Metroid No-Death Playthrough (Actual NES Capture) - Part 1

This is part 1 of my 100% playthrough of Metroid on the NES. This is not an emulator and was not played on the Wii or Wii U Virtual Console. This footage was captured directly from my front-loading NES using a real Metroid cartridge.

I played a little bit of the original Metroid as a kid but never really got into it. My family never owned the game but my brother always said good things about it. I only played it a few times at other people's houses, but I remember the huge vertical tunnels more than anything. I think the game was just too large and confusing for me to get into as a kid, so I never went out of my way to rent it or anything.

Anyway, around the time the GameCube was being shown off Nintendo announced Metroid Prime, and I decided to give the series a real shot since Prime looked cool. However, right before Prime came out, I picked up the original Metroid and played through it to give myself a better understanding of the series. It was amazing. It had excellent music, power-ups and bosses, and it was a great challenge too. I got hooked pretty quickly.

One thing I like about the original game is that unlike Super Metroid, you can access areas in any order you want (except for Tourian). So it's actually more of an open-world game than Super Metroid. It's also far more challenging.

About every year or so I grab Volume 29 of Nintendo Power and hook up the NES to play through this game. It's still tons of fun after all these years. For this playthrough I used Issue 29 once again. In that issue Nintendo Power printed a full map of this game to celebrate the upcoming release of Metroid II: Return of Samus. That's how I keep track of where I am and what I need to do. Nintendo Power recommends going through Ridley's Lair before Kraid's Lair, so that's my strategy.

In each video I'll be keeping track of the items I've collected, so you can treat this playthrough as a walkthrough if you like. I collected all 255 missiles in this playthrough and all of the energy tanks as well (although energy tanks eventually become duplicative since you can only carry six and there are more than six in the game).

In this first part I collected the Morph Ball, missiles, the Long Beam, Morph Ball Bombs, three energy tanks and the Ice Beam. The Ice Beam is located in two places: Brinstar and Norfair. You can access the Brinstar location as soon as you have Morph Ball bombs and missiles, but you're not supposed to be able to escape that area without the High Jump Boots. However, if you jump right as the floor reappears, you'll be able to escape without the High Jump Boots. The Ice Beam allows you to grab the Energy Tank hidden in the ceiling near the starting area (you have to freeze an enemy and use it as a platform).

Items collected:

Morph Ball - 0:21
Missile Expansion # 1 - 2:48
Long Beam - 4:16
Energy Tank # 1 - 6:17
Morph Ball Bombs - 7:17
Ice Beam (Brinstar Location) - 10:25
Missile Expansion # 2 - 13:40
Energy Tank # 2 - 13:49
Energy Tank # 3 - 17:07

Recorded with the Hauppauge HD PVR and a composite connection at 60 frames per second. I used a Toshiba model D-R550 DVD Recorder to upconvert the NES's native 240p signal to 480i so that the Hauppauge could capture the console's audio/video signal.

I'm using a standard NES controller.