Greetings, Metroid fans! Santa CapCom is back today with a very special gift to our readers: Twinetroid, a text adventure game built in Twine. This game is a translation of the Japanese gamebook Metroid: Zeebesu shin’nyu shirei, which roughly translates as “Zebes Incursion Directive”. The book was published by Futabasha in 1987 as part of the Famicom Game Book Series. It was written by Nobuyuki Shioda and contains illustrations by Arisaka Sumi (Which are now included in the gallery! VGMStudios provided most of the scans).
The game consists of an impressive 95 rooms, and like Zero Mission, contains a special endgame section. In each room, you encounter an enemy, then search the room, and choose which direction to go next. I’ve included an auto map so you can tell your location (just note it will load slower on some platforms). The text has been kept loyal to the original, even in places that don’t match with canon, like Zebes being called an “asteroid”. About the only new material are descriptions for secret passages: in the original, you were given an incomplete chapter number and had to flip through the book until you found the missing chapter number – even the author admitted this was tedious, but he felt this was the best way of preserving the feel of exploration from the game. I tried a bunch of different tricks for secret passages here – have fun discovering them!
Work on Twinetroid started WAY back in 2010 when I found a text dump of the game on a Japanese Geocities page, which I then translated off and on for a few years before getting my own copy. Come October, I finally decided to port it over to Twine, an easy-to-use text adventure platform. The digital version takes all that book flipping and dice rolling and automates it into what should be a fun retro adventure.
I hope you enjoy it!
