Guide: Metroid NES

 I fired up Metroid 1 because a video was slow and often boring, and accidentally got gud. Here are my findings.

 

 Most importantly, screw attack is easy mode. You can get the most powerful videogame upgrade ever and blitz your way through everything before tourian, except Kraid. I ended up leaving missiles on because I hate how the varia suit looks. With the screw attack, it's not like I need to shoot. 

 Screw attack quirks: it's not really supposed to work within one tile of the platform you jumped from, which makes the hitbox weird. Invincible rippers can hit you since they don't die on contact. It will let you kick zoomers and other short enemies on the upswing, although the timing is tight. Sometimes other enemies attacking at knee height will do damage instead of taking damage.
 If you want to kill zoomers by landing on them, then you need to jump from below their platform. If you want to kill enemies on platforms below you, you can't. Move down, attack up.
 You can jump straight up in a somersault, by letting go of forward at the same time you jump. Although you will activate obligatory sideways movement if you start moving after jumping.  

 

The beginning of the game is real slow, since they expect you to backtrack through all of brinstar twice or more. I will also call out the fact the first vertical corridor is absurdly long and tedious. Pacing lol. Definitely don't fall down. I found I don't want or need to go back for the varia suit. Although I do like the eye-searing purple/cyan missile mode.
 If you also dislike the varia's looks but want to use it (perhaps for acid and lava), there's a handy easy password that lets you start unsuited. Two twos. https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Metroid/Passwords

 You don't need missiles before tourian for anything except doors, and metroids drop 30 missiles at a time. You can kill two metroids at once if they're on top of each other. Stick your gun in there and shoot. If you kill metroids in pairs or even gather them up by letting them latch onto you, you can quickly refill missiles. 

 Accounting: every missile pickup you can't use because you're full is a wasted missile, so before tourian you might as well use them anyway. If you feel like shooting something with a missile, just do it.

 When I first played Metroid I didn't memorize the layout and I did kill everything I saw. Both of these are serious mistakes. Enemies are bullet sponges and I often have to wait for them to even be shootable, never mind in the way. Moreover, drops on these easily-avoided enemies are terrible. 

 If I do need to refill health (and can't get to metroids yet) then I don't use zoomers &c or the spawning pipes. Kill things which drop 20s. Ideally, one-shot leapers or desgeegas (the leaper clones) with the screw attack. The five energy from respawners is regularly not worth picking up, because it lets the pipe spawn another.

 Metroid 1 strongly rewards aggression. The best way to kill Kraid is not to try to avoid or freeze all his claws and spikes, but to get inside him and go for the damage race. Either missiles or bombs will work fine. His belly spikes will block the missile and it will hurt him anyway if Samus' gun is already inside him. Likewise if a particular room seems dangerous, I don't try to be more careful, I blast my way through it as quickly as possible.

 The map of Metroid is small and simple enough that remembering the whole thing is perfectly viable. In particular, keep in mind refill rooms with high density of 20-energy drops. It is said that Ridley's lair is easier than Kraid's. This is true. I would guess it's due to having 20-droppers everywhere, whereas Kraid's is littered with fivers. Ridley's is also smaller.

 There is one exception to aggression, in green norfair. The tall eye/egg pillars with lava. I can't escape the tallest pair, and there's a multiviola perfectly positioned to spawn and knock samus down into there. Instead, be very very careful in this one place. Do note there's a weird second-controller suicide combo, so if you fall in with the varia suit and aren't using save states for some reason, you don't have to wait ten minutes to die from the lava.

 

 Know a technical limitation: scrolling can't happen in both directions. Only vertical or only horizontal. Vertical corridors can't have secret passages on their sides, and horizontal ones can't have them on the floor or ceiling. Cuts way down on bombing/shooting every block. All those copy-pasted rooms also mean secret passages are copy-pasted. 

 

 If it seems to you that drops mysteriously stopped dropping, it's because they did. Rooms have a limited number for some reason. Max about ten missile drops (20), less if the room didn't roll high on missiles, and energy too will slow way down after a bit. Change rooms to refresh the pool.  

 Yes, you can get cheap-shot while entering or exiting a door. On entering, it reminds you that enemies can and should be baited into unwise attacks. On exit, remember that samus is extremely well armoured and a few stray hits here and there don't matter. Don't bother with annoyance or frustration, just keep blitzing.

 Ice beam + screw attack would be a nasty combo, except I can't stop shooting two icicles at once, instantly unfreezing them, and anyway stopping to freeze them is superfluous. The things with good drops aren't hard to hit with the screw attack, while the things with bad drops have bad drops and are best left alone.
 If you can shoot one time (or three times) stuns are OP in every game and Metroid is no exception.
 Ice beam + screw attack would be the best if you ever needed to shoot, since missiles are relatively plentiful, meaning ice beam's weakness wouldn't matter. But you have the screw attack, so it really really doesn't matter.
 It would be much better if the wave beam was before the screw attack, instead of the reverse. The only real use for the wave beam is letting me murder floor enemies more murderously. 

 Oh wait I could deliberately shoot two to miss and aim with the third.

 

 Everything in a particular area does the same damage. Brinstar is 8, norfair is 10, hideout 1 is 20, hideout 2 is 24, and tourian is 30, with the bizarre exception of mother brain who does 20.

 I've heard that doing 100% is a pain since there's no percentage tracker. Um, guys, you can get six energy tanks and 255 missiles. If you have less than that you haven't picked up everything yet. Cool? Cool. You get 75 missiles for each hideout boss, so there's 105/5 = 21 missile packs in the world. 

 The e-tank in kraid's room is very easy to get by dropping off the higher ledge rather than the closer one. Can also bomb jump over the close ledge, from the arena floor.

 Exploit: you can jump in midair using various means. Mainly by unmorphing from a ball. As long as you don't move sideways after the unmorph, you can jump at any time. Conveniently, unmorph uses the jump button, so you can mash.
 Technique: bomb jump, then unmorph and normal jump. I regularly do this to get over ice beam obstacles even when I have the ice beam and don't need to.
 There's that one super-hard jump in Ridley's lair. All that's over there is one missile, and it takes like two minutes to reset if you miss the jump. Use a save state. Or the exploit. Or just skip it.

 I put my toe into super metroid and I don't like it anymore. Metroid's movement is kinda jank but sm's is worse. Symbolize it this way: in sm you can easily jump two screens, meaning you have no idea what you're jumping into. It's also easy as piss. Get the spazer beam and missiles are obsolete...
 The only metroid game with genuinely dangerous metroids is the first, and even then it's merely a learning curve thing.

 In metroid 1 you can triple bomb jump. It's done by simply holding B (for bomb) until it works. This means there can go backwards through Kraid's one-way passages. There's no point, but it is possible.