Release Date: July, 1987
Platform: NES
Developer: Nintendo
Kid Icarus has an odd place in the history of the NES. It seems to be one of those rare games that has a massive following but remains underrated. Part of the problem is that it was developed by the same people who made Metroid and was released not too long after. The game have similarities and it's hard not to compare them. However, when this guy compares them, Kid Icarus comes out on top.
You control Pit, a little dude with useless wings and a bow and arrow. Traversing both vertical and horizontal scrolling areas, Pit must upgrade his skills and collect the three treasures stolen by Medusa and her minions. Since I already brought up Metroid (and since many who would consider playing Kid Icarus have already played it), let's compare the two games.
Controls
While Pit has some difficult jumps to make, the control is absolutely fluid. He responds quickly to every command, so getting past difficult parts is left completely to the player's hand-eye coordination. In Metroid, Samus responds fine to player input but RAM issues cause some serious slowdown issues in delicate areas. Also, when Samus gets hit she bounces back a good half-mile, often into a lava pit. Pit just stays where he is.
Level Design
Metroid essentially has one level with different sections that you can move in and out of. In other words, it is mostly a non-linear game. Kid Icarus is linear and has defined levels, so it's hard to directly compare them. Each have their faults, however. Some of the areas of Metroid begin to look samey, and the insane amounts of backtracking one has to do can get irritating. However, when one learns the game, planning can be done to avoid this. While this problem is avoided with Kid Icarus, it's ridiculous in that on vertical levels, you cannot fall below the bottom of the screen even a centimeter, otherwise you die. Otherwise, I found both games to be quite creative.
Enemies
Both games have many sets of enemies that act similarly to one another. Metroid has basically a few categories. Enemies that crawl along walls, ones that come out of pits, and ones that fly down from the ceiling. Kid Icarus has enemies that crawl, fall out of the sky, or come at you with a zig-zag pattern. However, where Kid Icarus shines are the three dungeons. The highlight is the eggplant wizards, who throw eggplants at you that turn you into a whale, making you backtrack through several rooms to find a nurse.
Bosses
Kid Icarus has the cerberus, the dragon, the floating bubble, and Medusa. Metroid has Kraid, Ridley, and Mother Brain. While there is a bit more variety in the Kid Icarus bosses, all of them are insanely easy to beat. Medusa is insultingly easy, possibly the easiest final boss in all of video game history. Kraid and Ridley are a bit similar for my tastes, but at least they are hard. And Mother Brain is appropriately difficult as well.
Graphics
Metroid is dark, dark, and more dark. Kid Icarus is more colorful, but has some truly awful backgrounds.
Sound
Metroid has beautiful, haunting music appropriate to the game's setting. Kid Icarus has an annoying, looping tune that is just a bit too chirpy. And the sound effects when Pit hits an enemy with an arrow are shrill to put it mildly. The dungeon music is good.
Weapons/Items
Pit mostly uses his bow and arrow, which he upgrades by getting more points. He also can win many a helpful item by winning games of chance, enduring skills trainings, or buying them in stores (or the black market). Perhaps my favorite part is that in the dungeons, he can use hammers to break free centurions (turned to stone) who can then help them in boss battles. Metroid also has many awesome upgrades, my favorite being the screw attack. All things said, I just like the variety with Kid Icarus a bit more.
Story
While this only a minor concern for both games, it is always nice for the player to be rewarded at the end of the game for a job well done. With Metroid, you find out you're a girl. Pit rescues some princess, and the more points he has, the beefier his muscles get (and presumably, the greater the chance of him scoring further). There are several endings, at least.
Challenge
Kid Icarus is quite difficult, for about four stages. However, as Pit upgrades, the enemies don't get harder. Thus, the game gets progressively easy until the final stage, which is the easiest yet. Meanwhile, Metroid has above average difficulty that is consistent throughout, becoming even harder in the final room. Unfortunately, part of Metroid's challenge is with the control. At least both games provide great fun with unnecessarily long passwords you can copy, take ten minutes to input, and then pray you get your game back.
Summary
While Metroid is technically more proficient in a lot of areas, the game requires immense patience as the player must slowly learn a map that is difficult to traverse while at the same time struggling with some pretty mediocre controls. Many of the problems with this game were fixed in Super Metroid and further releases. Kid Icarus still holds up well over time and it's disappointing that it wasn't popular enough to spawn numerous sequels, settling for one mere Gameboy release twenty years ago. It certainly had the makings of a storied franchise right from the beginning.
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I have dropped everything else and am now currently playing Skyrim. Its consuming. Thank goodness I have a daughter now, or I'd waste away my whole weekends.
Kid Icarus comes out on top of Metroid?! You're high. Kid Icarus's controls are no better than Metroid's, which is about my only problem with Metroid (which can have some backtracking, but the game is way smaller than you think; plus, admittedly, I have the map mostly memorized). Kid Icarus's backwards difficulty is a game-killer. It's almost too hard to bother with early on, and suddenly it's a breeze. As amazing as the level design is, it's the exact opposite of what game design should be. I do love the game, which I'm sure isn't coming through, but the faults are large.
I'm just now getting back to games after a week and a half of Christmas-related stuff. I'm playing the third Professor Layton game on the DS as of last night, and hoping that they finally didn't write a moronic story to go along with the excellent puzzles. On PS3, I'm still playing Mass Effect 2, God of War 3 and several others. I did finally play the PS2 classic Ico, which is every bit the gem I was told (though there is a game with insane backtracking).
In his defense, its called pixel perfect memories. If his memories were in a higher resolution, he might not have this problem.
(That said, I never played Kid Icarus so i may be talking out of my arse.)
I've never actually played Kid Icarus, but I will say it's unfortunate they never really got the chance to do a sequel like Super Metroid. That game pretty much destroys the first Metroid in every way imaginable. Or, for that matter, a full on remake like the absolutely excellent Metroid: Zero Mission for GameBoy Advance. There is actually a "3D Classics" version of Kid Icarus coming very soon to the eShop for 3DS, and I'm pumped to play that whenever they allow us to play it in the states. It went up for Japan today, so I'm hoping it's up when I get home tonight.
"allow us to play it in the states" seems to be a running theme with a lot of games I'm interested in
Yeah, me too. It's rather unfortunate. I'm certainly fine with importing, but it has to be something that's playable with essentially zero Japanese knowledge. A lot of the stuff I want to play is absolutely not like that. I think sometimes the American branches of these companies are too conservative about allowing games to be published in the US. I can understand it (somewhat, though I still don't like it) if the company itself doesn't want to take the risk in publishing it, but to stop another publisher for arbitrary reasons seems stupid.
Sony has been particuarly bad about this in the past. They have really arbitrary rules about what they will and won't allow to be published here. At the beginning of the PSP lifecyce, for instance, there were quite a few PSX/Saturn era games ported to PSP. SCEA said they wouldn't allow "direct ports" of games to be released in the US, and denied approval to Suikoden I & II and the port of the first Sakura Taisen game. However, once Square Enix started releasing ports of their games, they allowed them into the US. Ever since there's been a pretty killer stream of old school RPGs that were released, and the PSP is really the best console for gamers in that niche. Still, their idiocy at the beginning of the generation ensured that lots of awesome games never got to see the light of day. It's just incredibly frustrating.
I started and finished Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception last week. It was good, but certainly not as good as the 2nd game. They tried a little too hard with some of the set pieces, and in a lot of cases I really felt that they took too much control away from the player. It was still a very fun game, and I played through it in two sittings which I rarely do with games, but it still had some faults. That being said, I'm really excited to play Uncharted: Golden Abyss when the PlayStation Vita launches here next February.
After I finished that I started Batman: Arkham City which I have stopped for the forseeable future. The game is really rubbing me the wrong way. They cranked up the Xxxxtreeeemmeeeee knob to about 15, and the beginning of the game is monotonous fetch quests crossing across the city essentially. Ugh. The change to a more open world did not do this game well. I really loved the Metroid-esque progression in Arkham Asylum, and that is missing here. To say I am disappointed would be an understatement. Also, I could do without the generic bad guys constantly calling the female characters "bitches." Like, seriously.
I am very disappointed to hear that about Arkham City. Hopefully it's just you, as a lot of other folks seemed to love it, but the things you described are the exact things I was worried about when I heard about the new game.
I'm probably in the minority on that. I assume at some point I'll try to dig back into it to see if it hooks me, but the beginning of the game did not, that's for sure. All the gritty seriousness made me need to go play something more light hearted first. I'll give it another go after I finish Sonic Generations (which is shockingly good considering it'd been about 10 years since the last good console Sonic game) or Dead Rising 2 (which has been a part of my shameful backlog for far too long considering how much I love the original).
The obsession with open world gaming is something I'm not sure I get, but that shouldn't be surprising, since as a writer I want to experience the story as the authors intended. In Final Fantasy XII (and the shamefully awful XIII), by the time I got to the final boss, I couldn't remember why I had an issue with him.
I appreciate tons and tons of sidequests, as long as they enhance the story. I never sit down to a game thinking "I'm just gonna run around and do stuff," though. The Arkham City developers seemed to ignore what made the first one so attractive, although I'll never begrudge creative teams wanting to try new things, either.
I'm with you on that one as well. I've never particularly enjoyed simulation games like SimWhatever or Civilization. Most of the time I want a story, not a sandbox.
It's a delicate balance, giving the player enough freedom so that he feels he's not watching a movie, yet not so much freedom that the story gets lost.
The thing that drives me crazy about open world game design is that there's rarely enough compelling gameplay to get me through the horrible missions they send you on. If I'm going to play something open world it needs to be way over the top (like, say, Just Cause 2) with regards to gameplay so that I can still have fun finding different ways to do things as I slog through the boring missions.
I like a story, but I think that modern games often try too hard to have "movie quality" stories or whatever. For me, all I really need is a compelling setting as long as there's good gameplay. All the story in the world can't fix a game that's just not fun for me.
I guess it depends on the genre as well. RPGs and FPSs don't need a movie-like story as long as the gameplay itself is compelling. However, the adventure genre relies more heavily on the story being solid.
A prime example for me of the story getting in the way of the game was Metal Gear Solid. The exposition is insane. I think there is more time spent not playing the game than playing it.
The MGS games have a ridiculous story. It's downright terrible at times. I badly want to play through the 3rd game, but I have zero interest in sitting through 15 hours of cutscenes.
For me, cutscenes are only acceptable if they're short. Otherwise, tell me the story as I'm moving around.
The other irritating thing is conversation trees that take literally 10 minutes or more to get through, especially when there is no character development during that time.
Meh, I have no major problems with the MGS games. 3 was quite fun, and is my favorite, but I enjoyed all of them.
I agree with everything said here.
Ha, as if you would've been able to decipher the plot enough to figure that out even if it didn't have that open world part.
Yeah...FF XIII has this ridiculous two-headed problem: it reads like it was written at a third-grade level, but it still doesn't make any damned sense most of the time. If you're going to be intentionally vague and withholding, at least give me some interesting lines to read.
If you're going to be intentionally vague and withholding, at least give me some interesting lines to read.
So.... bhiggum should have written it?
Is he usually vague? Oh, this is a Werewolf thing, not a Survivor thing. Yeah, that's fair.
Woohoo! I write at over a third-grade level!
My main problem with the ending....
Ha, yeah. I'd like to know if that was intentional on the part of the writers, or if they painted themselves into a corner.
Every Final Fantasy ever (well, at least the 8 that I've played) has had some super-dodgy writing and plot toward the end of the game, but that one took the cake. By the end of the final cutscene, I was just sitting there like "well... at least it looks pretty".
I continue to play Chrono Trigger for two reasons.
a) It's an absolutely glorious game.
b) Lavos is kicking my face in.
I think it took me two or three times to beat Lavos. In other words, it took me that long to figure out the trick to beating him.
I just bought Spelunker HD on the PSN. I take back anything I ever said about the difficulty of Demons Souls. Nothing quite like walking off a ledge that's a bit too high and dying immediately. Over and over again.
that sounds a lot like Spelunker for the NES. Great level designs ruined by bad play control, worse hit detection, and instant death after falls of eight inches.
This sounds about right, though this controls slightly better than the NES game if memory serves. The main character is haralded as the "weakest hero in videogames" in Japan. I think that's a fair assessment.
Apparently Irem made a follow up to Spelunker HD in Japan called Minna de Spelunker Black. Same infuriating difficulty level, but you're shrouded in darkness and can only see a small circle around our intrepid hero. I don't think I hate myself enough to try that.
First, Kid Icarus rocked, as I owned it, but not Metroid. And those Eggplant Wizards game me fits.
Second, if you're not playing it, play Dark Souls. Or Demon's Souls. Seriously, every generation there's some game(s) that just define that generation, and will be what I take away from it. Mega Man from NES, Final Fantasy from SNES, Final Fantasy Tactics from PS1, SSX3 and Tiger Woods golf games from PS2, and the Souls games from PS3. Totally addicted. Sadly though, I still want to pick up Skyrim...