Metroid
Nintendo’s most famous bounty hunter has one of the company’s biggest anniversaries this year. Even if the series may be living in the shadow of Zelda and Mario, Metroid is also celebrating 30 years in 2016. By far one of the most criminally underlooked Nintendo series, Metroid’s influence on video games is huge. There’s a reason the term Metroidvania exists.
Samus has always had trouble getting attention in light of the bigger series, but Metroid has some of the best Nintendo games ever made. Super Metroid, Fusion, Zero Mission, and the 2D series got turned on its head when Metroid Prime took it to a first person shooter, but the themes of the series remained.
After the Prime trilogy, Nintendo partnered with Team Ninja to put out Metroid: Other M in 2010, which was met with less than enthusiastic reception. The game received some negative feedback from fans mostly because of the way that it handled Samus as a character. Since then we’ve heard nothing but silence from the series.
Now a new Metroid game is actually coming out this year called Metroid Prime: Federation Force. We don’t know anything about the game besides that it has four player co-op and Samus hasn’t been seen anywhere in it. Federation Force could definitely surprise us and turn out to be a fantastic game but one things certain, it’s not the game we were asking for.
With such a milestone of an anniversary we can only hope Nintendo has a full-blown Metroid title up their sleeve. Either a new Prime entry, or a return to form with a 2D Metroid. Samus is one of the most important video game characters of all time, and she’s spent too long on the sidelines. 2016 is the perfect time to don the Varia Suit and Arm Cannon once again.
