Samus' first portable game and is well worth picking up!
The Objective of this game is to kill every single Metroid on the planet, you have a counter in the bottom left corner showing you the amount you have left to kill. At the start of the game only a small area is open to you as the rest is blocked up by lava, once you've killed a certain amount of Metroids the lava level will lower and you'll have access to more of the game. Along the way you'll collect powerups such as missiles, spiderball and various beams. As you progress through the game and get more powerfull the metroids you face will be stronger as you'll be fighting their later forms.
Your first playthrough of the game will have to be shocked quite a few times when you're just walking around and then all of a sudden a Metroid appears, this is even more true when it's a form you haven't seen before.
One of the things that people think makes this game horrid is the lack of a map , back when I was playing this game (14 years ago, when I was 4) the internet was a new thing as were computers and very very few people had them so you had no where to go for help other than magazines. I completely disagree that the lack of a map ruins the game, if anything it makes it better. If I was able to complete it at the age of 4/5 then I'm sure you should all be able to finish it yourself now. The general direction you had to go was down, then go left and right on both levels killing all metroids along the way, then continue down, the only back tracking that had to be done was when you wanted to switch to an older beam (Which you needed in some cases) which required you having to go back all the way accross the map to pick it up, this in my opinion is the only "bad" part about the game but it meant you had to have a good memory to play the game which is never a bad thing.
The game difficulty is fairly hard but in my opinion it's just right. I have a friend who could never beat the final boss, this was a couple of years back now (When he was 15) and he was shocked to learn that I finished the game 100% when I was 4/5.
The reason the game is rated badly by people these days is that they've been softened up with so called "games" that are coming out on the newer consoles. For example the other day I was reading about SMB.3 being released on VC soon and someone was shocked to learn that you could not save on the original NES version! People look at this game, see the dated graphics (More on that later) and the lack of a map and think it's rubbish, even though they could just pop over to gamefaqs and look at a map or a guide there they dismiss the game and call it rubbish. I never had that luxary back in the day and I enjoyed the game just fine.
One thing that I'm annoyed at Nintendo about is that the game has yet to see a remake, the graphics are pretty much outdated now and the lack of colour is slightly annoying. Metroid I has been remade in the form of Zero Mission, which also contains the original version aswell as being on the Wii Virtual Console and included in Metroid Prime. Super Metroid has yet to be remade but the graphics are fine as they are and it's going to be released on the VC pretty soon. So come on Ninty, show some love to this fantastic game! Release it with updated graphics as part of Metroid Prime 3! Or put it on out DS. Anything! Just release this game with better graphics or in it's original form just so more people can play what is in my opinion Samus' best game and one of the best games ever made.