DP Challenge Part 8/100 – Metroid Prime Trilogy (Metroid Prime)

Game: Metroid Prime Trilogy (Metroid Prime)

Ranking: 5/100

Score: 92.27%

Well, this one’s a little tricky. The game ranked 5/100 is ‘Metroid Prime Trilogy’ which consists of three games; Metroid Prime, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. The latter was released as a separate game on the Wii and has its own entry on the top 100 Wii games. With this in mind, I’ll cover Metroid Prime 1 and 2 under this heading, and Metroid Prime 3 in its own.

Galaxy-renowned bounty hunter Samus Aran has to save the universe by collecting power-ups and shooting things. This time, she follows a distress beacon, which leads to nasty space pirates, old foes and a visit to her adoptive family’s home. By home I mean temple on top of a toxic chemical that sends everyone crazy. Let the high jinks begin!

Samus: ready to kick ass and take down names. Without the 'taking down names' part.

Intro

The manual is concise and gives all the relevant information – it has to be, given that it includes the premise and instructions for all three of the Metroid Prime series. The options are simple to navigate; you have to make a save file before you start, but everything is prompted on-screen. When you start up the game, there is very little in terms of a story introduction or cutscenes beyond a narration over a ship landing - the main reason for this is because you basically play the introduction. The whole first level gives you the premise and reason for ending up in the game situation, and is a far more interesting way of getting across both the premise and the controls to a new player.

Who's Samus? She's the main character, obviously, but she's described as a bounty hunter and Chosen One; two concepts that don't really sit well together. When the narration describes her as 'a light that burns brighter than all others', I needed to reach for the puke bag.

We don't need a horrible narration with star metaphors. 

A simple animation showing her listening to her ship radio as some report on her important achievements would have done the job.

Ridley. What a dick.

Getting Going

As previously mentioned, you essentially play the premise to the story, which is a combination of playable tutorial and cutscenes. It's a really great way of introducing the controls and the story in one go, plus it isn't so long that you become irritated by the fact you're playing a tutorial level. Another positive note is that, as far as tutorial levels go, it was actually challenging. By the time I go to the boss fight and escape-the-detonating-spaceship section, I no longer felt I was in a tutorial.

One tiny thing I thought smacked of being unfair was during the timed escape-the-detonating-spaceship section. Once you trigger the cutscene where Samus's suit is damaged, which clearly leads to the main game, there is a twenty second or so segment after this which comprises of you doing nothing as a lift takes you off the spaceship. If you don't have enough time left on the clock, you'll die during this segment.

If you're going to have a cheeky timed segment, at least make it something the player can control the outcome of - in this case, let me be able to speed up the lift somehow.

Hmm. That looks a bit risk-heavy. Have you completed the necessary Health and Safety assessment, Samus?

Fun

The game employs every technique in the book to make you feel genuinely part of the experience, from subtly changing the background music to reflect when you are approaching a threat through to forcing you into claustrophobic, dark tunnels. Sometimes you can hear enemies in the background for a while before they appear on-screen. There are timed elements in the levels as well, where an event such as an emergency shutdown means you are killed if you don't complete it in time. Oh, and you really are killed - your vision turns to white noise and your visor shuts down. There's a combination of shooting, platforming and a little bit of a puzzle element as well, which makes it more than an 'Operation Wolf' style game of just blowing away enemies every few screens. You can also scan and explore each area, too, which makes the world you inhabit feel a bit more real.

The action is quite slow-paced at times, and I can't decide if this is actually a bad thing. Of course, when you're walking around five different rooms and maybe only encounter a couple of enemies or a missile turret in total, it doesn't exactly get you pumped for action. On the other hand, when you're creeping around these dimly lit, atmospheric rooms hearing scraping noises but finding no threats, it puts you on edge. The experience is akin to waiting for the toaster to pop - you'll always jump when it goes off*.

I think it might be nice to see a little more action in some levels, but I wouldn't want to lose the sense of dread you get from not being able to anticipate a bunch of enemies rushing at you in every room you enter.

*That might just be me.

Visuals

The environments are dark and moody, but generally without being so dark that it becomes impossible to see obstacles. There are alien hordes that actually shoot you with mucus that covers your visor, making it impossible to see what's in front of you and forcing you to rely on the ever-present map. The environments you encounter are quite different to; one level you're on a spaceship, the next you're in a rainforest and later on you end up in some ancient ruins. That's all in the space of an hour's gameplay.

Sometimes it can get so dark and atmospheric that it's difficult to see what's going on around you - especially in scan mode. You get a cursor area that's the normal screen colour, but as it's all made to look like a wireframe computer program, the wireframe elements impeded your vision.

Could the scan mode be less dark, or perhaps use a different colour palette to distinguish it from combat mode while still navigable? I'd also have appreciated a pared-down wireframe system, as I personally found all the white lines and geometric shapes a little distracting.

It's snowing! It's just like Christmas, only with more murdering alien pirates.

Intelligence

Enemies will go for you or shoot you the moment you cross their path, turrets will shoot at you the moment you enter a room - all enemies want to kill you and do their utmost to try. Some will charge en masse, which is trickier to handle, and some are mere nuisances. Conversely, some fauna will leave you alone providing you don't shoot at it or approach too closely, which is an interesting feature.

There still isn’t a great deal of range of enemy attacks, however - they pretty much just come at you in various forms.

It could be interesting to have some enemies that run away from you, or hide and jump out at you. Given you spend a lot of time on an apparently uninhabited world, it would make sense to have enemies react in a defensive manner.

Immersion

The fact that I could - within reason - go to any part of the world I felt like was nice; you're restricted in terms of having certain doors that won't open without obtaining certain weapons or solving certain puzzles, but there are several routes and you can potter about until you find one that you can fully progress through. One thing I especially enjoyed about this game was the information you gleaned from using the scanning option. Not only did it perform important tasks such as booting up lifts and the like, but it gave you species information on flora and fauna in the area - it's a first person shooter/platformer, but with biological field notes! Coupled with the exploratory gameplay meant I could really feel as though I was exploring an unknown planet. Another thing the scan function did which I appreciated was drip-feed you information that helped to build up the story - I was genuinely sucked in and wanting to know what would happen next.

Sometimes it did feel a little samey, however - you go through a door, you sometimes shoot at things - and you start to wonder when you're going to achieve something. Usually that's when you end up going through some kind of boss fight, but it can drag a little bit.

There's a fine line between atmospheric exploration and just not getting to do a great deal. Most of the time it's pitched well, but on occasion I would like to see more incidences where I have to physically do something to progress beyond opening doors. Even something like shooting down a rotting tree to form a bridge would add a little variety.

What I should do when playing 'Metroid Prime'...

Cameras

The camera is first person, so causes you very few problems; you see what's in front of you, and if you turn, so does the view. There's really not a lot that can go wrong here.

Of course, seeing what's behind you is tricky - you have to whirl around to get a view of the whole area and in that time, you can get shot.

It would be useful if you could see a version of the radar regardless of what visor you have set. Often when you're exploring, you are encouraged to scan the environment a lot in order to figure out what to do. when you do this, there is no information on enemies. At least if there was some sort of warning version in the position of the radar you have with the combat visor, it would give you a heads-up on whether you want to change the visor to get more accurate information on the numbers of enemies nearby.

...What I actually do when playing 'Metroid Prime'.

Controls

The controls are simple to pick up; you turn with the Wii remote and you move with the nunchuck control stick. One button is used to jump and the other is used to perform most actions. It's pretty easy to make the controls do what you want them to.

I found that it was sometimes difficult turning and moving; an element of this was definitely down to practise, but sometimes you would perform movements that should make you turn and run, but instead you seemed to get stuck. Most likely an object was in your way, but this was difficult to see in scenarios where you're navigating a boss fight. Oh, and reaching for the missile weapon (which was triggered by the Wii Remote direction pad) was quite awkward when you hold the Wii Remote pointing towards the screen as required by this game. Maybe I just have tiny hands. I also found accessing the scan mode wearying - you have to point the Wii Remote past the main view, then press the + button. On paper that doesn’t sound awkward, but in the game, it seems to take an age. At least you can get back to combat mode with a single button press.

I'd love a way to quickly toggle between visor modes, but I've struggled to come up with a button that's easily accessible that isn't already being used by another important function. However, a really minor thing I'd change in this game is probably swapping the functions of the A and B button. The B button feels like a trigger, yet it was designated as the jump button. Why not make this the button you press to shoot?

See! The scan says these eyes shut down when exposed to bright light! If I hadn't scanned everything in this room, I wouldn't know that, so I wouldn't know to shoot at them, even though it's the only logical thing worth trying. See! It isn't a waste of time!

Ideas

This game has a lot of interesting aspects; the fact that you really feel as though you are inside of this space suit is great, and switching between different visors so you can scan your environment and shoot at things makes you feel in full control of what you do - you can scan enemies hurtling towards you instead of shooting them, if you feel like it. The varying nature of your environment is fun, too; it makes a nice change being able to see more than just the inside of a spaceship. I loved the way you get the story told to you through scanning items in-game; it's mysterious and it left me eager to find out what was going to happen. Another thing I enjoyed was that the boss fights seem varied. I played two and they were different takes on the whole shoot-a-big-thing-until-it-dies style. I was intrigued when, after the first tutorial level where I was forced to learn how to use all these special abilities such as using a grabbing beam and missiles, you lose them all and have to navigate the environment with just a gun. Do I get them back? Am I on a scavenging mission? I like the idea of these elements and how you have to return to various stages with different power-ups in order to progress further.

There is one idea this game has that I'm not a fan of, and that's the Save Stations. Now, they are definitely in keeping with the aesthetics of the game and I appreciate being handed consequences to messing up and dying - there's usually a reasonable amount of level progression between Save Station points - but I have two problems with these. One, they're actually awkward to find - they're on the map, providing you remember to press 1 and check the map every time you enter a room, but crucially, they're hidden away in rooms and don’t show up on scans. I found one completely by chance and if I hadn't, there would have been a lot of backtracking because there was a boss fight in the next couple of rooms. Two, this is a game where you are expected to backtrack a lot - you have to collect items in a certain order to do certain things. That doesn't seem to fit with a series of Save Stations set up in a linear progression.

Why can't I just somehow teleport back to my ship? Keep the existing Save Stations (because I don't want to have to trek halfway across some ruins because some big alien boss creature shot my face off), but give me some kind of homing option that automatically returns me to my ship and performs the same functions as well. In fact, let me teleport between any Save Station I've accessed. That way you can get across the levels a little more quickly when you've collected power-ups.

Shooting, shooting, shooting...

Memory

This was a game that I could easily become absorbed with; the way the story is slowly uncovered through in-game actions is great, and the levels are varied while retaining that dark and creepy feel to them. The game gives me enough control that I don't feel it's forcing me to go in a certain route (even though it is) and you know what? The fact that the person stomping around in a huge metal suit blasting things to smithereens is female just makes me happy*.

There are a few niggles, such as the way the controls are set-up slowing the game down a little for me and the fact there seems to be no way of speeding up some of the backtracking, that do rankle with me a little. However, it would be churlish to be annoyed by the game just for these.

I think I'd just like to have some sort of teleport option to reduce the amount of backtracking you need to do. Even though I found the controls awkward when it came to perform certain actions, I really can't think of a way to improve this beyond getting the actual Wii Remote redesigned.

*Even if in the early Metroid games the incentive given to complete it quickly was that you’d get to see Samus in a bikini. Stripperific.

Overall, this is a great game where you get to shoot things, solve simple puzzles and explore vastly different levels and uncover a story in the process.  It’s wonderfully absorbing and I for one would happily play this again. Even if I do just end up getting distracted by scanning all the plants in the area.