Well, I'm very interested in bringing games into audio, but the problem with metroid is that I've never played. I've had friends who have gone through metroid cycles, but I never played myself. I am interested in the project, I just need to do some research to get it right.

well I don't think Brian will be too surprised when i say I deffinately agree, audio Metroid would be awsome, and I'd be willing to help in any way i can with voice acting or whatever. when I've ffinished my Phd I might even try learning programming myself and have a crack at making such a game, but that will be a couple of years off unfortunately.

the other problem with producing audio Metroid, apart from all the general issues with the lack of devs and resources is it's viewpoint. Unless it was converted to an fps style game ala Metroid Prime, you'd need to do some quite radical things in an audio interface to fully represent the environment, with ledges and enemies above and below the character, as well as side to side.

I'm fairly certain this would be possible in audio (I've got a very clear notion of how to do it myself), but I'm not certain A: how easy it would be to program and B: to what extent people would take to the notion, sinse it would involve a bit of a learning process and some new ideas which hadn't come up before in an audio game.

with what you say about Rail racer Brian, I'm  mildly scheptical on the last point, though perhaps the shock value could be reduced by releasing some simple games using a similar perspective, ----- eg an audio version of the original donkey Kong or castlevania.

While I love what's been done in audio 3D with the likes of Shades of doom and Sarah, imho audio 2D games are lagging well behind.

Oh btw, as to the metroid story, Samus was born on the human Colony K-2L which was attacked and destroyed by the space pirates, with ridly, one of the space pirate generals who takes the form of a dragon personally killing samus' mother. she was then rescued from the wreckage by the choso, who bought her up on the planet of Zeebs, where she had to undergo several tests in order to earn the weapons they'd made for her such as the power sute. this was why she was chosen by the galactic councel to carry out the mission on planet Zeebs of stopping the space pirates from using beta rays to breed the Metroids to use as biological weapons.

After destroying mother brain on Zeebs, samus escaped the lower caverns of the planet, but as she took off Ridly landed in a star cruser and shot her down, seriously damaging her power sute, so she was forced to sneak into the space pirate's ship and eventually find a choso engraving which restored her sute, gave her some new weapons, and let her blow up the robotic version of ridly the pirates were working on before stealing a pirate fighter and leaving Zeebs behind. All this happened in the game Metroid Zero mission, which was an enhanced retelling of Samus' first adventure on Zeebs.

the metroid Prime games take place betwene Metroid 1 (or metroid zero mission if you prefer), and metroid 2, where Samus goes to investigate pirate actvities on different planets, and are basically concerned with a mutigenic substance called Phazon. As Brian Said, in Metroid 2 Samus goes back to sr388 to destroy all metroids on the planet after an expedition from the Galactic marines failed, then in Super metroid she takes the last living Metroid lava to a research base to be studdied by the galactic federation, but ridly turns up and steals it, so she has to go back to Zeebs and destroy the pirates once again (completely exploding the planet in the process).

In metroid fusion though, it's found out that destroying the metroids wasn't such a good idea, sinse it let another life form of sr388, the X parasite, takeover the echo system and attack a galactic research base, Samus, also now infused with Metroid Dna, then  has to hunt down all the X parasites on the research station, as well as finding out the disturbing truth that the federation are also breeding metroids, and, ----- and batling an evil clone of herself created from the X parasites as well.

In the general the plot is cool! sort of like aliens meets starwars!

I'd just like to point out that an audio version of metroid would be fun but extremely complicated to program and learn.  You'd have to have a lot of key commands and the programming would take quite some time.  I looked up metroid myself and saw that the development time was about 2 years for just one of them for the sighted.

Well, the story sounds great! My only close to metroid experience is in super smash bros.
Since I'm not familiar with everything in metroid, I'm not sure how dificult it could be, but it's sounding might be a good challenge which I like(when I have time). I'd definitely need to wikipedia it and most importantly, talk to someone who's played it before. The palnning itself could take some time.
Brian, if you have written down any of your brainstorming in a document, I'd like to read it.

I think it'd be possible to remake the old side scrolling metroid easier than one of the three dimentional ones simply because the game play in a side scrolling game is much simpler.  The problem with a game like metroid is the number of different objects. If someone could figure out a way to represent switches, elevators, and walls you can blast through then that's one of the biggest problems solved.  I myself think that undertaking a project for an audio version of metroid would be hard but worth while.

I believe the site your thinking of there brian is the Metroid data base: http://www.classicgaming.com/mdb/ I believe they went down for a while but when I last checked they were deffinately up and running.

but if anyone does want to see Metroid documentation I've got text files of the hole lot, manuals, game scripts, and descriptions of all the enemy creatures, pluss all the logue book info for the prime games.

I'm afraid I haven't got the source code for original Metroid, but I believe the mdb stil has that available if anyone wants to see it.

I like the boss idea Brian, it rather reminds me of the Acid worm battle in Metroid Zero mission, or the battle with the plant statue in fusion where you had to use power bombs to clear out all the plant's floating spaws so as to get a clear shot at it's core.

I really don't think the items in metroid would be an issue to represent in audio, you could even borrow the Metroid Prime system and have an item scanner that would give you descriptions of each item or creature you came across (perhaps spoken by sapi).

The biggest difficulty as I said, I believe would be representing the vertical ledges in audio, but I'm fairly certain this would be possible as Brian said, by using pitch indicators to show the hight of ledges, with lower pitches used for ledges undernieth the player. Combine this with a pit sound everytime the player reaches the edge of a ledge (perhaps a wind sound effect), and maybe a footstep echo to indicate when the player is approaching a wall (though imho this might not be necessary), and you have all the navigational aides needed! for extra security you could also have a key to speak the players current coordinates within a chamber, so that if he/she accidently missed a jump or was knocked down by an enemy, the player wouldn't be too lost (though being a bit lost was always part of the fun of metroid).

You could even do quite clever things, such as having an even higher pitched sound effect for ledges above the player which he/she could only reach after collecting the high jump boots item.

As to those bombable blocks, well personally I don't see that they'd be too much of a problem, you could simply include a sound effect when they exploded to show the player that they'd found something (even in the graphical games, most often the blocks weren't obvious and you'd have to bomb lots of random walls to try and find them).

As I said earlier, the only thing that stops me from doing it myself is a lack of programming knowledge. However I could definitely help with the story part. We're talking about a game similar in style here, not a remake of Metroid. That would certainly be cool but I think we an get away with using the gameplay style, just with a different story and different names for the items.
  The story I came up with was, for me at least quite an interesting one and worth expanding on. The basic idea is that you took on the role of a mysterious warrior named Elana Chang, better known as Phoenix. You've been commissioned by the Galactic Alliance to investigate a mysterious energy signature from a strange planet. You would explore the world, collecting powerups for your suit that would give you new abilities, in turn allowing you access to previously unreachable locations. Someof these would of course be guarded by more powerful enemies that would need to be defeated in order to gain the items. Then of course we'd need someone to program everything, plus someone to handle the music and sound effects. In a game like this, good audio is vital, for atmosphere as well as the gameplay.

On the subject of complexity of audio games, I was actually expecting Rail Racer to be more complicated with power-ups like you had in Mario kart.  As it is right now, I still really enjoy it since it's more complex than any other racing game out there with some very fun and tricky obstacles.  When I have the kind of money to buy it I plan to, but I just can't do that right now what with computer games not exactly being number one on my priorities list.

And so, just so you know that I'm not off topic, I would be happy to see a complicated game like Metroid.  I'm no sort of programmer, but I'd be willing to be a beta tester.

sk8kid1,
    I'm not sure if justbasic could uundertake a project like this. It's good for what it's good for, but a project like this would require directx.  I'd reccomend c#, or since you already know basic, visual basic for an audio version of metroid.

Actually, vb.net is supposed to be able to do everything c# can.

Lyle, it's that time of the month(LOL, the server takes a break for a few days at the most every month or 2). It'll be back up soon.
Yeh brian, I overlooked the license issue. This'd definitely be comercial, and I think programming something like this might be enough with out legal issues. I'd probably have agreed sooner if I hadn't realized that. I also still haven't been able to read much about metroid, so I'm not sure about the possibilites of storylines of a game like it.
I'm really not in the mood to get into the whole programming language argument for the millionth time, but I won't. This project is in the future, so I'll have plenty of time to learn something new(maybe).