Metroid

High Scores: Kraid’s Lair

A number of Nintendo’s main franchises have roots in horror films. We get Mario via Donkey Kong, which is of course via King Kong. And we get Metroid via Alien: the boss Ridley is a nod to Ridley Scott; Mother Brain is analogous to Mother, the Nostromo’s onboard computer; the parallels between Samus and Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley are not negligible.

Hybrid Landscapes in ‘The Adrift of Samus Aran’

In a series of fifteen sparse poems that flit across the page like half-remembered meditations, Vince’s speaker visits the psychic remnants of their life, the intersections and edges of their experience within a landscape that has turned them into “a / Body rounded / to Zero.”

Retrogamer: Speed Dating for Video Games

Phantasy Star 0 played like I imagined a heroin overdose would feel: slow, stultifying, mind-numbing, a product of poor decisions.

My Samus

I waxed a valenced enemy to ones like these, mawkish and mutant, I shot them
bodiless, a bunch of vapors in the cool. So it continued: new raptors, ghost bricks,
a face on four stems.