Wall Jumping In Super Metroid On The Nintendo Switch: The Interaction Of Old Technology With New

Today I am thinking about the quirks of old technology, and how old systems interact oddly with new ones.

As you might remember, to celebrate my 100th book (DRAGONTIARNA: KNIGHTS) I decided to get a Nintendo Switch. The Switch offers a good library of old NES and SNES titles, and I’ve been playing through them to finish some of the games I never had the time to finish back in the 80s and the 90s.

I’ve been playing through SUPER METROID, which is widely considered a classic, and I’ve been enjoying it. In SUPER METROID, you play the armored bounty hunter Samus Aran, who descends into the labyrinthine depths of the Planet Zebes to battle the evil Space Pirates.  Along the way Samus encounters various puzzles and traps, and you can upgrade her armor and weapons. For a 25-year-old game, it’s really fun, and it holds up better (sometimes a LOT better) than more modern games.

But then I got to the part where you need to wall jump, and I was stuck.

“Wall jumping” lets Samus ascend narrow shafts by bouncing back and forth off the walls. Basically, you do a spinning jump at the wall, and then when Samus is spinning against the wall, press the opposite direction on the control pad. Then hit the Jump button, and Samus will bounce off the wall. When she hits the opposite wall and starts spinning, repeat the procedure.

Except I could not get it to work, no matter how hard I tried. The controls just did not respond how they were supposed to.

Then I remembered DOSBox. If you haven’t heard of DOSBox, it’s an emulator that creates a simulated DOS environment that allows you to play old DOS games on modern Windows, Macintosh, and Linux systems. One of the problems of emulation old DOS games is that some of those games were written back in the days when a 33 MHz processor was fast. A modern processor runs around 2.5 GHz or higher, and because of that, an old DOS game can become unplayable due to the speed. To combat that, DOSBox has an option that lets you slow down the emulator to match an old processor.

I wondered if something like that was happening. The Nintendo USB controller I was using is way more responsive and sensitive than the SNES controllers of the 90s, and I was using the left joystick on the controller to control Samus’s direction. I tried using the D-pad on the USB controller, but that was still too sensitive. Finally, I tried the much stiffer buttons of the D-pad on the left Joy-Con, and that did the trick. Using that, I was successfully able to manage a wall jump.

This is of course a trivial anecdote, but it is always interesting to consider how old technology interacts with new systems. In the end, I had trouble figuring out how to wall jump in SUPER METROID because the controllers have improved so much in terms of sensitivity in the last 25 years.

-JM