This is a snazzy little number I picked up in Asda for about £15, so I’m quite pleased with that. The Metroid Prime series is a semi-spinoff of the popular Metroid series, developed by retro studios yada yada yada. It’s the thing with Samus that’s from a first person perspective.
The main Selling point of this game is A: you’re getting three games for the price of one on one disc and B: New Play controls for the first two Metroid games, and since decent Gamecube games became like gold dust when the Wii came out, that’s something worth considering. So let’s talk about the new features.
I can’t comment as to whether the gameplay has changed much between the consoles, but it does feel very natural and VERY immersive. Not being one for FPS games, I went in with a bit of scepticism, especially having played Hunters on the DS, but the game still feels like a Metroid game. And note that I use “game” in the singular there. I only completed the original Metroid Prime. This is mainly why this review has been on the back burner for about three months now. However, I have played enough to form an opinion, and one day I might go in-depth for each game, but for now we’ll just look at the complete package. But trust me: I have a good reason for not playing the second and third instalments nearly so much. Metroid Prime is brilliant. Echoes and Corruption less so. I will Revisit this in a bit though.
One of the major complaints of the sub-series was the loading times. The original corruption could take up to a minute to open one door, and the PAL versions of the first two had extra time added on to doors opening to prevent the game possibly crashing, as it would in the NTSC version from time to time. Now, some of you may be wondering how you can fit three games, one of which has already filled the majority of a Wii Disc, on a single Wii Disc. It’s fairly simple actually. They’ve stuck them on two Wii Discs. The only other game that’s used a Dual Layer Wii Disc is Brawl, and I think you might remember some pretty noticeable loading in that. Thankfully, Metroid Prime and Echoes have virtually no load times (except when first booting up, but those are minor). As for Corruption...well that’s largely down to a poor design choice. The first two games tended to have long, narrow corridors between complex rooms. Like Metroid and Symphony of the Night would occasionally have (both games released on early disc based systems). This Allows for a little bit of the loading to be done in advance, as the character can only travel so fast, and felt fairly natural. Corruption never had those corridors, so each room needs to be loaded in one big dump. I think you can see where I’m going with this. The load times are worse. And I’m not talking about once or twice when I went into huge arenas teeming with character and object models with complex animation. Every. Fucking. Door. I feel like I’m not so much busting down the door with my arm cannon as sending in a reservation by carrier pigeon. I’d like to point out that early on in Corruption, you have five minutes to prevent a meteor crashing into a planet. This is how I know that one ENTIRE MINUTE was spent waiting for ONE door to open.
As for Echoes, well it does show promise, but the light and dark mechanics just feel gimmicky, so that’s why I haven’t played through that. But I’d definitely recommend the Trilogy. It’s kinda hard to find though, since it was an actual limited edition. You can pick up Corruption pretty easily for about £7, but the Trilogy will cost upwards of £40 on Amazon. I know that’s kinda normal for a game, but I rarely pay more than £30 so, it’s steep to me.
So yeah. Gosh, it’s been a while since I did a proper review. Did you like the Haikus? Sorry I couldn’t be on the podcast, but if I grudge paying £30 for a game, you can only imagine how I feel about a £20 ticket to sit on a train for 5 hours round trip.
Birth by Sleeps quite good by the way. Wanted to review that for a while, but it’d be a repeat of the Grandia II review. Not that the twist wasn’t really obvious from the Final Mix trailer.
I like Fire Emblem too, but that’s beside the point.
So what’s new with you?
How are the kids?
Please speak to me Jocasta. I know we’ve had our troubles, what with my mercury addiction and your affair with Derek, but we had some good times.
Remember the good times?
If I keep doing these reviews...
...will you love me?
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