Nintendo celebrated the 30th Anniversary of the Metroid series in a weird way- by not even mentioning it. For a company so steeped in nostalgia it was a bizarre move, to say the least. Fortunately, the fan community was more than ready to step in, including Project AM2R: a full-color remake of the classic Metroid II: Return of Samus.
Hopefully many of you already know this, but Metroid II for the original Game Boy is the most underrated game in the entire series. Sure, everyone (rightfully) loves Super Metroid and Metroid Prime, and tons of gamers cut their teeth on the original, but the Game Boy-only sequel managed to actually make you feel like a bounty hunter. It sees you exploring an alien world trying to tag all different kinds of Metroid bounties with the aid of new weapons, armor, and abilities, and was superior to the original in almost every way (greyscale graphics or not).
The tiny screen and graphics are really the only things holding people back from really truly enjoying it this day, and that seems to be the reason for the creation of this remake. For over eight years a team worked on AM2R, fixing Metroid II: Return of Samus up in beautiful 16-bit graphics in the style of Metroid: Zero Mission (for the Game Boy Advance), as well as a new original soundtrack. They timed the release for the 30th Anniversary of the series on August 6 and planned for future updates to the game to keep improving it as well.
But as we all know, the rights of fan remakes are often dodgy, and Nintendo has filed a DMCA takedown notice on the website hosting the game.
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Why Nintendo did that is fairly obvious, as they still sell a 3DS Virtual Console version of Metroid II. They couldn’t even be bothered to gift the series’ fans with a sale of some sort, which really would have been the easiest thing to do to celebrate this milestone. (Yes, we do have Metroid Prime: Federation Force, the weird multiplayer title without Samus that’s coming out later this month, but c’mon.)
Even with the website gone, gamers that still want to check out the remake can find it as it was made available via a torrent file. Good luck to Nintendo in scrubbing that from the internet. We’ll see if they decide to take further legal actions against the team, or what updates AM2R has in the future. Follow @AM2Rgame for more info on the project.
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