Metroid Prime 3

2007-11-18

In October, I picked up Halo 3, the Orange Box, and Metroid Prime 3. Because it took me a day to get my xbox live stuff sorted out before I could use my new 360 I started Metroid Prime 3 first.

I'm was pretty disappointed. You'll note that I LOVED Metroid Prime 1 and 2

On the one hand the Wii controls are very interesting. The Wiimote is effectively Samus's hand and you use it to press buttons and pull and twist knobs etc. That part works great! Some other kind of interesting things, you shoot out the grappling hook by "casting" the nunchuck. Think of doing a casting motion like casting a fishing rod. So far I haven't grappled to swing. Instead I've had to grapple to rip doors off their hinges so after you grapple you pull back on the nunchuck to rip the door off. Those parts feel pretty good.

The ability to instantly aim like Virtual Cop seems better than analog stick or PC mouse I think.

There is one lame thing in the control scheme and I'm sure Retro had a hard time deciding what the best way is. Basically the Wiimote is aim, the nunchuck is move. The game is designed for you to hold the Wiimote in your left hand because when you are controlling Samus's hand her left hand comes up.

But....., every other dual analog game in existance the left thumb is move, the right thumb is aim. So, if you want to play the way you're used to from Halo or any other console FPS or action game then you need to put the Wiimote in your right hand and the nunchuck in your left. Once I did this it got much easier to play since that's how I've played action games since the first DualShock controller. But, now of course it looks wrong that my right hand is controlling Samus's left hand.

Okay, that's the good parts.

The bad: Like I expected, the graphics just don't work anymore. 2 years ago these would have been close to state of the art console graphics but now with Gears of War, Bioshock, and pretty much every other 360 game the Metroid 3 graphics basically look like shit. I think this is a problem for Wii. For a game like Mario or games based around Mii or even Okami there are no problems but for a realistic looking game it's hard to look at the screen now that it's last gen. This happened in the last cross over. The moment PS2 came out it only took a few days before it was hard to look at PS1 games that only a few days early seemed okay.

The REALLY bad: I'm only 3 bosses in but in Metroid Prime 3 and unlike any other Metroid, there is now lots of other characters and spoken dialog. On the first few levels there are soldiers all over the place. Most have nothing interesting to say but some have long dialog sequences. Given that all Metroids to this point have had this errie Samus is all alone on a strange and creepy planet vibe, the inclusion of all these other characters makes it feel like it's not Metroid.

On top of that, the voice acting is complete shit. What is it with Nintendo and shitty voice acting? As just one example among many, at one point there are 45 seconds left until some meteor is supposed to crash into the planet and destroy everything. One of the female characters says something like "We've got to hurry before the planet is destroyed" except she says it like someone walked up to a random person at starbucks and held up a dialog card and said "read this". There's no tension, no emotion, just matter of fact reading of dialog.

And, even worse, the game starts off with, I guess you'd say, 4 superheros. Samus and 3 others. The 3 others are some female biomorph who can change shape, some hulking mech like character and one other who I can't even remember. These 3 characters are arguably the WORST character designs I have ever seen in gaming history. It is so clear that Samus was designed by another artist it's not even funny because she's the only one that doesn't look like ass. I don't mean in actual rendering, I mean in design. The other characters are just lame. They don't add to the Metroid universe, they take way from it, clutter it up with garbage.

I'll probably try playing a little more but I then again maybe not. With so many other interesting games out why play this?

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