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Episode 24 – Lawrence Schwedler (Composer, Metroid Prime Hunters)

Shinesparkers Metroid Podcast
Shinesparkers Metroid Podcast
Episode 24 - Lawrence Schwedler (Composer, Metroid Prime Hunters)
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Our twenty-fourth episode of the Shinesparkers Podcast stars Lawrence Schwedler, the composer of Metroid Prime Hunters, and many other video game soundtracks during the Nintendo 64 and GameCube era, while at NST (Nintendo Software Technology). Lawrence shares his memories of working on Metroid Prime Hunters, and answers our questions, and shares his thoughts on topics such as adaptive music, and how people can get into the video game music industry. We also answer our mailbag on the topic of accessibility improvements discussed on our last podcast.

Podcast is hosted by Amanda, with team members Darren and Stephan Wells, who is new to the podcast!

00:00 – Introductions
01:43 – Interview: Lawrence Schwedler
1:03:33 – Topic: Adaptive Music in video games
1:27:52 – Mailbag
1:35:06 – Bloopers

Links mentioned in this podcast:

Invisible Sound Design in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (By Scruffy)
GameSoundCon

15 May 2022
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Coming Soon: Your favourite Metroid game 2022

May 15, 2022

Shinesparkers will be hosting a new poll soon to discover which game the community considers to be their favorite. Last year, 705 people voted in our very first poll, and this year we want to do it all again. Since then, new Metroid games have released, but how will that impact the results this time around? On June 1st 2022, we will be opening our poll up to the public, and they’ll have two months, until July 31st 2022, to submit their choice. Only one game can win!

We are hoping to gather even more results this year so a wider pool of Metroid fans can decide their favorites, and we are urging people to get behind the game they want to see win!

Stay tuned for the announcement soon!

13 May 2022
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Community Spotlight: TorvusBolt

May 13, 2022

Our latest Community Spotlight is now available! This time, we are focusing on a pretty awesome community member called TorvusBolt, who is infamous for his speedrunning of Metroid titles, most notably Metroid Dread. Torvus is also known for his “Torvus Trivia Thursday” a weekly series of insightful information shared on his Twitter account, which has been informative and entertaining to many Metroid fans. He even insisted on creating a pretty awesome header for his own Community Spotlight too! We want to thank Torvus for taking the time to share his words with us, and we hope that our readers will check out his amazing speedrunning videos linked on the page linked below!

Click here to check out the Community Spotlight

10 May 2022
Metroid Dread Permalink

Metroid Dread Becomes The Best Selling Metroid Title Ever

May 10, 2022

Metroid Dread has officially become the best selling Metroid title in history, with 2.9m copies sold! This was confirmed in Nintendo’s latest financial results, and includes physical and digital sales globally on Nintendo Switch, which has now confirmed to have sold over 107 million units worldwide.

We couldn’t be prouder of this amazing news, and congratulate MercurySteam and Nintendo on such an impressive sales total.

Source: Nintendo

06 May 2022
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Metroid Prime Trilogy Permalink

Interview: Bryan Walker

May 6, 2022

We are thrilled to share our interview with Bryan Walker, the former Senior Director of Development at Retro Studios. Bryan’s credits include Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, and the New Play Control! port of the original Metroid Prime. He also played a role during the development of Donkey Kong Country Returns, and Mario Kart 7. Bryan shares his journey through the video game industry, starting with video game reviews, and on to Retro Studios, where he helped to bring some of our favourite Metroid games to retail. The interview touches on a few nice topics, which we won’t spoil in this news post, so be sure to click the link below and give it a read for yourself. We hope that you’ll enjoy it!

Click here to read the interview

05 May 2022
Metroid Prime Hunters Permalink

Metroid Prime Hunters: First Hunt was made to tide fans over, Reggie reveals

May 5, 2022

Former Nintendo of America CEO Reggie Fils-Aimé recently published his memoir, Disrupting the Game. One of the stories he shares in it concerns First Hunt, the demo of Metroid Prime Hunters that came with the first launch of Nintendo DS hardware in late 2004. Apparently, Hunters was not progressing through development at the speed Reggie was hoping for, so he suggested making a demo to tide fans over. This was an unpopular decision with the development team at NST, since refocusing on a demo would mean delaying Hunters by six months, but Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto agreed with Reggie. Hence, First Hunt was born.

In our interview with Hunters composer Lawrence Schwedler, he said that First Hunt was a proof of concept, and that NST used the lessons they learned on it in the full game. While it may not have been a popular decision from Nintendo at the time, it ultimately worked out when Hunters released in 2006 to positive reviews.

Source: Nintendo Everything

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Episode 23 – Video Game Preservation and Accessibility

Shinesparkers Metroid Podcast
Shinesparkers Metroid Podcast
Episode 23 - Video Game Preservation and Accessibility
/

Our twenty-third episode brings two important topics to the discussion table: video game preservation, and video game accessibility, which impact Metroid fans, and video game fans generally. The team talks about how this impacts the Metroid series, and what can be done to change it. We know this is a topic that our community has been quite vocal about, and we hope that others are as keen to see changes happen as we are.

Podcast is hosted by Amanda, with team members Roy and Darren.

00:00 – Congratulations to MercurySteam for their Metroid Dread awards
00:32 – Topic: Video game preservation
12:23 – Topic: Video game accessibility
22:22 – Mailbag: What video game genres could Metroid explore in the future?
27:08 – Bloopers

Special thanks to Stephan Wells for his guidance with editing this podcast.

29 Apr 2022
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Feature: The Space Pirates

April 29, 2022

A brand new feature is now available on our website, this time focusing on the Space Pirate civilisation, seen in the Metroid Prime series. These pirates have been a challenging and deadly foe for the Galactic Federation, and Samus Aran has encountered them on a number of adventures. This feature goes into their rich history, and focuses on their physiology, culture, technology, weaponry and war, and speculates their future. It’s another addition from our team member Quadraxis, which we hope you will consider reading!

Click here to check out the feature

08 Apr 2022
Metroid Dread Permalink

Metroid Dread’s Boss Rush mode now available

April 8, 2022

Late tonight, Nintendo released the second free update for Metroid Dread that was announced back in February during the Nintendo Direct. This update adds the anticipated Boss Rush mode, in which you fight all the bosses one by one, with your damage carrying over to the next fight. Your missiles get restored after each fight, however. You unlock Boss Rush by completing the game once.

That’s not all, however – there’s a Practice Mode so you can prepare yourself and leaderboards to track your completion times. If you complete Boss Rush, you will unlock Survival Rush, which is a time-sensitive version of Boss Rush. Defeating bosses adds time to your clock, as does defeating them without taking damage. Your energy and missiles do not refill after each boss. Finally, there’s Dread Rush, which is unlocked by beating Dread Mode. You must defeat 12 bosses back to back without getting hit once, otherwise it’s Game Over.

This update is available now. Best of luck to those of you attempting any of these modes!

Source: Nintendo

20 Mar 2022
Metroid Dread Permalink

Metroid Dread becomes third biggest Metroid game in the United Kingdom

March 20, 2022

According to GamesIndustry’s Christopher Dring, Metroid Dread has now had the third biggest launch of a Metroid title in the history of the United Kingdom, second only to Metroid Prime 1 and 3. It has already become the best selling 2D Metroid game in the UK. This is according to sales figures from GfK. While they only accounts for physical sales and does not include digital, it’s a strong indicator that the game will soon become the best selling Metroid game overall, if it hasn’t already.

Source: Christopher Dring