I finally got my copy of Metroid Prime 3 yesterday. I had asked for it to be shipped DHL from Video Games Plus which they did but they sent it to my old UK address. Fortunately both of us caught this quickly and they managed to get another copy DHL-ed to me.

Anyway I spent a couple of hours playing it last night and managed to get through 2 bosses (or one boss and a mini boss depending on how you look at it). As I have not managed to complete it I’ll give you my first impressions.

Firstly Wow! It looks great, ok not HD great but for a Wii game it looks amazing. The first few minutes or hours are very different from a normal Metroid game in that 1) you have people speaking to you 2) you don’t have to kill everything you meet and 3) you get some help in places. This might put off die-hard fans but for me it fleshes out Samus’s world a little more without removing any of the core Metroid elements.

(more…)

With the imminent release of Metroid Corruption I have started playing Super Metroid on the Virtual Console. Having never played a Metroid game until Fusion (on the GBA) and Prime (on the Cube) Super Metroid passed me by (I know I had a SNES and still never played it!).

Anyway coming to it as a relative newcomer is interesting for several reasons.

Guidance and objectives:

Super Metroid is really hard. Not because of the AI or the amount of health or ammo you get. Instead it is because there is very little guidance. It does not tell you how to use any of your abilities or where to go next. Instead you are left to explore and experiment to discover what to do and where to go. To this end it can be frustrating at certain sections becuase you think you are lost or even trapped.

Feeling trapped and unable to progress is an interesting one as there are several sections where you can blast a switch to open a door from one side that when you return you cannot open from the other side. This leads to a few moments of thinking ‘crap I am going to have to reset and start from my save again’. Interestingly, however, there are always ways out of the area you think you are trapped in.

(more…)