Metroid: Zero Mission is a video game with its heart in the past. That is not unusual on the Game Boy. The Game Boy is an inexpensive little machine without anywhere near as much computing power as the big things you plug into your TV set. Accordingly, its catalogue is full of blippy and beepy titles that look like they would have been right at home ten years ago on the Super Nintendo.

The other reason its catalog looks like that is because the Super Nintendo years were very good to Nintendo the company. There were many, many Super Nintendo titles, and a great number of those delighted audiences and sold briskly, which encouraged Nintendo to produce more of the same, which meant ever-more-delighted audiences and ever-brisker sales. It was a virtuous circle. For a while everyone was happy. Then Sony put out the PlayStation and spent the next eight years eating Nintendo's lunch.

In response, Nintendo did the only logical thing. It circled its wagons, put out some more Super Nintendo games and hoped for more audience delight and more sales. The key difference was that it was now putting out said Super Nintendo games on the Game Boy Advance, a handheld device that coincidentally did a very good job of running the Super Nintendo back catalogue.

All this is a long and windy way of saying that:

• Metroid: Zero Mission feels very much like Metroids past, but also that;
• the game is still jolly good fun and you should still go to a game store and pay cash money for it.

It is a spacey sci-fi sort of thing full of gooey aliens and outlandish technology. It is larded with spooky moments where creatures rumble out of the ground and threaten to eat you. It starts you with a big ray gun and promptly offers you a bigger one. It feels a lot like the best moments in Aliens, when Sigourney Weaver and the Space Marines armed themselves to the teeth and went from corridor to corridor blasting the hell out of anything that moved.

The game stars a space bounty hunter named Samus Aran. She is tougher than Sigourney Weaver and has a much bigger gun. She also wears an astonishing suit of armour, which variously protects her from alien attacks, gives her a jump like a kangaroo's, and allows her to roll up into a little ball so she can fit through half-height doorways. When her suit is all powered up she is a bit like the Terminator, only orange. She will kick your ass.

As the action begins, Samus has just arrived on the planet Zebes. Zebes is a wet and drippy sort of place, with rocky caverns and swampy pools that appear to be full of acid. It crawls with large and small monsters. Its buildings are getting kind of run-down and all the people have gone. This is apparently the work of evil space pirates. There is a job to do.

So we move Samus through the caverns and hallways of Zebes, and blicky things fall from the ceiling and rise up out of the ground, trying to bump into her. If they succeed, her armour blinks to indicate that it is running out of power and will soon fall off. Sometimes the blicky things spit poison at Samus or try to knock her off the ledge she is standing on. She deals with all these threats the same way: she shoots the blicky things dead.

As Samus explores the maze of tunnels she occasionally runs into items she can plug into her suit. She gains the ability to shoot long distances, and the aforementioned rolling-into-a-ball trick, and countless others, all by picking up stuff someone has left on the floor. This will make you wonder why she didn't bother powering up her armour before she went marching into harm's way, but you will not find a satisfying answer so it is probably best not to ask at all.

The game is a loose remake of the very first Metroid, which appeared way back in 1986 on the original Nintendo home system. At the end of that one, we learned for the first time that Samus was a woman. Here the cat is out of the bag from the beginning. Somewhere, a fanboy is deeply disappointed about that.