Learning the map in Metroid is kind of like learning your way around in Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption. The environment might appear daunting at first, but eventually you get the hang of it. At least I did; I never used a map for Metroid. (I used one for Zelda, though. And I recently played through Maze of Galious and occasionally glimpsed at a map for that one.)

I think Metroid is somewhat underrated now. I often see people trashing it on the way to praising Super Metroid or Zero Mission, but I think it holds up very well and is the best at evoking that feeling of solitude. I do quite like Super Metroid, though. Zero Mission was okay but it didn't grab me like the original.

People tend to forget the technological and time gap between Nes/SNes and Metroid/SuperMetroid.
Super Metroid is the best thing I ever played (retrospectively).

It came with a very basic map (in the manual). It did not show any details, just roughly where the different areas were in relation to each other.

Remember this? We all went through it.

BTW Spoiler Alert.

I wouldn't recommend using a map that reveals all the secret items, finding them is part of the appeal. But yeah, the lack of an auto-map is really annoying. That, starting with 30 HP every time and having to stand in front of a pipe grinding for health orbs all day is quit stupid.

Super Metroid gets a lot of praise, but I found it quite disappointing to be honest. It took me 6 hours to beat on my first attempt and with no help at all. The combat is way too easy because health is more prominent and your move set is larger while the enemies are still limited to their NES movesets. The labyrinthine level disgn has been replaced with the "Metroidvania formula" where the game is basically linear, but the path crosses itself a few times to give an illusion of non-linearity. There is always an invisible hand guiding you, which some people believe is a work of genius (it isn't).

It's not a bad game by any means, in fact it's a really good one, but it dropped what made Metroid special. To be fair though, it did fixe the aforementioned BS. Zero Mission to me feels like a stripped-down version of Super metroid, it has the same issues, but less content. If you like Super Metroid you might want to give Metroid Prime a try, it's like a 3D remake of Super Metroid (of course not story-wise).

Starting with 30 HP and empty containers is BS; there is no real challenge in filling up your health it's just a tedious waste of time to stand in front of a pipe and keep shooting at bugs. That's on of the thing I'm glad are gone.

However, not being able to shoot in all directions is a more interesting topic. It's basically about balance: in the original Metroid not being able to shoot downwards, diagonally or duck made you think very carefully about your positioning. Bombs were an essential tool for dispatching enemies and with swooping enemies you had to carefully time your jumps and positioning in general. At first you might just run and shoot, but after a while you would start being more resourceful, jumping above enemies, laying bombs in advance and so on.

Having a more flexible moveset like in Super Metroid is not a bad thing in itself, but the game has to be balanced around it. That was not the case though, enemies still had similar movement pattern to the NES, which made Samus overpowered. Case in point, how many times di you use the bombs as an actual weapon in Super Metroid? I never used them, unless I was practically forced to (like being in morph ball mode in a tunnel). How many times did you have to stop and think before you shoot? Not that many times. Of course if the enemies had been properly updated, then a better moveset would have been a welcome addition.

The difference between starting with 30 HP and having a limited moveset is that the former is just tedium for no added challenge while the latter does actually provide more challenge. The difference between the two is easy to spot: ask yourself whether what you are doing is actually making you more or less excited. If it is making you less excited it means you are just going through the motions, doing something that shouldn't be in the game in the first place, like standing in front of the same pipe killing the same bugs over and over again. After a while it gets just boring and the only reason you get hit is because you are getting tired from it.

THAT was the standard difficulty for games around that time :D

That topic about the flexiable moveset can also apply to Super Castlevania 4 where it had that and the enemies moveset where the same and made certain items useless. (even though the game is still hard)

I never managed to beat most of the NES games I owned, except for i. e. the Mario titles, but I was a wee young one back then. Funny thing is, now that I'm older I'm more of a "casual" gamer, and yet I manage to successfully ( more or less ) play through the Souls series. So I'd say, despite Dark Souls and co. being so heavily advertised as some of the hardest games in recent years, they're still not nearly as hard as the old console classics. :P

As for the perseverance: when you're a kid with maybe half a dozen games to play on your console, it's easy to keep coming back to them, if only out of lack of alternatives. But nowadays, especially with sites like GOG, gamers have access to so many cheap games, it can be hard to stick with a game if it doesn't fully captivate you within the first few hours.

NES games without quicksaving are just a pita.
Emulation finally gives you the opportunity to finish those games without repeating whole levels/games because of one single point in the game and without you being forced to bite into the carpet so that you don't develop spontanious desires like killing someone with a spoon.

Very true.

Watching Game Center CX inspires me when I'm struggling with an NES-era game. I figure if a mediocre player like Arino can persevere over games like that, I should be able to make it, too, even if I'm not going to sit down and try to beat the thing in a single 12 hour marathon.

This is why they made Zero Mission. But in my opinion, I'll take Super. Or the Prime games, but Sakamoto said those aren't canon.