Last weekend I bought Metroid Prime 3 Corruption on the Wii and it absolutely FUCKING ROCKS! I was a great fan of Metroid Prime on the Gamecube and was eager to see how it worked out on the Wii, especially after reading up on how the nunchuck had been implemented and how apparently it was so brilliant.
It is. It really really is. The controls for MP3C feel really natural and intuitive and it takes about 2 minutes to get into them. As per usual the game has an excellent tutorial which doesn’t feel like a tutorial at all, and it also thanfully dispenses with the whole “here is Samus fully pimped out at the start of the game and - oh WHOOPS, all gone! Now go find suit upgrades, kthxbye” rigmarole that MP had (and, I read, did MP2).
The levels in this game are stunning, and for the first time they’re set across different planets which you can move across using your ship. Of course there’s the traditional hunt for more upgrades to open up previously inaccessible areas, but it’s a tried and tested part of the MP franchise and I think it works just as well as ever.
If I do have a complaint about this game it’s that the free form nature of the game (which essentially lets you roam around all the planets from the get go with the aforementioned barriers making it obvious where you’re not supposed to go yet) is a bit too free form. There were times when I was really stuck on where to go and then the game told me that to access a bit I couldn’t go to I needed an upgrade and maybe is was on another planet… Hmmmm. This has led to quite a few situations where I’ve been a bit stumped on how to proceed and I find myself thinking is what I need close by, is it a long way away, have I missed something obvious? I don’t ever recall having these issues with MP which although also non-linear didn’t have quite such a free roaming design so you always knew roughly where you were headed.
Anyway, that gripe aside it’s a great game and definitely one of the Wii’s killer apps, in my opinion. So don’t just sit there, go buy a copy.
Strangely enough, I found many of the bosses at the beginning of Prime 3 harder than the later ones. Maybe I was just getting better with the controls.
The final boss is pretty challenging, but I think it’s a little easier than the final bosses of Prime 1 and 2. The nice thing about Prime 3 is that when you die at a boss, if you choose to continue, you’ll start again right at the boss instead of having to trek all the way back from the save station.
I’ve only played the early parts of Metroid Prime 3, so this might just be a function of my inexperience with the format, but I’ve found some of the levels to be a little disorienting. Now don’t get me wrong, I love 95% of what I’ve seen so far… but you get absorbed in the game so quickly, it can be a little jarring when you’re shaken out of the environment after you get lost and find yourself being forced to headbang through the same three or four corridors until you find the right route.
Out of curiosity though, while we’re talking about maps, am I correct in assuming that Prime 3 is like Super Metroid in that you never lose the chance to get an item or powerup? I’d rather find everything myself, but I’m paranoid about moving too quickly and permanently cheating myself out of loot.
I only have MP1 (I wanted a trial before I went with Corruption), and that is incredibly frustrating. In 20 odd tries over the last month or so, and I’m not a whole lot closer to beating it. After about 10 tries, I got the hang of it and got past the armored MP, but I’m always so low on health, the next one gets me every time. I’ve put it away for a couple weeks now, it just got to be no fun at all.
I love the game and it’s worth every penny and every hour spent on it, but the one flaw in the game is the game just doesn’t prepare you for the final boss battle. You spend all that time building up your skills and equipment and you’re more or less ready for each new challenge you face but then the final boss is like 10X harder then you’re ready for. I’d try and try and finally go out and get a cheat system, activate unlimited weapons or invincibility or something, play the final boss fight again and realize I’d never made it past 1/4 of the battle anyway. Screw it, I don’t care. It’s such a beautiful, fun game the final boss battle doesn’t matter to me. It’s the journey to the final boss, not the final boss itself.
As a video gamer I cut my teeth on (among a few others) Super Metroid for the SNES, so I’ve been eagerly devouring the Metroid Prime games, and yeah - MP3 is utterly fantastic.
To those having difficulty with boss fights in any of the MP games, a few words of advice:
-Look for patterns. Often the boss will follow set movement paths, or use 3 or 4 different attacks in the same repeating sequence.
-Look for tells. Often the attacks will be preceded by a certain motion, or something will glow, or a sound will be made, etc. Both of these can help you anticipate and avoid attacks, as well as being ready if/when the weak spot is about to become vulnerable.
-Scan the boss, and read what it tells you (if the boss changes form, scan it again!). In addition to auto-targeting the relevant weak points for you, the scan will bring up hints about what weapons to use and when.
-Jump. Strafe. Jump and strafe at the same time. Morph into a ball and zip away. Samus is extremely agile if you use everything at your disposal.
-Try every weapon you have. The ordinary power beam shots are quick, but a super missile is death on a stick. Or just plug 'em with missiles. Use other beams, and their beam combos. Using morph ball? Lay a few bombs, or even a power bomb.
If all else fails, www.gamefaqs.com has some excellent walkthroughs, complete with strategies and tactics for fighting the bosses. The walkthroughs can also help you make sure you have all the energy tanks, missile expansions, et cetera. The boss fights get a lot harder if you go in with too few energy tanks.
Omi no Kami: yes, you never lose the chance to gain a powerup. There’s always a phase during every Metroid game where you can go everywhere on the map, access everything, etc.
I remember playing Metroid and Super Metroid (one of my favorite games ever) and I think I’d like to see it translated to a first-person shooter. I don’t know if I’d buy it to try it out, but if I could demo it somewhere first, that’d be optimal.
I played the SNES version, which was great and the game translated incredibly well to the first two Metroid Prime games on the GC. You get a real sense of being in the same sorts of worlds, the atmosphere carries right over.
If its such a blast on the GC, I’d love to try it some time on the Wii with its floating controllers.
The only part of it that I didn’t like was the section before the last planet where you had to go to all the various planets searching for energy cells. It was too tedious and I ended up looking them up.
Here’s something fun I read online that I didn’t think to do on my own: When you get the dash upgrade for the morphball start dashing into groups of enemies and knocking them around like bowling pins. Too much fun!