March 21, 2014
[Review] Metroid Prime Pinball & Mario Pinball Land (DS/GBA)

I’m always thrilled to spot a Nintendo game for cheap at the shops. Metroid Prime Pinball was a real breath of fresh air, bringing back the Prime sensibilities in some small way to clear away the feeling I got from Other M. But that wasn’t why I bought it, just a nice side effect.

The game I probably played the most in my childhood was, oddly enough, Pokemon Pinball for the GBC. Pinball resonates with me even if I rarely ever had the chance with an actual table. It had been a while and I’m actually close to beating every Metroid game, since there aren’t too many. I’m glad I picked it up, even if it’s really short. So short in fact that hungry for more pinball content I emulated Mario Pinball Land, the previous pinball game Fuse had done for Nintendo, not willing to wait for the VC release.

The two games are surprisingly different. Mario is more like an adventury Mario game, while Metroid hews a bit closer to the aesthetic of a physical pinball table. In Mario, you go through single GBA screens in an interconnected area, accomplishing a simple task on each screen to get a star, while also collecting powerups and coins. It’s a very different take on a pinball game, with secret entrances to new screens, roaming enemies and boss fights, and a persistent story, of a kind. You can even continue progress in the adventure if you lose all your balls, the focus is less on the score attack. It’s like if Super Mario 64 was pinball-based.

Metroid, on the other hand, also has a story but plays out more like a pinball machine. There’s different boards but each one covers just the DS’s two screens. You are trying to re-enact the story of Metroid Prime mostly, completing a series of pinball table-like tasks to advance to a new area. It has bosses and enemies too, but a bit more modular. I love the liberties it takes though, doing things a real pinball table would never be able to do, like when Samus suddenly stands up and starts shooting bugs that are coming her way.

Metroid is really great, a well-tuned pinball experience with a goal and an adventure along the way. Mario is a bit less focused, with a sprawling world unlike a traditional pinball experience, with many secrets and actually a lot of accuracy required, not to mention trial and error and persistence. Yeah it’s hard but in a less fun way than Metroid. I preferred the DS offering, it seems a better crafted game, not to mention the subject matter. That’s not to say that Mario didn’t try interesting things with the pinball formula and gave a unique experience. It’s too bad Fuse has parted ways with Nintendo for now, maybe Jupiter (the developer of the three Pokemon pinball games) can take some time off Picross, and take another franchise to the table. Kirby’s had his shot… Donkey Kong Pinball, anyone?

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Filed under: review fuse games gba ds metroid mario metroid prime pinball mario pinball land 
February 13, 2014
Review: Metroid Other M (Wii)

Alright, here we go. I borrowed this game along with Jungle Beat from a friend, because they were two games with a strongly negative reception in their respective fansbases, yet admittedly had their positive aspects. I was curious, almost curious enough to spend money to buy them myself. Having played them now, I’m quite glad I didn’t.

Not to get ahead of myself, but this one had the wider bad blood of the two. Its instant derailing of Samus’ character after almost 25 years is held as its greatest crime. I’ll add my own crimes to the list during this review, but between it and Jungle Beat, I preferred this one, the latter two thirds of the game were more fun. Inferior to previous 2D Metroid and the Primes in my opinion, but it had things going for it. Let’s get the crap out of the way first though.

Anywhere on the Internet you can find the criticisms of this game, especially the story-related elements. However, we can’t ignore the gameplay shortcomings: Enemies take way too long to deal with early on, the charge is so slow and they take so many hits. Action is broken up frustratingly with unnecessary shifts in control: slow-walking from a zoomed-in perspective or looking aimlessly around in first person. In the moment too, switching from the uncomfortable sideways-Wiimote to pointing for missiles is clunky, so much that I barely bothered with it. Finishing moves were poorly explained so I had trouble pulling them off, and half the time they didn’t “finish” them anyway.

Enemy designs were ugly and overcomplicated, and their names were just hideously unpronounceable. I guess it made them seem more alien? The environment concepts were interesting but they, along with the setting and premise, were shamelessly ripped off from Fusion. Music is basically nonexistant, and the ambience I either ignored or was drowned out by sound effects so aurally there was really nothing there.

The premise is poorly executed and the symbolic posturing is so, so hamfisted. It cannot be overtstated how poor the writing here is, and the monotone voice acting does not help matters. There are several main players who are not characterised at all, then killed off with little fanfare or consequence. The major plot points of the first half trail off to nothing more than implication, and while environmental and implied storytelling is a strength of the Metroid series, contrasting it to the extremely in-your-face storytelling applied elsehwere leaves a lot of impact to fall flat.

Samus’ boobs are too big and her suit has heels. Heels, people. Her eternal monologuing inspires dread. And not Metroid Dread, hopefully. I wouldn’t normally use phrases like ludo-narrative dissonance but, uh, Other M has got it. I wanted to watch the cutscenes but at the same time I didn’t want to. And the whole thing ends on an anti-climax.

On the other hand, uh, running around feels good. Whew, I’m all ragey from that. Should have started with the good stuff. Well, it looks pretty. The map’s pretty good and the part of the game where you go around hunting items was fun enough for me to get 100%. Must be because there’s no talking, no plot, no forced sections. The abilities you get make you feel powerful, although by the end you could say overpowered, possibly because the enemies don’t really ramp enough I guess? I like the implementation of the speed boost and stuff with the level design. I also liked some of the environmental concepts with holograms, but there wasn’t enough of it.

Basically I’d agree that it’s a big misstep in the series. I chalk it up to the interpretation of Samus, the ludicrous excuses they put up for the gameplay constraints (the authorisation system gets too much hate probably, but it’s partially justified), and the one that surprised me was the almost complete ignoring of the Prime games. This is a very Japanese product, and you get the feeling that the arrogant and possessive Sakamoto didn’t care for what those Westerners did with his baby. So he made this? Really, this? I blame him for a lot of problems with the game, mainly because I like a figurehead to point the blame at, like Miyamoto. In some ways it competently evokes an extension of the 2D games into a pseudo-3D setting (it’s 2.5D really, maybe 2.75D at best), but in others it’s going against that. So I don’t know what its goals are.

I’ve seen the game for $10 and if you’re able to ignore very large aspects of a game to focus on the good parts, it’s worth it for that. The fighting is different to any Metroid before it, but the exploration feels pretty Metroidy. And the concept of telling a more in-depth story is interesting, but executed very poorly. My wife couldn’t bear to be in the same room as the game because of the talky parts. But it pretty much ruined the series for a few years, and the follow-up has to be good. That’s why some people wanted Retro to have another go (shut up, Tropical Freeze is gonna be awesome!). I like being up on all the happenings and lore and gameplay of all my favourite series, so I needed to play this. You don’t have to. Thumbs down not ironically

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Filed under: review team ninja metroid other m metroid wii nintendo 
May 14, 2013
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (Wii) & Metroid Prime Hunters (DS)

Whew. My big Metroid rush is over for now. Or is it? Tomorrow, the new Famicom sale game is going up on the WiiU and it’s (you guessed it) Super Metroid. I’d been considering picking that up with the last of my Wii funds, but this is much better. Anyway let’s talk about these other two games, shall we?

What’s interesting to me is how many similarities these games have. MP3 was made by the same developers as the other Primes, Retro Studios. It really changed up the formula that had been established by the revolutionary first game and the evolutionary second. It did this not only with its control scheme that made heavy use of the Wii remote, but also in terms of structure, conventions and scope. It’s the first Metroid game with proper voice acting (MP1’s unused spoken intro aside), it involves moving Samus’s ship and travelling to other locations, planets, and even systems, it brings in a large amount of NPC interaction, and it has a dynamic plot. In most other ways it’s an extension of the first two games, but even then a lot of gameplay things were tweaked: stacking beam weapons instead of selectable, the new Hypermode which introduces a different type of strategy to fights, using the ship to affect the environment, and all the grappling.

When I looked into Hunters though, I found it had got there first on a few of these. Taking your ship between different planets, encountering other Bounty Hunters, a redesigned control scheme for new hardware. On the other hand, while it had a lot less suit upgrades, it actually added a ton more weapons, some a lot less useful than others (I’m looking at you, Volt Driver). The two were developed alongside each other for part of the time, and Retro were consulted on many things by the developer of Hunters, NST. But I’m wondering which company had these ideas first, especially the other Hunters and the planet-hopping. In any case, it was cool to play them together as they had these common elements—it also highlighted how different the execution of them was.

Now we could easily talk about how crummy Hunters looks as an early 3D DS game. I looked past that for most of my playthrough—I guess I’m good at ignoring visual shortcomings when I want to (I played on my 3DS for at least 6 months in power-saving mode—not recommended). Just accept that the textures are super-blocky and play the game. There were other limitations on the smaller system though, such as a noticeable lack of enemy diversity and especially boss diversity. The scans were also very laconic compared to its console counterparts. Everything is just a lot smaller in scale, but again the limitations of the system understandably imposed this to some extent (would it have killed them to make one or two more boss designs though? There’s 2 reused 4 times each!).

So obviously the fidelity of Corruption was much higher. The production values were very high for the most part. Perhaps for such a cinematic game, I was starting to see the long-whined about visual limitations of the Wii, but for the most part it looked and felt excellent. Comparing it also to the other two Prime games in such a short time, it was a big step up. I also loved the variety of environments, and how each planet had a completely unique and at some points beautiful visual design, right down to the style of doors giving a sense of place for each area.

Some complaints: Ship Missile upgrades were useless, the final boss battle was underwhelming, and the Wii remote movement stuff was overused in some parts and underused in others. While we’re here, Hunters complaints: too many arbitrary force fields, not enough weight behind the rival Hunters, I got lost a lot.

But let’s talk about some good parts! I loved those two key differences to the other Prime games that these brought: the planet-hopping allowed a more convincing and interesting reason for different environments, and more unique places that gave a more frequent sense of exploring a whole new space; the greater presence of NPCs reduced the usual lonely feeling of Metroid games, but that was still there—more importantly, it gave the world a lot more depth.

Of course, the heavier emphasis on setpieces in Corruption undermined the usual Metroid thing of wandering around, exploring and backtracking. I think they still managed to incorporate those feelings and experiences very well into this new structure, though. The appearances of Hunters randomly in levels also gave a deeper feeling of sudden excitement and peril, plunged back into cool, steady exploring afterwards. So both found very effective gameplay hooks in there while shaking up the Metroid formula.

Speaking of the Metroid formula, Hunters had no Metroids or Space Pirates. Weird. Still, a compelling story with perhaps not enough justification for when there was an appearance of common enemies such as Geemers (how did they come to a whole other galaxy?). In fact, the stories of both games were fantastic (although obviously the story was a lot more “there” in Corruption).

I’m trailing off a bit so once again I will intentionally end my post before I get really out of hand. But I will say, having now experienced all of the Prime series (except Pinball), um it was fun. Sorry don’t know where that sentence was going. I’m definitiely a bigger Metroid fan now. Luckily not enough to feel bitter about the zero 25th Anniversary acknowledgments. It’s just a B- or C-lister now, oh well. But I’m glad I gave Hunters a chance, it was a very neat little game that was an adequate translation of the Prime gameplay to the system. Curruption was a very enjoyable conclusion to the series, easily my favourite of the three at this stage (maybe after replaying I’ll join the prevailing opinion of the first being best by far… not at the moment though). Really, all the added elements made it such a great experience, a real sci-fi epic. I just hope NIntendo aren’t too discouraged by Other M’s reception, and pull their finger out and make some more great games! Give them to the West again if you have to! And Retro, hire more developers! So that’s that, Mission Completed! (If you read this post in under an hour and picked up all of my references, you’ll now see me in my underwear. Enjoy!)

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Filed under: metroid metroid prime metroid prime 3: corruption metroid prime hunters ds wii nintendo retro studios nst review 
April 29, 2013
Some gaming papercrafts me and Everbloom made the other day. It was heaps of fun, but some were more fiddly than others. I made Zero, Samus, and Mr Saturn, she made Toon Link, Chibiterasu and this super complicated Japanese-style bridge that she took...

Some gaming papercrafts me and Everbloom made the other day. It was heaps of fun, but some were more fiddly than others. I made Zero, Samus, and Mr Saturn, she made Toon Link, Chibiterasu and this super complicated Japanese-style bridge that she took to work. They come from various sources, nothing beyond simple google searches.

I just noticed now that we ended up with two competing franchise styles from Nintendo and Capcom, as Metroid and Megaman are often compared and Okami took more than a few cues from Zelda. Mr Saturn’s a bonus. ;)

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(Notes: 10)
  
Filed under: fandom crafts zelda metroid okami rockman mother papercraft 
March 23, 2013
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (Wii)

So I picked this up again after a long hiatus. Originally the reason was that I had borrowed Wind Waker and Paper Mario 2 from a friend, and wanted to get those awesome games back to him ASAP. So I put my playthrough on hold (halfway through Torvus Bog, I think), which stretched a long, long time as I put off restarting that. But I finally did and finished it.

My initial impression of the game was that it seemed like a mod, or expansion pack, of Prime, rather than a fully developed sequel. The engine is obviously the same, the interactable objects are mostly quite similar, certain enemies are reskins of Prime enemies, the beams are quite simple reskins. It differentiates itself a bit more as you go on though, with some stunning environments, new items and concepts, and a more active plot (rather than mostly inferred through scans, although it has that too).

That’s not to say that building so closely upon Prime is a bad thing. Prime was a fantastic game, still recognised today as a classic and a brilliant extension of the Metroid franchise despite some pre-release concerns. The sequel is less accoladed, but to my mind it’s probably just as good and different enough to be worthwhile playing. Also, similarly to Majora’s Mask, a few changes can go a long way toward the atmosphere, especially in environments. The comparison is apt as both are lesser-liked sequels that share many assets and mechanics, but with a darker tone and new ideas.

Echoes is a little less experimental than Majora’s Mask though, although carrying the Zelda link further, designers who worked on A Link to the Past apparently consulted with Retro to develop the Light World/Dark World concept. It’s well-executed here, with familiar structures but twisted and a dangerous feel to Dark Aether, although the portal loading screens were a little long and annoying.

I realised as I went on that Echoes was a bit smaller in area than Prime, but the dual worlds added to the size, and I feel bactracking was handled a little better. The smaller size and interconnectedness helped this aspect. As I got to know this little world, I felt good moving around confidently.

This feeling was hampered in the long run by a lacking “sense of progression”. Progressing meant collecting items and upgrades, getting MacGuffins, and opening new areas—all well and good, and staple to Metroid. But adding cutscenes and a major NPC (and Dark Samus scenes) was ultimately futile as it was not followed through enough. I didn’t feel as if my efforts were hindering the Ing or helping the Luminoth. I suppose the Dark Samus subplot was handled well, but due to all the explicit scan lore I expected some reflection of the conflict I was currently carrying out on the game world or dialogue with U-Mos, for example. Prime also felt a bit strange in this respect, as everything was implied and I didn’t feel as if I was accomplishing much until the end, which then felt a little flat.

Then again, the restrained and laid-back storytelling (for the most part) is refreshing in this age of Quicktime events and dull cutscenes. Echoes’s cutscenes were snappy and light on text, leaving some more lore/audiolog-type scan stuff for optional finding. This also applies to more retro stuff, but the comparison is more appropriate for this, a 3D first-person action-shooter. Just the tone and pace was so nice and slow and subtle. I liked that.

Combat is, well, it’s ok. At first you have to be careful, as threats are unknown and can do much more relative damage, but as you get to know everything’s patterns and capabilities—and your health increases—you tend to just rush past most creatures. Thus I think the start of the game and new areas that you venture into are more effective in building tone so on. Of course, once you get the Annihilator Beam there’s another shift because it makes it so much easier to just blast through things. So the tonal shifts are a little strange in that way but cool.

I like the sound design in this game. Sound effects are not too loud most of the time, the compositions for the different areas are nice, and part of the soothing change back into Light Aether after a stint in the Dark.

Another positive was the interactions of different groups. The Luminoth built everything, then the Ing corrupted it. The Luminoth then lost the war and went to sleep, waiting for a redeemer. The Federation showed up later and promptly got slaughtered by some Ing. Space pirates also make the scene (with Phazon), but are mainly possessed by more Ing. Finally, Dark Samus wrecks some stuff. Then Samus arrives and has to figure all this out by scanning stuff. It’s a fairly rich world, although the Federation and Pirate stuff is pretty much just in the first quarter of the game, I guess.

Oh by the way, there was a manga produced for this game which the Metroid Database has translated (except the last chapter) here. It focuses much more on the Federation troopers, and Samus arrives before they all die. It’s not bad.

Not sure what else to say, as I actually finished the game a little while ago and (appropriately to my playthrough) put off the review. But yeah it was a sweet game, and on the strength of it I bought Hunters for the DS too, which I will play before starting Corruption as they were developed in that order, although Hunters is set between Prime and Echoes. I really respect Retro at this point, they should hire a bunch more people so they can work on more than one game at a time! Anyway that’ll do so, see you next mission!

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Filed under: metroid metroid prime metroid prime 2 echoes retro studios nintendo wii new play control review 
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