Metroid: Hidden Worlds

Here we find a map unlike any in the programmed levels. There is a one-sided door
hovering on the neighbor map. Below Samus is acid that eventually turns
Samus back up through the ceiling to fall again.

We all remember Metroid, back in the good ol' days of the NES. That spirit-crushing game with tough platforms to jump and even tougher enemies to deal with. Well, in case that wasn't enough, there is a whole other world to explore by exploiting a wall-climbing glitch. With this glitch, the hidden worlds, with all their glitches, one-ways, and infinite bees, is revealed.

The coolest part about these worlds, which is also ironically what caused a sudden disinterest in the whole thing, is that they are not programmed into the game. They are not little easter eggs left for only the elite to find (much to their dismay). They are actually blank sections of map. Each room is 0 bytes on the game cartridge. The room itself is only generated when Samus enters it, at which time the room assembles itself based on surrounding map data. Only about half of the grid for the map is actually programmed, leaving almost an entire game left to explore. (Approximately 500 rooms to be considered "hidden worlds").

When I was younger I experimented a lot with the glitch, but found that all in all it was rather tedious to do on the NES. There was a lot of getting stuck in walls and having to re-enter passwords and backtrack. I gave up on it after a while and went back to enjoying the game for what it was.

Which brings me to recently: experimenting with the rom. Save states and screen-capturing are made of pure awesome. When you find a room like this one to the right and you're sick of killing off an infinite number of bees and have worn out the entertainment potential of running off the right and appearing on the left, you can just open the last save state right before you ascended up the wall.

My goal is to eventually map out the entirety of the hidden worlds. It's going to be a slow process and an ongoing project. And although I would not be the first to do or explain it, I would be the first to include pictures/screenshots rather than cold explanations. Because lets be honest here, describing an 8-bit world in text can't be anything but dull.

First Post!!1!1

First post! There, got that out of the way. Got the blog up. The name is an anagram of our names, and as Berge put it: "I like the implication that ours is one of many tabs open... and that it is geekier."

There will be more to come, mostly random geekiness from the both of us... that and better icons. Sketching is not my strong point.