Long-living VG Oddities

 Did you ever ask yourself what the Space Pirates in the Metroid series really are?

I mean, they're an alien race appearing as outlaws and they're called Space Pirates, that's for sure, but what on earth makes them pirates? They don't seem to ambush civilists just for fun or mere random profit, since the Phazon came up they seem to seek galaxy domination, and they don't seem to gather in dark taverns to boast about unlikely adventures, spooky tales and pickup stories and most of all in order to drink GROG! GROG! GROG!. Instead those pesky wannabe-pirates seem to search for tactical advantages against the Galactical Federation, for example when they attacked Norion, Bryyo and Elysia at the beginning of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption or when they attacked Samus' homeworld in the online comic - almost like a military organization of their own. They even have a similar class hierarchy. So they're more soldier than pirate. I mean, okay, back in the days, on a ship there was a captain who was the highest rank on the ship and his crew probably was in some sort of order, too - but there always have been several different pirate groups and not a giant union of pirates. Unless you take the film Pirates Of The Caribbean 3: At World's End into consideration - which you clearly shouldn't ;^p [...]
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These soldier-pirates have been called like that since the SNES™-version, if not even since the very first game for the NES™. I mean, I can understand that. For the videogame developers of the eighties and nineties it was okay to take Space Pirates as foes, it was as okay as it was to make barrels and gorillas your foes or let the player walk on clouds. The videogamers didn't seem to care much who they fought against. It was still a primitive form of entertainment, these "videogames", they didn't have to have a great story. Just look at the Angry Video Game Nerd episodes to see what I mean. But the demands of us videogamers has changed and if you would bring out a videogame today where you're a space hunter and you'd have to fight space pirates, it better did not cost much money ... The same should approve for Metroid IMHO, but as a matter of course a change of conceptual things to invite some logic into this big name franchise is most certainly not going to happen.

What could be interesting to know is what they were called in the original, the japanese version - was it just a stupid translation? That wouldn't have been very unusual. But even as a translation error I don't think the japanese would have presented a better name for them.

Anyway, if you think further then you'll probably notice that Samus often encounters laboratories or research facilities where the Space Pirates execute their Metroid experiments, so the conclusion of this observation would be to think of them as scientists. But as you all know if Samus ever entered their territory they turned into firing and slashing annoyances to get rid of, every one of them. No behaviour that would be typical for scientists like hiding cowardly behind a counter until all the shattering is over or so. Of course, the low processing power of the system is probably the reason for that, just like the attitude of keeping things "simple": like creating a world where there's an alien race that is purely evil, without exception. Where there's a possibility of distinguishing between good and evil in the first place!

But that's just my low-value-view of things ...
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