#mercurysteam

[theblindarcher]

Hadar... sen olmen!

GBA FE inspired half-body portrait of Raven Beak from Metroid Dread. Reposting to commemorate the game breaking 3 million in sales.

#pixel art #fanart #ドット絵 #metroid #metroid dread #raven beak #nintendo #mercurysteam #nintendo switch #fire emblem #gameboy advance

[scianvih]

#Metroid #Samus Aran #Metroid Dread #Awesome #Fan Art #Illustration #Ilustración #Wallpaper #Fondo de Pantalla #Videojuegos #Videogames #Gamer #Game #Nintendo #MercurySteam #Nintendo Switch #Adventure

[poz-patrol]

#video game screenshots #dailygaming #dailyvideogames #konami #castlevania lords of shadow #castlevania #gabriel belmont #marie belmont #pan #full moon #hideo kojima #mercurysteam

[schismusic]

Metroid Dread, Michael Mann's Ferrari and the flimsy-ass excuses I tried to find to connect them

Sometimes it just takes some honesty to get lack of creativity out of the way.

This waiting thing I'm not new at, not at all. I've done it very often. The earliest I can remember I was eleven and Tron: Legacy was about to drop in theaters. You bet your ass I got the soundtrack the very second it entered record stores. It was an aesthetic-defining moment. The kind of stuff that alters your brain chemistry permanently. When some friends who were in Venice told me Ferrari was a bad movie I felt all kinds of stomach-churning. I don't mean to be François Truffaut-like and pretend like all movies made by Michael Mann are automatically good, but I do have insane amounts of respect for the man as a filmmaker, and after what happened with Blackhat - in short: a really good movie sorely mistreated by audiences, critics and box office revenue - I was kind of hoping in some sort of smash hit. I really needed a W, so to speak.

In case you guys were wondering, I kinda dig Patrick Dempsey as Piero Taruffi.

Once again it just kind of floored me for a second. It wasn't too clear-cut right away. I don't think it's one of his best - too many things just don't align: the acting feels distracted and half-hearted and the inexplicably botched adaptation/voice acting job they distributed in Italy is even worse than that laughable fake Italian accent everyone has on all the time in the original; some of the dialogue is insanely out of focus and thematically off-center in a way no other Mann movie ever allowed for; sometimes it feels like the movie itself has to take the script back onto its central theme without losing itself to agiographic intents; the photography often felt a bit too painterly for the movie to have that same electrifying visual feel as (most recently) Blackhat or (most impactfully) Miami Vice. Crucially, something still felt off in a good way. What to make, for instance, of the sunglasses symbolism that instantly connects a movie set in the late '50s with the original cyberpunk aesthetic wherein “by hiding the eyes, mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous,” like Bruce Sterling himself said? Or again the cuts to the clutch pedal and then the gear stick systematically being interpolated when someone is driving? Or yet again the sheer sense of speed, the same speed of sand slipping through one's fingers, every shot conveys? When I came out of the theater (a local monoplex, almost deserted, mostly dedicated to films d'essai - incidentally also the only theater that showed the movie without me having to go to the Big City) some people I knew asked me what I thought of it and my very honest reply was "ask me in about ten years". There's absolutely no telling what future filmmakers and film historians will make of this: everything rests on the shoulder of future Mann movies. These intuitions here, not just the communication discourse (which, once again, is pretty typical of all Michael Mann movies, starting at the very least from The Insider) but this unique omissive/breathless style of storytelling and information conveyance, might make for another cutting-edge, literally breathtaking Michael Mann thriller soon: very soon, if the voices about Heat 2 being adapted to a movie turn into a reality.

Topically enough, right on Christmas morning my precious and beloved friends J. and A. gifted me a digital copy of Metroid Dread, a game I had basically lost any hope of ever playing. The Metroid series has always fascinated me in that, for a franchise as old and weathered and revered as Mario and Zelda, there's relatively few people - at least when I was a kid with no readily available internet access - who kept a memory of it. I first met Metroid as a middle schooler, via the Prime Trilogy collection a friend of mine had saved on his jailbroken Wii; never finished it but it stayed within me like a particularly revealing nightmare did. When I played Super Metroid at age eighteen that intro sequence burned itself on my prefrontal cortex and changed everything. It's a masterpiece that drives its main strength from the freedom to explore and delve deeper and deeper into it - and quite revolutionarily, the possibility of not doing so. To realize when enough is enough takes a special ability and knowledge of the self. To accept less than what would be enough takes either idiocy or excellently precise calculations and execution.

Yet ultimately at the heart of every horrifying car accident, the screaming contests, the bankruptcy threats, there sits an inconsolably pulsing heart that the movie resolves to show us exactly twice.

We were at my grandparents' for Christmas and as we drove through the town my father looked out of the car's window and saw an obituary with his last name on it. I didn't quite catch who exactly it was and how they were related to us - and rest assured they most likely were, it's an Abruzzo thing. As most of my family's deaths, as discussed on my Godflesh post, were on my mother's side, to see my father's last name on a mortuary announcement was a bit of a surprise, in that as you probably can imagine it's also my last name. It's a new experience which, in total frankness, I don't exactly hope to replicate soon.

While preparing for this post, I annotated on my phone's notes app that "Michael Mann would make a fantastic Metroid movie that everybody would hate". I know this because something similar already happened with Miami Vice: he systematically removed almost all signifiers of the original TV series to reprocess the core concept of it into a lean, aesthetically experimental, profoundly emotional film about means of communication reshaping the way crime and crime-fighters relate to each other, and the way the individual relates to sovereign organizations. It certainly helped that Michael Mann himself, as screenwriter-turned-director-turned-producer, was the man who defined the original Miami Vice's aesthetic, and therefore was in all likelihood the most qualified to strip it down to absolutely nothing, remake it from scratch to fit a new, apocalyptic vision of a post-9/11 society of control based on telecommunication.

In discussing Ferrari with @power-chords, she immediately pointed my attention onto just how critical the figures of mass communication turn to be throughout the movie. Journalists, priests, even the movie stars the pilots are dating. Michael Mann is moving into a territory of movies not about movies, but movies about media in general, sitting at the edge of communication breakthroughs, studying the intersection between an "old world" and a modern, contemporary, fucked up world. Unsurprisingly, Metroid Fusion (and to a lesser extent Metroid Dread itself) delve into omission, falsification, breaking down of information: there's fertile grounds for Mann to work with, I think.

Most importantly, however, Metroid Dread is peak-form Metroid, combining the strength of the more exploration-based titles in the series with the thrilling combat-oriented difficulty spikes of Fusion. The new thing compared to, for instance, Samus Returns is how the game does not trivialize the enemy encounters in regular gameplay up until the very end, which by the way is nowhere close to a careless power trip. And even if it were, it'd still be more than warranted: the final boss is granted to give you unrequested cosmetic surgery to make you look like a dumbass. All the while Samus has never felt any better, movement is slick and deliberate, the 360-degree aiming is incredibly precise even taking the Joycon drift into account: and this precision eliminates almost all instances of rage-game bullshit when it comes to the EMMIs, the fighting, the jumping, the exploration, without by default trivializing any of the elements. It is, simply, a game feel miracle.

It feels about as glorious as it looks.

The deep knowledge of the gameplay mechanics of a great Metroid game is key to Mercury Steam's success with the central executives at Nintendo of Japan. Samus Returns didn't sell too bad, like most Metroid games (at least when you don't compare them to Pokémon, Mario or Zelda), but this here is just a quantum leap. All elements of the game, including the mechanical frameworks established in the 3DS game, are honed to a lethal degree: every enemy encounter, every instrument at the player's disposal turn out to be multifaceted, limited only by the player's own creativity and abilities. But the game knows how to help you, the player, hone those abilities too - it wants to be discovered. It entices you in further and further.

The game is majestic, in short. It knows itself, its players, its predecessors, even its stakeholders spectacularly well. And it is so thanks to employees who were forced to borderline inhumane working conditions, under threat to get their name scrubbed off the end credits if they didn't physically show up for work in the middle of a global pandemic.

"MercurySteam employees talk about the working conditions in the studio" - Spanish article from AnaitGames

During one of the earliest scenes in Ferrari, Enzo (Adam Driver) goes to Mass in the factory's own chapel, and together with all the racing department's higher-ups he proceeds to not give a damn about the function, keeping his eye on a stopwatch instead, monitoring the times Maserati's drivers are doing on the Modena racetrack. As the execs do this, the priest starts waxing poetic: "If Jesus was born today he would not be a carpenter. He would be a mechanic, like you are," says the uncaring bastard in a long dress to alienated, broken working men, facing - unbeknownst to them - the serious threat of bankruptcy, immediate liquidation, job loss. It took this movie about thirty years to get made, being passed from one producer to the next one, from one director to the next one, with this script that sort of tries to be a biopic with all of its strengths but is fundamentally tethered to a protagonist who's, ostensibly, Just Some Guy who happened to own half of one of the most famous car manufacturing companies on Earth. But the reason he was able to do that is, like one of my teachers points out in his Letterboxd review of the movie, his entirely-too-natural knack for timing. The precision Enzo Ferrari requires of his drivers, that quite literally lethal element of exertion, precision and composure, is what is required of him too, but this doesn't make him any better than anyone else: he's not the one dying, he's not the one crashing cars. Some of his friends did. He just got extremely lucky.

Informing the very concept of the labor of love is the idea, almost the aesthetic even, of the love of labor. Gaming culture is profoundly imbued with this. Crunch, stricter and stricter timelines: these are no news to anyone who's into gaming in an even remotely active manner, and are the byproduct of a culture based around hype - a profound affection that degenerates into pretense. Enzo Ferrari fashions himself a dictator, taking charge of the communication around his brand and purposely, painstakingly reshaping flows of information to operate according to a logistical nightmare of an inner timetable. Adalgisa Bisbini (Daniela Piperno) plainly states, with the brutal honesty that can only come with old age and immeasurable pain, that "the wrong child died", right behind her son's wife's back as they're visiting the family grave. Two graves marked Alfredo Dino Ferrari sit mirroring each other in an imposing structure in the San Cataldo cemetery, in Modena. Enzo Ferrari mourns them both, unknowingly echoing his mother's feelings. It is a circle of mutually inflicted pain where everyone already feels what they're being told, and yet it never stops: labor must ensue, so that the vestiges of love can ensue. No wonder Enzo and Laura Ferrari (Penélope Cruz) can only ever fuck on top of spreadsheets.

The importance of an ashtray cannot be overstated.

#schismusic #cinema #videogames #ferrari #ferrari 2023 #michael mann #metroid #metroid dread #mercurysteam #nintendo #labor #love #random bullshit as usual #Youtube

[virlouvette]

(based on this artwork)

Metroid: Samus Returns © Nintendo and MercurySteam (Yoshio Sakamoto, Takehiko Hosokawa, Jose Luis Márquez)

#metroid 2 #metroid samus returns #metroid fanart #samus aran #metroid 2 gravity suit #gravity suit #MercurySteam #Nintendo #(unprofessional photography…)

[hardcore-gaming-101]

Metroid Dread

For most of the 2010’s, the Metroid franchise was in a bad spot. Metroid: Other M had flopped, Metroid Prime 4 was nowhere to be seen, and Federation Force was hardly a consolation. 2017’s Samus Returns wasn’t mind-blowing, but it still brought some life back to the series and showed off what developer MercurySteam was capable of. Nintendo must’ve agreed, because they put them in charge of Metroid Dread, released in 2021 for the Switch, the first game in the core Metroid series since 2002’s Metroid Fusion.

Read more...

#Hardcore Gaming 101 #Kurt Kalata #Review #Metroid Dread #Metroid #Samus Aran #side scroller #alien worlds #Nintendo #MercurySteam #Nintendo Switch #open ended #metroidvania #female character #Western sequel to Japanese game #2.5D #video games

[legiongamerrd]

#Gamefemerides Hace 12 años se lanza en Occidente Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. Un juego de acción y aventura desarrollado por @mercurysteam_entertainment , producido en parte por Kojima Productions y publicado por @konami para @playstation 3 y @xbox 360. La versión de PC fue lanzado el 27 de agosto de 2013. El juego es un reboot de la serie Castlevania. Sucede en el Sur de Europa, durante la época medieval. La historia se enfoca en Gabriel Belmont y su misión de vencer a la orden maligna conocida como los Señores de la Sombra, y resucitar a su esposa. El jugador controla a Gabriel en ambientes 3D, usando habilidades de combate cercano para derrotar enemigos y resolver puzzles, para moverse en el juego. #LegionGamerRD #ElGamingnosune #Videojuegos #Gaming #RetroGaming #RetroGamer #CulturaGaming #CulturaGamer #GamingHistory #HistoriaGaming #GamerDominicano #GamingPodcast #Podcast #MercurySteam #Konami #Castlevania #CastlevaniaLordsofShadow #PlayStation #PS3 #Xbox #Xbox360 #Acción #Aventura https://www.instagram.com/p/CjVR8JMguup/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#gamefemerides #legiongamerrd #elgamingnosune #videojuegos #gaming #retrogaming #retrogamer #culturagaming #culturagamer #gaminghistory #historiagaming #gamerdominicano #gamingpodcast #podcast #mercurysteam #konami #castlevania #castlevanialordsofshadow #playstation #ps3 #xbox #xbox360 #acción #aventura

[geehawttea]

and here's Ginebra

#raiders of the broken planet #raidersofthebrokenplanet #spacelords #fanart #digitalart #art #artwork #artists on tumblr #artworks #drawing #spacelords ginebra #ginebra #mercurysteam #gameart #video game art #videogame fanart

[molagboop]

i love ashkar's clearly artificial metal beak. old fuck's got dentures

BIRD dentures ajgkfjkdjfd... I love it.

ok but this is the second time I've heard someone posit that Raven Beak's beak looks like an augmentation, the first happening literally yesterday. show of hands how many people are in the "i assumed it was real" camp and how many were under the impression that it's a prosthetic.

#ask #i assumed it was real and that mercurysteam just gave him a really cool beak #now i have to make a model post about the head because apart from me obviously needing to do it at some point #there are clearly details that people have interesting takes on and I need the Words #real talk though imagine a Chozo doctor or artist making beak augments their life's work #iconic #true craftsmanship #chozo anatomy

[prokopetz]

I think everybody who's hand-wringing about Silksong not having a demo out for Next Fest needs to bear in mind that metroidvanias (and metroidvania-adjacent genres, e.g., Zelda-likes) are some of the most labour-intensive games to produce, and that most well-regarded indie examples of the type were in development for a very long time.

Phoenotopia: Awakening was in development for seven years; Ghost Song and Owlboy, for nine years; Iconoclasts, for eleven (if you count the development period of the cancelled Ivory Springs prototype; eight years if you don't); and if Radio the Universe makes its tentative 2023 launch date it'll have been in the works for thirteen years.

Of course, the elephant in the room is Hollow Knight itself. By all reports, it only took four years to produce. There are a couple of caveats that need to be attached to that, however: first, that how quickly Hollow Knight was turned out is one of the most notable things about it – many AAA studios would struggle to turn around a game of that scope in so little time, much less an indie studio! (For reference, four years is also about how long it took Nintendo and MercurySteam to turn out Metroid Dread.) Second, anyone who remembers how janky Hollow Knight's gameplay was at launch will understand that such extraordinarily rapid development came at a cost.

Point is, Silksong, which has been in development since 2019, is only just now reaching the point of having been in the works for as long as its predecessor, and even if it does take until 2024 or 2025 to come out, that would still put it on the extreme low end of expected development times for a large indie metroidvania. Missing the 2023 Next Fest is not a sign of danger ahead.

#gaming #video games #silksong #hollow knight #game development #metroidvanias

[coldgoldlazarus]

Whenever I see art of Samus getting shipped with Peach or Zelda, I'm kinda torn. On one hand, it is genuinely cute. On the other hand, I always feel a little bit annoyed that she's stuck with crossover ships by default instead of anyone from her own actual series.

On the other other hand, that annoyance then makes me feel guilty for both being kinda ungrateful for the cuteness, and feeling a little bit like a gatekeepy asshole toward Smash-only people. (But it sure is easy to tell apart Samus fanworks based in Smash from Samus fanworks based in the actual series, regardless of the presence or lack of crossover stuff.) Plus in fairness, the only viable girlfriend candidates at present are either Gandrayda or maaaybe Madeline Bergman, and for various reasons, both are pretty easily-overlookable characters even within the fandom, let alone outside it.

But then on the other other other hand, there is a wiki, and people can just look it up...

Anyway, this is why Retro or Mercurysteam just needs to give Samus a canonical girlfriend, so we don't have to rely on crossover stuff. The more weird and alien she is, too, the better.

#not a reblog #metroid #samus aran #in which I am very mildly cranky #over something that really isn't that big a deal #there are also good OC ships I've seen #and heck I even have one of my own lined up #if I ever work on my fic some more again #metroid silence #but still. It's not the same #give samus a girlfriend

[theblindarcher]

To go with my Raven Beak repost, here's the time-lapse I made using footage over the course of four streams.

Songs in the video include:

To Brinstar ~ Avien

Ice Beam ~ DJ the S

Bogged Down ~ Argle

Alimbic Insanity ~ DJ the S

Yellow Valkyrie ~ DarkeSword

The Unnamed Frontier ~ Pyro Paper Planes feat. Viking Guitar

Maridia Mix ~ Chako

Melting Point ~ Zack Parrish

Opposing Currents ~ Luminist (featured in Harmony of a Hunter Returns)

Burenia Remix ~ EksSan Remix

Metroid Legacy ~ Omni-Psyence

Song links in the video description

#pixel art #fanart #ドット絵 #metroid #metroid dread #raven beak #nintendo #mercurysteam #nintendo switch #fire emblem #gameboy advance #time lapse #art time lapse #Youtube

[kef-meister]

Metroid Dread

One of my absolute favorite things about Metroid Dread isn't just the story or the gameplay - but Samus' body language. There's one scene in particular:

This still comes from a scene near the start, where Samus has just survived an event which has (once again) disabled most of her powers so the 'Metroidvania' part of the game can take place. She's originally on the floor, comes to after having passed out, and then props herself up using her gun, first, instead of her left arm.

This is someone so used to being in her suit that she effortlessly uses her right arm - which is "only" a gun - as a means to hold herself up or clobber things with rather than its intended purpose. They specifically chose to animate that. This, to me, is a small but very important detail that shows how much thought MercurySteam has put into Samus and the way she moves in-game and during cutscenes.

(It also makes me wonder if Samus is ambidextrous, but that's not something I'm going to explore here - I just wanted to yell about this detail.)

#metroid #metroidposting #kef high on metroid #samus #samus aran #metroid dread

[poz-patrol]

#castlevania #castlevania lords of shadow #marie belmont #konami #mercurysteam #gabriel belmont #video game screenshots #dailygaming #dailyvideogames #steam games

[beevean]

You know, this whole thing on bad creators and strangely loyal fans reminds me of something I read in the LoS artbook. Apparently, MercurySteam and David Cox received so much hate and death threats for LoS, they genuinely thought Konami was going to drop them from the project. However, when they returned to the studio, Konami actually green lit them for two more games, MoF and LoS2, because LoS1 wound up being (and still is) the best selling game in the entire Castlevania franchise, selling between 1.77 to 2 million copies worldwide.

While making LoS1, they tried so hard to make it for both experienced and new fans, they studied the fandom memes and theories, I think they said they even brushed up on the older games. When they first pitched the idea, they even tried to keep it to the original formula, only to be told to do something different.

My issue is that, you have creators who are flaunting just how much they hate the original work, while somehow being praised and having loyal fans, but when you have creators who wanted to capture the essence of the original, but change some stuff to make the story unique to them, they get hated and sent death threats instead.

Sorry bout the rant, but this has been eating at me for a while.

This sounds like the complete opposite experience of the Devil May Cry reboot, where the people in charge were absolutely brimming with resentment for the mainline games.

Unlike LoS, DmC:R was a commercial failure. Whatcha know :^)

From what I've seen, I can honestly tell that the MS devs really respected the main series. They mixed up every element they could, but overall the story, whether one likes it or not, is very aware that it's its own thing and it's not trying to surpass the source material. It's a shame that they got that vitriolic reception :\ I understand that reboots are seen with suspicion at first, but not to this degree.

[monochromatictoad]

I'm happy that Isaac is growing on you <3 I don't know what you've learned about him by far, but I think he's too underrated (no thanks to a certain show that completely changed him and convinced the fandom that he needed to be "fixed")

I gush about Hector a lot nowadays, but Isaac was the first Devil Forgemaster that grew on me. I think he strikes the right balance between being tragic and being a bastard :P and he's just full of personality! He's charming in his own over-the-top way

and yeah he's kind of cringefail. but that's the appeal <3

Everything I know about Isaac is from you! I'm sad we don't have an equivalent of Isaac or Hector in LoS, (though I have some theories about the Acolytes.) I think they would've been so fun for MercurySteam to interpret and put in LoS!

#snailmail #cringefail king #i am really weak for characters who are hopelessly devoted to their cause #but his design is just also fantastic