Hangout Review
Metroid 3: Super Metroid
Conrad Sulzer Regional Library, Chicago, IL
January 20, 2001
I had a deeply affecting dream as a boy of thirteen. In this dream Madonna was my mom. This was the "Like a Prayer" Madonna, and she was a really great mother. She didn't act trashy when I was around. She left her blonde ambition on the back burner, and gave me warm, reassuring gazes. We also hugged a lot and she took me on long walks. Maternal and protective, but also a sexually charged force. I went through a brief period of depression after that dream. Mom's videos were always on the tube, and now they made me feel horny and lonesome. The emptiness inside me was two-fold. I had an oedipal crisis on my hands. My hungry, young pecker heartily sought entrance into Madonna's beckoning vagina, but this dream had also etched her as a sublime mother-figure in my psyche. It seemed I wanted inside her vagina and her womb. I've never forgotten the strange, hollow feeling I carried with me after that dream.
That hollow feeling has returned. I just spent eleven hours and thirty-six minutes of my life inside-scrolling pursuit of the Metroid larva. I found it. It was a big jellyfish that siphoned most of my life-force the first time I crossed its path. Then about twenty minutes later, it saved me from a tantrum-prone, drooling brain-creature. That dastardly menace actually killed the Metroid while it was regenerating my powers. It was an emotional exchange. My Samus started flashing and her blaster began firing huge blue beams. A hugely thrilling moment, but too soon, it passed. The beast was vanquished and the strange planet I'd been calling home was about to explode. I raced back to my ship and made it out of the atmosphere in the nick of time. The game is over now. Samus and I no longer have contact. Although I can imagine her supple flesh growing moist underneath her magnificent robotic exoskeleton, as she sprints across alien landscapes, leaping high into the air and dissolving predatory beasties with her big gun. The thought of the clammy hands of countless other gamers, guiding her movements without the poetry and grace that I afforded her deepens my agony. Cruel, stupid world. I miss Samus.
I miss my mommy.
