Very solid improvement hack without affecting the core gameplay much in intrusive ways. I’m just a casual player who doesn’t speedrun games but I can appreciate some positive tweaks. Here’s some things I liked and didn’t like.

Pros:

• Auto charge. I find it really useful and non bothersome for the most part as it allows me to use something I barely used before because I didn’t want to continuously hold B the entire game. It also allows for drawing in items easier which is another cool feature. I absolutely loved it during the zero suit samus segments. Having it enabled for these parts is a must, definitely keep this feature. I never used to use the charge shot during these parts.

• Super Metroid item grab. This is much more quicker than waiting for the menu to popup to show me pointless information. The initial popup is enough.

• harder bosses. I got destroyed by Ridley on normal difficulty, but I enjoy the challenge. Kraid was also hitting me left and right, bouncing me around. Mecha ridley was damn annoying to defeat but I mastered it the second time. Im just glad they aren’t pushovers anymore.

• Starting off on crateria by the ship. This makes a lot of sense since it shows how samus arrived in brinstar. It’s a good choice I’d say, nothing I’m against.

Cons:

• Auto charge, again. I found some parts of the game very frustrating because of it. There was a moment I wanted to freeze an enemy and then jump on it. But I end up somersaulting into the enemy and killing it (Happened in the middle of Ridley). Another thing is it’s hard to freeze enemies without killing them with a full charged shot. I had to get myself to hold B to stop the charge altogether. So the auto charge does have its annoying moments.

• Super Metroid Controls. For the most part they work great, but holy hell it made the Metroids so much more difficult! Having to swap between ice beam and missiles is way more difficult and they latch onto me before I can manage to switch. It was a terrible experience. I’ll stick to the default controls.

• Faster room transitioning. As much as it speeds things up, it kinda takes away from the original feel of the game. The screen transition is iconic in this game. I understand that speedrunning is the main concern for hacks like these. The inclusion of an optional patch to restore it would be nice. Overall the more optional patches you include, the better. Just need a folder called optional patches and it won’t clutter up the main patches. Then everyone wins! This is a very minor con, but I still like the original transition better.

All the other changes are fine and don’t concern me, like the shinespark and physics changes. Im not a speedrunner nor do I go for 100% so they dont affect me. About the auto charge, I suggest making that into an optional patch. Really looking forward to where this project will go next in the future!