With 12 Minutes to Spare!

 Well, I beat Metroid Dread for the 4th time, this time under four hours with a time of 3:48:something. I know that speed-runners are doing this in just over two hours, but I'm less concerned with pushing super-fast victories than just seeing if I could do it in that time.

It's funny - the bosses in Dread are, I'd say, more punishing than those in Super Metroid, but the fluidity of movement and the ease with which you can aim means that it's far easier to dodge attacks and hit incoming missiles.

One thing that had worried me going into the Raven Beak fight at the end of this run is that, since I didn't pick up any Power Bomb upgrades (I went straight from getting them to the boss... well, to the fifth Chozo Warrior boss, and then to Raven Beak,) I thouhgt I'd run out of Power Bombs when Raven Beak summoned the big sun-like thing. You can, to be fair, simply dodge things to deal with that when it's out, but it's way harder to dodge the boss' attacks when you have this giant burning sun above you.

However, as it turns out, while you don't seem to get power bombs from the little black-hole things Raven Beak tosses at you, or by blowing up those sun-like things, you can get some if you counter attack some of his melee attacks - things that in previous runs I'd really just tried to dodge. It can be tricky telling whether the incoming attack is counterable, but if you do, it'll refresh your PBs.

Luckily, I believe that if you die, the timer rolls back to whatever checkpoint you're sent to, so my two failed attempts on Raven Beak didn't count against me (the fight is lengthy, so that might have deprived me of getting under 4 hours, or at least made it a lot closer).

I'd be really overjoyed if they announced some sort of DLC for the game. I used to dislike DLC in the era of DVD-Roms, as I would often play with my console offline then. However, in this age when half my video game library (if only half) is just downloaded to the console, I don't find this quite as alien.

To be fair, Metroid games are kind of tightly constructed - it's harder to add a new zone like you can do with, say, a Dark Souls game.

I'd actually really love it if Mercury Steam did a remake of Super Metroid with Dread-style controls. You'd certainly have to rejigger a few things - the way that Dread handles missile upgrades, for example, wouldn't really work with Super Metroid's existing gameplay flow. But the truth is that a ton of the upgrades in Dread are the same, and work similarly, to their antecedents in Super Metroid.

Also, while I think Dread is a phenomenal achievement, I do think I like the music from Super Metroid better, and I'd love to hear updated versions of those tunes (beyond Red Brinstar, which we got in the Quiet Robe cutscene in Dread). I think it'd also be really cool to get a less abstracted, 16-bit version of the lush greens of... Green Brinstar and the fiery caverns of Norfair.

This might be a bit much for DLC, to be fair.