Same on all accounts. Got the original NES Metroid for my birthday when I was a kid and impacted my taste in games forevermore. Of course I’ve played all the Castlevanias as well and Hollow Knight is a masterpiece.
It’s hard to properly compare because I’ve played Super Metroid more times than I honestly remember and have only made it through Dread 1.5x (at best). There are so many cool rooms in Super (and even later games like the Prime series) where I play them and go, “Oh, this is the room with X!” where X is a cool encounter, maybe a friendly/non-hostile creature, or an entertaining set piece. Dread doesn’t really have that, the areas check off zones like flavors of ice cream, the music is not memorable, and creatures are often used across multiple zones, further diluting any uniqueness to the areas.
It’s best summed up by this screenshot I took of Dread (I added the red outlines around the black space myself to highlight my point). Notice how the foreground has no character or texture and all the detail has been pushed into the background, which is essentially the negative space you traverse through. My eyes don’t really hold on this area, they capture the boundary of the play space and then navigate through it, passing over a lot of the inconsequential stuff in the background. Again, compare to Super.
Also the EMMI stealth sections are so incongruous with the rest of the game you could cleanly slice them out entirely (while redistributing any of the power ups of course) and the game would be the same. In fact I rather hate them because instead of taking my time to explore and soak in the environment, I’m just chased through a very samey looking area.
Oh and finally, it’s a small point and I don’t want to make too much out of it, but like … the game opens with SPOILERS beating her so hard she loses her abilities. That’s weird, right? Kinda oof, IMHO.
All these “why are people using Bluesky and not Mastodon” topics are starting to give me a headache. You’ve been told and on some level, I have to assume you understand the reasons, but are simply unwilling to address them. When people say, “it’s difficult to use” instead of understanding why they think that way, you just dismissively wave your hands and say, “no it’s not”.
If you want people to use Mastodon, you need to SHOW people the power of federation while HIDING all the rough bits. People want to go to where the friends, writers, artists, scientists, etc. they want to follow are and sign up for an account there. Simple as. In this way, they very much want at least the appearance of centralization. I don’t want to have to get balls deep in an instance’s politics to understand their moderation, who they’re federated with, if they have the funds to operate into the foreseeable future, and how to migrate my data if any of those things goes sideways.