Metroid

The Good
The music is good. The open world design works well for those who like that sort of thing, for better or worse. Beating the game as quick as possible to see Samus unmasked and even in a bikini is a genius way to incentivize multiple playthroughs. The Mother Brain boss fight and escape sequence is very thrilling and was repeated in future games.

The Bad
Very difficult. It's too easy to die because enemies will kill you with their unpredictable moves as you try to traverse though the game. You start with 30 units of energy and it takes forever to fill up your health and missiles. When you continue after dying, you will still have only 30 units of energy regardless of how many energy tanks you've collected.

Unlike in The Legend of Zelda, there's no battery backup to save your progress, only using passwords which is tedious. It's especially bad when the Famicom Disk System version in Japan allowed you to save your progress in the floppy disk. It's too easy to get lost in the game because there's no map and everything looks the same and again unlike The Legend of Zelda, the game wasn't bundled with a map. You have to have the right Nintendo Power magazine to guide you with the included maps (or, you know, look one up online if you don't have it).

You can't have both the wave beam and the ice beam so if you have the wave beam and you encountered the Metroids, you're forced to find the ice beam in order to continue. Controls are a little slippery with making it easy to accidentally getting hit by an enemy or missing a platform which ends up you falling down lower or falling into hazardous lava.

The Bottom Line
I highly recommend you play Metroid: Zero Mission if you don't like dated design choices of the 80s.