Metroid

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Metroid
Developer: Nintendo R&D1 Publisher: Nintendo Platform: NES Released in JP: August 6, 1986 Released in US: August 15, 1987 Released in EU: January 15, 1988 This game has unused areas. This game has debugging material. This game has a prerelease article

The story of one girl and her highly advanced power suit borrowed from a dead civilization of birdmen. Also, there's no saves or map. Have fun!

Debug Features

The NES version of Metroid contains a secret password, which enables several debugging features (the zeroes are optional):

NARPAS SWORD0
000000 000000

("NAR" refers to T. Narihiro, the programmer who converted the game from the FDS disk format to standard ROM)

This will send you to the start of the game with the following debugging features enabled:

• Infinite health (the tens digit of your health never changes; you can still get hit and take damage, it just won't have much of an effect)
• Infinite missiles (though you technically don't have any missile containers; this can lead to a crash in Tourian, as noted below)
• Ice Beam equipped (this uses the Wave Beam's graphic with the Ice Beam's palette, which never happens normally)
• All items obtained (sans missile containers and energy tanks)

PROTIP: If you intend to beat the game with this password, it would be wise to pick up at least one missile container first. If you kill a Metroid without obtaining a missile container, and it attempts to drop a missile pickup, the game will freeze. Alternatively, you can just avoid killing Metroids altogether. This glitch was not fixed in any of the later rereleases of the game (e.g. the one included with Metroid Prime), possibly because Nintendo is unaware of the code's existence.

Inaccessible Rooms

Two rooms cannot be accessed, both of them in Norfair. They're copies of rooms that exist elsewhere in the game.

The hall at the bottom of this screen isn't connected to anything and thus can't be entered.

The room to the left is, once again, not connected to anything.

Save Function

The pads on the top left indicate space for a CR2032 battery.

Interestingly, opening up the Metroid cart reveals that it uses an NES-SNROM-0x PCB (x indicates the board revision). Among the five games that Nintendo published using this board, three of them used the battery backup space. Releases of Metroid outside of Japan did not have a save feature and opted for a password system, instead, as the Famicom Disk System version(s) relied on disk backup. The other game that didn't use a battery was Kid Icarus, which shared a similar transition from Japan. Metroid was the first NES title to use the SNROM board, making it quite obvious that they intended to have battery backup but instead cut it and chose the more cost-effective path. Template:MetroidSeries