Exploration / Progression

[Jarno]

well as for supoer metroid, it does give quite a good indication of where secrets are, like cthomlan mentioned above, but also there are sometimes rooms that lead to nowhere, no other doors, and then you know something has to be here, they wont make the room for nothing

but the xray defently had its uses to see how to get past certain blockages, is it shine spark, or powerbomb or super missle or just normal bombs, the xray helped with that a low

as for metroid prime 1, i love it i think its one of the few 2D platformer games that actualy did well in 3D, the Scan visor is indeed a bit annoying you spend scanning every room after you clear it. and those names like radion en denzium dont tell you much so you indeed had to look tru your log book. but still i liked the game a lot

a thing i realy loved about the scan vizor was that you could get information about lore, find out useless information about lifeforms and plants, even if it wasnt combat info it greatly increased the feeling of beeying there on an unknown planet far away

[PolyUV]

the only thing i hated about super metroid is the scan/x-ray you need to use everywhere to find secrets. it makes the game so slow you want to make sure you dont forget a secret passage but you end up scanning to whole game. that i hate a lot

What about in Castlevania? You can go through it and just attack every flat wall in sight, and I don't mind that. Although, I suppose the later 'Sight' perks from Eye monsters get around that, where they automatically reveal breakable walls on screen, without slowing you down. So, an improvement on the X-Ray?

I can't tell you how many times in Aria of Sorrow I would farm that Peeping Eye in the corridor where the first save room was. I did like the mechanic, even if it was a little too obvious. There were nice secrets you couldn't find by bashing walls, like in SotN with the elevator on the Outer Wall, or, hell, the mechanic to get to the inverted castle. An ability akin to the Search Eye function would be nice, but a little more subtle.

[Abster]

Order of Ecclesia had a pirate hat which indicated where hidden treasure chests were at by sounding a tone that got louder the closer you were to it.

[Jistuce]

a thing i realy loved about the scan vizor was that you could get information about lore, find out useless information about lifeforms and plants, even if it wasnt combat info it greatly increased the feeling of beeying there on an unknown planet far away

I really enjoyed the pirate computer scans especially. They put a bit of a face to the enemy. The pirates are definitely the scum of the universe we thought they were, but they're still PEOPLE and not just roving automated targets.

Also, it's one thing to know Samus is an interstellar badass, it's another to see her prey's thoughts on the subject. Especially since their thoughts are generally some variant on "Oh crap, the Hunter is here! Run!" (And then in Prime 2, the theme is "What the heck, the Hunter is twins now? I HATE MY LIFE!")
Heck, even just the nickname. Despite Samus being but one of many bounty hunters, she's known to the pirates as "the Hunter", capitalized. It emphasizes that she's just BETTER than the rest of them, and so MUCH better that she's in a league of her own. It fits well with the original backstory that Samus was the person you called when everyone else told you the job was impossible.