art, a developer foreword, anything extra like that would've been great...

The Game
They did a pretty good job with the emulation. Unlike the version on MZM, which I played briefly, this version has nearly undistorted sprites. It seems like they did some editing to make sure things looked good.
With no second joypad available, you can now exit to the password menu by pressing up and select while paused. This also allow you to save the password, so you don't have to write it down. There's also a useful sleep menu you can bring up with L+R.
On the negative side is the lack of autofire, which means it's hard to bombjump. I can't seem to be able to door climb either, but maybe I'm just getting old. When curled up into a ball, Samus jitters 2 pixels instead of 1 as in the original. Not sure if this is a tweak, but it looks a tad too bumpy.

Again I have to mention the lack of extras. It would've been nice with an enemy gallery, survivial modes, random or alternative maps and other stuff.

Well, that conludes this review, which has mainly been about the box.

Art and screenshots used are (c) Nintendo, I hope they don't mind.