I never owned an SNES so I never had a chance to play the really old games. I have heard they were really tremendously atmospheric and gamebreaking for their time, but it is just hard for me to imagine that they could be as all-encompassing as Metroid Prime 1 or 2, which essentially redefined the first-person shooter format for 3-d gaming(along with Halo 1: CE, of course). I have not actually played those SNES games, however, and so I cannot say definitively they are not as good, it is just hard for me to imagine any 2-d game in the genre being better than Prime 1 or Prime 2(not that Prime 3 is bad, far from it, just the Gamecube controls were amazing for the Prime series, and I doubt anything like that setup will come around for some time).

Well... I started out playing the SNES games, and I honestly did not enjoy the new wii and ngc games...first person shooter meh..! it's completely lost all of the Metroid atmosphere. =/ The music and monsters were really cool. ^^ If you've got a Wii you can easily download the old classic games, which is what I did!

Then again, you always prefer whatever you saw or played first.. That's your first experience after all and what you're going to be comparing everything to after that.

echoes was aawesome, espeicelly in the trilogy version so it wasn't so glitched and the controls were smooth. That game had the most epic boss battles by far. Just stick a little rock and roll (i personally liked AC/DC, hells bells for all my boss battles) and fight emporer ing.
can't wait for other M though, we get to fight mother brain, and hopefully kraid again in 3-d