The Pulse Bombu is a creature in Metroid Prime comprised entirely of raw electricity.
Description[]
Like other Bombus, the Pulse Bombu resembles three yellow-green spheres attached to a cyan nucleus. It glows as it floats through the air. It periodically releases explosive segments from its body and lacks any intelligence other than an instinctive attraction to charged energy sources.[1]
Samus encounters Pulse Bombus in the Chozo Ruins and Phendrana Drifts. While they don’t actively attack, the explosive segments they shed pose a hazard. Additionally, they are attracted to sources of charged energy and will instinctively fly toward Samus if she uses her Charge Beam, harming her on contact. Their energy-based nature makes them immune to all weaponry except the electricity of the Wave Beam, but this also means that they will be instantly destroyed if they touch water.
In the Phazon Mines, Invisible Bombus are Pulse Bombus that can only be seen with the X-Ray Visor.
12 September 2017
23 August 2016
27 August 2007
Official data[]
Logbook entry[]
Pulse Bombu
Morphology: Pulse Bombu
Life-form of raw energy. Periodically releases explosive segments from its body.
Pulse Bombus are energy beings, invulnerable to most known weapons. Electrical energy can harm them, however. They lack any intelligence beyond an instinctive attraction to other charged energy sources. Pulse Bombus produce energy constantly. All excess energy is shed, regardless of who or what may be nearby.
Official website[]
Samus scans a Pulse Bombu.
"The Pulse Bombu floats through life, periodically releasing explosive segments from its body. It lacks any intelligence beyond an instinctive attraction to other charged energy sources.
The Pulse Bombu consists entirely of raw electricity. It appears to glow as it floats gracefully through the air."
Development notes[]
The internal filenames for the Pulse Bombus are Atomic or AtomicAlpha,[2] referring to the similar Atomic species from Super Metroid that Bombus highly resemble. It is likely that Bombus were originally Atomics before Nintendo requested that Retro Studios replace classic returning enemies with new original enemies.[3] In Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, the Harmony-Class Drone is identical in behavior and appearance to the Pulse Bombus, and it is likewise called "Atomic" in internal data.[4]
According to Zoid Kirsch, the static shown on Samus's visor when getting close to a Pulse Bombu is generated by displaying bits and bytes of the game's actual code.[5] This is due to the Nintendo GameCube only having 24MB of RAM, so this was thought of as a way to save memory for other textures.[6][7]
Gallery[]
References[]
- ^ a b Inter-Stellar Network — Pulse Bombu. Metroid.com. Retrieved on 2007-08-19. (dead link)
- ^ Metroid Prime - The Cutting Room Floor
- ^ "The entire first year’s worth of characters I modeled for the game were cut. At first, we were making all the enemies looking just like the old Metroid 2D enemies. Nintendo later decided that they wanted the enemies to have a new look, so we scrapped all of those creatures. These weren’t just models that were scrapped, but these were enemies that had a full set of animations and some even had AI programmed. I’m actually very glad Nintendo made that call because I think the newer designs that Jones and Keller came up with were a big improvement over the original 2D designs." https://shinesparkers.net/interviews/mike-sneath/
- ^ Metroid Prime 2: Echoes - The Cutting Room Floor
- ^ Zoid Kirsch (ZoidCTF). "When you see Samus’s visor affected by electrical “noise” in game, you’re actually seeing the bits and bytes of the Metroid Prime software code itself being rendered on the screen. Turns out machine code is sufficiently random to work great as a static noise texture!" 8 Nov 2022 10:04 a.m. Tweet. https://twitter.com/ZoidCTF/status/1590012343286894592
- ^ Zoid Kirsch (ZoidCTF). "In this clip as Samus approaches the Pulse Bombu, the screen fills with static to show interference with her visor. As we worked on this a big issue is the memory use of the noise texture. The Gamecube only has 24MB of RAM, so every texture has to be carefully considered." 8 Nov 2022 10:04a.m. Tweet. https://twitter.com/ZoidCTF/status/1590012338421518337
- ^ Zoid Kirsch (ZoidCTF). "If we used a low resolution texture (64x64) to save memory the “static” would be blurry and not crisp. One engineer on the team came up with a great idea: what if we just use the memory holding the Metroid Prime code itself! We quickly tried it out and it looked amazing." 8 Nov 2022 11:04a.m. Tweet. https://twitter.com/ZoidCTF/status/1590012341676302336