If the Nintendo DS truly does reach out to new gamers as its creators are hoping, the audience for Metroid games is about to get a lot bigger. Unfortunately anyone whose first experience with the series is Metroid Prime Hunters: First Hunt is going to have a very skewed image of what the games are all about.

Hunters, or at least the portion of it packaged as the First Hunt demo, is a straight shooter with little in common with the rest of the series, except for the Morph Ball. There is no exploration, no upgrading, no backtracking, no scanning, almost no jumping, and no lock-on. First Hunt plays like a portable Quake III. There are a couple of training levels to practice your aim or learn to control the Morph Ball. The meat of the demo is its multiplayer feature, which is quite similar to the multiplayer mode in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, except here, it’s the main attraction.

As a wireless multiplayer first-person shooter, First Hunt is impressive stuff. It moves quickly and looks great. There are three different control schemes, and two of them have both right-handed and left-handed versions. The default mode lets you move/strafe with the D-pad, aim and jump with a stylus on the touch screen, and shoot with the L-button. The E3-style mode puts both aiming and shooting on the touch screen; tap to fire, drag to turn. The last mode is quite interesting: you move/strafe with the D-pad and look with the face buttons. The shoulder buttons jump and shoot. Since neither aspect of your movement is analog, this mode is rather clunky, but it may be good for new players who aren’t used to the touch screen.

Other than hidden passages for the Morph Ball, probably the coolest thing about First Hunt's multiplayer is the new "Electro-Lob" weapon. It shoots blobs of green goo that lob like grenades and cause a lot of splash damage. If you hit an opponent with it, his visor will be disrupted. This translates into a wavy effect on the top screen that makes it hard to see where he's going, plus a complete disruption of his lower screen radar.

As a Metroid game, First Hunt is a puzzling disappointment. The game’s premise has Samus practicing against herself (huh?) for an upcoming bounty hunter tournament. I would imagine that a bounty hunter tournament, if such a thing existed, would involve hunters going out and competing for the most dangerous and valuable bounties. It would require speed, intelligence, and skill. What I don’t understand is why bounty hunters would convene into an arena and start shooting at each other, which is apparently what this game is leading up to. Whether the story holds water or not, the gameplay has to deliver, and so far Hunters is not set up like a Metroid game at all. It’s all about shooting, just shooting. I realize that First Hunt is a preview of the full game, but I sincerely hope the talented folks at Nintendo Software Technology are planning to make Hunters a legitimate sequel with the core gameplay that should always accompany a game bearing the Metroid name.