Topic: FEATURE: Metroid Prime Retrospective

[Crimm]

This is the talkback thread for the first article in the Metroid Prime Retrospective feature.

[King of Twitch]

What they found, for the most part, surprised and satisfied

A little understatement here I can't picture another Metroid without scanning. It adds so much to the experience.

[BeautifulShy]

I agree Zap. The game has a very nice story to it.

[broodwars]

So...did anyone proofread this latest installment in the Retrospective (Echoes)?  One paragraph is printed twice and "duel" is used instead of "dual".

Nit-picking aside, Echoes was a decent game but painfully boring to play through.  As has been noted in other threads not only is Dark Aether difficult to traverse and fight in, but there's little to no background music and the level design is not terribly different than Light Aether outside the purple haze and deadly plants.  The plot was also just...meh.  I couldn't have cared less about the Luminoth, and it didn't help that the game kept trying to make me care with lame one-sided dialogue cutscenes.  I tried to start a new game through Echoes probably at least 3-4 times over 3 years before I finally beat it, and in that time I beat the original Metroid Prime numerous times.  It's just such a considerably-unengaging game.  At least some of the new music is decent, particularly the remix of the Super Metroid Brinstar theme, and the game does get better once you reach the Tron-style world.  But who outside die-hard Metroid fans wants to play this game that long when you could be playing more interesting titles that are actually fun?

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

I played Metroid Prime twice, and Echoes twice.  Echoes was the more enjoyable one to revisit because the first one was such a pushover in the 2nd run: levels, puzzles, and especially bosses.  Prime1 was probably my turning point that made me sick of the familiar Fire/Ice/Green Zelda themed areas.  Echoes provided satisfying challenges in greater amounts, even at the base difficulty, more interesting 3D puzzles (i think Nintendo's best to date), scarier enemies, and yummier boss fights.  Playing Echoes the first time thru with the hint system disabled, it was an exploration-gamer's dream, where you progressed entirely by discovery/strategy/merit (wasn't Super Metroid like that?) -- the detailed map and your power-ups provided all the hints you needed to access new territory and make progress, and dead-ends weren't wastes because it's a plain fact something is hiding and waiting to be found.  Echoes's stage modeling/architecture (aside from the plain triangular hub world) was more wickedly alien, making me glad I don't have to sit thru more Fire Temple/Ice Temple repeats.

Prime1 is notable for being exciting from the very beginning.  But it takes a big nose dive once you enter the Mining area, with no real spice until you reach the last string of bosses.  I played thru cuz, well, it's a new game with new things to see.  I say Echoes took the opposite route with delayed gratification.  Starts off unexciting with a, surprise, Mining area, but steadily ramps up all the way to the end with a stellar curve.  (Then, wink-wink, MP3 comes out and is designed to flow a little more like Prime1.  What is this, Indiana Jones?  The Prime series and the Indy movies are alike, when you consider the dark/strange/intense direction Temple of Doom took, only to zig-zag back to desert-archaeology theme in Raiders/Crusade)

Granted, Prime1 gets the respect points for doing its 3D Metroid thing first, but it has 3D Zelda to thank (for better or worse).  It's a slight misfortune that Prime1, back in 2001, was only the 3rd 3D explory action game I've played, after OoT and MM, and I went thru the game with the Hint System on by default.  I might have been more fond of it without the Hints, I just wasn't fully accustomed to Nintendo's 3D adventure design philosphy yet.  Now, hand-holding makes me smolder with rage.  I'm not a big fan of 2D Zetroid nor 2D Melda, my mind doesn't wrap around large 2D maps well, unlike 3D enviros.

I'm buying the Prime Trilogy, but probably won't touch it until I finish Conduit/DeadlyCritters/MadWorld/Overkill Director's Cut/Kororinpa2/DeBlob/BoomBloxAssParty.

[broodwars]

(Then, wink-wink, MP3 comes out and is designed to flow a little more like Prime1.  What is this, Indiana Jones?  The Prime series and the Indy movies are alike, when you consider the dark/strange/intense direction Temple of Doom took, only to zig-zag back to desert-archaeology theme in Raiders/Crusade)

That comparison kind of works...except for one thing: Last Crusade is my favorite Indy movie (I love the comedy and Sean Connery), but Prime 1 is my favorite Metroid game (note that I do not use the "Prime" qualifier). 

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

Temple of Doom has the best Final Boss guy.

[KDR_11k]

I felt a lack of enthusiasm for Echoes, considering how much I loved Prime I should've jumped at it but I didn't buy it until I saw it discounted. Then I played it for a while and gave up at the boost guardian and haven't bothered to play it since. Low enthusiasm + difficulty spike = game goes back on the shelf. Corruption didn't really engage me either but it had no difficulty spikes so I just trotted through the thing. I felt it was pretty damn weak with its linear levels, lack of worthwile secrets and constant story ordering you around.

[noname2200]

I see the duel/dual thing has already been brought up. There's also a factual innacuracy about Echoes.

"Your only real hint as to the location of a particular key was a faint outline of the key’s container when using the Dark Visor in the light world, at which point you would find the nearest portal and shoot down the container in the dark world."

In fact, you were more or less told where each key was if you scanned each keybearer's testament, which were all scattered around. Each testament even highlighted the name of the room you had to look in.

[KDR_11k]

Heh, the room name highlighting reminds me of the translation errors in Prime 1, two hints had the wrong part highlighted and ended up matching the wrong room (which unfortunately ended up having the exact features the game used to describe the locations of the artifact, one was a small room with water on the floor instead of the Xray visor room and another was the wrong one of the two rooms with two pillars and lava).

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

The nice part of combining the Prime games with a surround sound setup was you could trust your ears to find items for you.  You probably weren't looking for it or walking in its direction, but that whirring energy sound immediately signaled the presence and provided a sense of direction.

[Halbred]

Good point about the key hunt in Echoes, KDR. I still have to give "key clue" props to Prime 1. You just read all the hints off the statues in the Impact Crater. I mean, they were all right there. In Echoes, you had to actually find the clues as well as the keys.

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

If you were a good Hunter, you'd have been collecting Keys before you were even asked to find them.

[NWR_Neal]

I always hated the idea that you had to go around and find a bunch of bullshit when you were right near the end of the game. In Metroid Prime, I liked it more mainly because of what Zach/Halbred said: all the clues are there.

I despised it in Prime 2 and 3 and haven't beaten either game because of it, which is funny because I enjoyed both games a lot, I just couldn't stand the artificial lengthening of them with the key hunts. It's the same reason why Wind Waker's Triforce hunt initially turned me off.

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

Why not try finding them on your own instead of waiting for the game to tell you to?  I know that as soon as I got an "upgrade" I went back to all those places I knew there was a secret I couldn't grab.  To me they're all secrets until I clearly uncover them; the Keys are all unknown secrets to me until the game starts calling them "Keys" (what's this funny battery thing?  I guess they'll be important later on... OH BOY! Another Power Bomb!... Another useless battery, huh...).  By the time the game asked me to find "Keys" in Prime 2/3, I had all but 2 of them (ahahahahahahah awesome), THEN I bothered with the clues (and I read them anyway cuz reading is FUN and FUNdamental in Prime games).

It's the joy of discovery.

I despise an unnecessary dependence on hand-holding.  Why praise exploration if one doesn't exercise it?  On the flip-side of "artificial lengthening" one could find a Key directly (cuz it's a secret that's inherently waiting to be unlocked based on the tools you have), completely bypass the 2 leading clues and basically make a "SHORTCUT."  I mean, SHEESH, the games don't give you clues to read to find missiles, and the physical processes of finding many of these missiles are just as involving as finding these Keys.  sheesh

I guess everyone forges their own path of enjoyment or weakness.

(none of this worked in Wind Waker cuz treasure chests that lead to treasure chests are retarded boring and dragging the boat around was no fun)

[KDR_11k]

I do explore, I'm just not perfectly thorough with it so of course I didn't find many artifacts before I was told to get them (wait, didn't prime 1 prevent you from taking an artfact before you know what it is?).

I don't even remember hunting for keys in Prime 3... I 100%ed that one because it had those satellites to tell you what you left over but all the pickups were worthless outside of the energy tanks.

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

"(wait, didn't prime 1 prevent you from taking an artfact before you know what it is?)."

Indeed.  No shortcuts allowed there.  Awful.  The Scan Visor wasn't hooked up to Wikipedia at the time.

[King of Twitch]

I really enjoyed Echoes but I wanted to throw the controller on several of the bosses, something I rarely want to do. Fighting a boss while your energy is being drained is just cruel and unusual; there was another one where you had to roll to the top of a small mound in morph ball and bomb up to another mound without falling off. Arg.

It definitely takes a little more time to ramp up as NinGurl69 *huggles said above and the landing site is pretty bland compared to Tallon IV. But I've never felt so much panic in a game trying to avoid the Dark Juice and I muttered "where am I?" to myself a number of times, immersed in totally alien surroundings. I liked the Luminoth and the no-doubt-bald heroic space marines and the crazy techno world and the echo visor interactions. Screw attacking makes it all that much better.

Is Echoes the only one of the three without a terrible glitch or freezeup issue? How'd they luck out on that?

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

"Is Echoes the only one of the three without a terrible glitch or freezeup issue? How'd they luck out on that?"

Being the 2nd on GameCube, it wasn't made for "new hardware", so the kinks had been worked out?

As a minus, a few of the music tracks in Echoes had clipping/glitches (Tekno Place).  Overall the transfer of the audio seemed to lack quality control (all streamed, no realtime midi).  I manually edited the tracks to remove the glitches so I could listen in peace -- and I hope they've been corrected in the Trilogy.

[BwrJim!]

You know what I liked about the prime series.. and metroid in general is the ability TOO create your own shortcuts and get things you shouldnt have yet.  You could do it in part 1 with skilled jumping and timing.. actually i searched that area so much, that at the beginning of the game, the first time down the elevator shaft, it froze on me.   

Soooo, I went the direct route you were intended to take and no freeze.  Soo, like the player I am I reset the game, and go the original route I took to see if I could lock the game again.  Sure enough i could!  Made me laugh actually, and it was at that moment the searching obsessivly (feelings from Metroid) took over and that when I found out that you could get a really powerfull weapon without needing the jump boots and something else.   hehe, I wonder if the glitches will still be there in the wiimakes?

Anyone else have moments like that in Echos?

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

Those aren't shortcuts, those are just lame glitches.  Example:  As soon as you landed on Tallon IV, you could perform a dash-jump from the Gunship and fly all the way to the ledge that led to the Space/Double Jump boots.  Retarded.

Last I heard, those glitches were removed in the Prime1 NPC edition.  And I've never heard of any major sequences breaks for Echoes in the wild; not too interested anyway.

[KDR_11k]

Glitching into sequence breaks is a major part of Metroid!

[noname2200]

Agreed. Sequence-breaking was a nice bonus. I rarely took advantage of it, but it did add replay value for times when I wanted to test what I could do before I was "supposed" to. The Super Metroid podcast was spot-on about the matter.

[King of Twitch]

Thanks for the terrible reminder of Metroid Prime 3. Nothing breaks up the fast-paced action of a first person adventure like being forced to explore the hazardous Pirate Homework.

BILLY PUT DOWN THAT PLASMA RIFLE AND GET BACK TO READING TOM SAWYER OR YOU'LL BE GETTING NO PHAZON FOR DESSERT TONIGHT, MISTER