The internet is a great place. And by great, I do not only mean large, but also a fantastic source of information. Some of that information are tools or guides (examples, tutorials) how to make games. I’m talking about Game Maker, Multimedia Fusion and alike. These two game creation tools are commonly used by Metroid: Fan Mission.

Metroid: Fan Mission is the largest community on the internet when it comes to Metroid fangame creations. Most of these mentioned game creation tools are relatively easy to use for anyone, so there’s quite a number of interesting projects going on at MFM. Some of these look really cool. I’ll list a few which I really look forward to:

• Metroid SR388 by Vonrichter, a Super Metroid fangame. There is a very cool trailer video on his blog at Destructoid, which I highlyrecommend everyone interested in this topic to view it, if you haven’t done so already. Unfortunately, their official website (www.metroidsr388.com) has been down for a while, so we don’t really know what’s going on in there at the moment. The trailer is a must-see, though.
• Another Metroid 2 Remake (AM2R) by DoctorM64, a Metroid II remake. There are several video’s on his website, which all looks very cool too! Definitely seems to recreate the ‘Metroid II-feeling’. There’s even a tech demo on there, how about that?
• ZeroEngine by Zas, a Metroid Zero Mission fangame/engine. This one has very promising screenshots and a very cool trailer video, which looks very much like the original Metroid Zero Mission!

These are only three projects, there are much more on there! Please have a browse through their forums, especially the Game Creation Studio forum!

About  3 years ago, I started working on a multiplayer Metroid fangame in GameMaker® 6. It featured Metroid: Zero Mission graphics and gameplay alike(ish). That fangame was called: Metroid Kombat (cheesy, I know).

It was mostly a game I developed when I hadn’t had !@#$ to do at my school back then, and it was purely made for LAN (bad networking code, etc). It was fun while it lasted, I enjoyed some good time in not only making it but also playing it with classmates and friends. Unfortunatly, I lost(these two words are you going to hear a lot at my blog) the GameMaker project files, including backups.

Back then, I was starting to hang around Metroid: Fan Mission, a Metroid fangaming community. We created a team of a few people (notable me, ‘Chucky’, ‘wild8900′, ‘Metro’ and ‘Dragon’) who were to recreate a multiplayer Metroid fangame, but this time with custommade graphics (latter persons all being excellent pixel artists).

The game to be made was called Metroid Tournament (also cheesy, I know). Progress went slow but steady. The engine was slowly developed, a lot of sprites, artwork and concepts were made. Months of dedication went in the project, notably on the graphical goods.

Ofcourse, I’m not me if disaster not struck again. Two years ago, I lost litterally everything from the project, and the project was cancelled. The loss was too great, and we couldn’t be !@#$ed to recreate everything. Besides, the engine wasn’t near multiplayer support yet, at all.

But somehow, because of a miracle, all that was lost from Metroid Tournament is recovered recently! All sprites, tiles, hud concepts, 16 worked out map concepts, menu screens, logo’s, icons, everything! Everything is recovered!

I’m not going to cancel Multitroid because of this, or merge anything Metroid Tournament related into Multitroid, but I do expect to start working on a second branch in the same engine I’m using for Multitroid in the near future.