I played the recent fan made snes port. Other than a map, being able to keep my beams (made sure not to stack them), and less slowdown than the NES version, I played this legit.

This games weird punishing design help make the growth you have throughout the game feel extremely good. Wandering around forever and finding the long beam for the first time is one of my fondest memories with this game. Despite it setting the groundwork for the entire series, it still feels very unique from its contemporaries in a few ways. It has a very loose sense of progression compared to the others. It feels like just knowing where things are and what order to get them can get you so far and make the game way less difficult. It's stressful, creepy, but also very charming in its limitations.

I don't think I'll go back to this though. I find a lot of it frustrating. There are a lot of hallways that just go on forever. The act of shooting stuff and jumping around has been done better in future titles. The bosses are very silly and I'm not really sure why they are there to begin with. It has baffling design choices that im sure youve all heard about by now. I guess my biggest problem with the game is that I'd rather play every other 2D entry in the series. Metroid 2 has a lot of the stuff I value from this game but on a more intimate and realized scale. I also appreciate Zero Mission more now, because the way it transforms metroid 1 into a fast, adventurous, comic booky feeling game is really cool to me. This is absolutely worth playing though, especially if you are a fan.