| Metroid Prime 3: Happiness is a Warm Beam Cannon |
| Thursday, 30 August 2007 | |
 Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is the reason why I bought a Wii.Ok, so it's not "technically" the reason I bought a Wii (which was so that I could be super awesome cool like all my friends and spend hours upon hours making celebrity lookalike Mii's) but it is a damn fine game. Damn fine. I've been counting down the days until it was released, thanks in part to a friend of mine who insisted on shouting "Metroid Prime 3 comes out on August 28th!" during every single conversation we've had in the last month. But that's the kind of fanaticism this game... no, this series, inspires in people. The kind of rampant fanboyism that can only come from a smokin' hot girl being shoved into a giant mechanical killing machine and being let loose to liquify all manners of alien/space pirate weirdness. My hands were shaking as I loaded the disc and waited for my Wii to update. ...it did not dissapoint. There are a lot of games that are built for the Wii, but this is different. It's almost like the Wii was built solely to someday play this game. They share a beautiful oneness with each other, a common destiny together, like chocolate and peanut butter, cookies and milk, or real time vertex shading and integrated normal mapping. They just mesh together.  The Wii remote and nunchuk (I never get tired of calling it a nunchuk) perform seamlessly with the game in an astonishing range of various degrees. One moment you'll be running around blasting wildly at invading space pirates, the next you'll be operating a complicated door mechanism with hand movements alone. The first word that comes to mind is "immersive". After the first ten minutes, you become Samus Aran. The attacks, the movements all become second nature.The control scheme, although being touted as completely original and new, is eerily familiar if you've ever played the shooting minigame in Rayman: Raving Rabbids. Essentially, you aim your weapon with the remote and shoot with the B Trigger, while you control your grapple lasso and move with the nunchuk. There are a wide gamut of other activities, but the game does a great job of keeping things simple and it never feels cluttered or cumbersome.  The only real problem I had in the first day of playing is that turning around quickly can be a problem. Basically, you strafe with the nunchuk, but to actually turn around you just swing the remote to the left or right. Too much swing (say, in the heat of an intense boss battle) and you lose line of sight with the sensor bar and go nowhere. Too little swing and you slowly hobble in a circle like a geriatric. It takes a little getting used to, but within the first hour, I'd gotten a decent hold on it.Dark Samus is back, much to my fanboyish delight. I can't help it. "Hot chick in a death suit" is cool, but "evil dark alien doppleganger archnemesis" is cooler. Just ask Spiderman (and don't you dare bring up that horrid movie Spiderman 3, because I will brain you). Everything you love from previous "Primes" is back in Corruption. The visors, the weapons, the morph ball mode. I really like the way that the visors are incorporated into the controls and it's now possible to quickly switch visors, scan an object and switch back with only a quick flick of the wrist. I love the grapple lasso. This is one of those weapons that was meant to be used on a Wii. Kinda like fishing in Zelda, or virtual lightsaber fights (which I'm sure they will include in an upcoming Star Wars game, RIGHT LUCAS?) this just feels "right". Almost virtual reality good. Crack that bad boy once and you'll be hooked, I promise. The art is beautiful, which is all the more impressive because it's on the Wii. Say what you will about the fun factor of the system, but they should have bumped up the graphic card a smidge. This isn't Super Mario World. There are no shiny happy places with dancing mushrooms and happy villagers. The world of Metroid is dark, gritty, mechanical. The graphics go a long way towards creating something that most recent games lack: atmosphere. If you're a fan of movies like Alien, or games like System Shock 2 (or to a lesser degree Bioshock), this is the game for you. On a final note, I want to shake the hand of the writer(s). Again, it's rare to see a first person shooter truly incorporate good writing, but here it is. Samus becomes the quintessential badass hero. She's the Space Snake Plissken. There were actual times when I expected to hear random crewpeople ask "Samus Aran? I heard you were dead." In the first level, not only are you treated to some awesome scenes of Samus's ship flying in, you also get the coolest meeting of bounty hunters since The Empire Strikes Back, a violent space pirate boarding party, but then you witness one of those cool moments that make you realize just what kind of character you're playing: Samus takes on an entire room of creepy crawlies, morphs into a ball, ducks through the ventilation system (i think that's the ventilation system, maybe its the plumbing), and blows her way out of the ship and out into space. There she is, floating; drifting silently with the debris, then BAM! She grabs onto a passing hatch and gets back in the ship. Hells yes. Beats taking the escalator. All in all, I can't wait to see the rest of the game. This is the kind of game that makes it worth playing video games. Do you love the game too? Do you own a pinup poster of Zero Suit Samus? Post a comment below and let us know! Comments (1)
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