Metroid Prime, I loved the first one on the Game Cube, what perfect balance, difficult yet compelling. It was all about exploring vast deserted ruins more about exploration than combat, opening up new areas, new techniques allowing the player to map connections between previously disjunct regions and unlocking new zones. Sure it was difficult, but you never felt it was cheap, it was tough but fair. The second episode - Echoes - lost a little of originals freshness, the level design looser, larger areas but fewer interconnections. The primary colour signals of the original (FIRE! ICE! PURPLE STUFF!) were chucked out in favour a more subdued pallet pushing the puzzle solving element to the background without managing to up the grittyness as I suspect was the intention. Still I played it to the traditionally grueling final boss battle. Most tragically Echoes, towards the final hours, introduced what is possibly my most hated dificulty mechanic in all of video gaming, widely spaced save points.
The way the design team sees this working is as follows: Right we’ll have this section and they have to do it without recharging health or ammo and our save ponts all recharge health and ammo so that would make it easier so we won’t let them save. Look you can do it in ten minutes , that’s not too long. The problem is that you can’t do it in ten minutes, if you’re a player approaching a sprawling 3D temple complex for the first time your initial reactino is to explore cautiously, then you get lost then you realise what you need to do then your realise you’re going to be late for the pub but you can’t find the save point, it’s taken you about 30 mins since you last saved, do you want to slog back through all that stuff (respawning bad guys) or are you going to try to make the next save point? Well you’ll try to get to the next one, unfortunately its guarded by one of the afforementioned traditionally grueling bad guys (another 15 minutes at least). So anyway, you get the idea, if you’ve spent any amount of time playing console games you’ll have no doubt encountered it and it’s really painfull.
But still Echoes was pretty good.
So the third park aka. Corruption: Well right from the outset the save points are spaced really widely, the structure is quite linear and there are a load of other charachters only one step up from the F-Zero GX cast in terms of design subtlety. Metorid should be a lonely desolate threatening experience, I don’t want Samus to spend any time high-fiving jive talking androids.
BUT.
There is one thing that Corruption gets exactly right: The interface. It’s the first FPS I’ve played with the Wii’s motion sensing pointy controller and it works perfectly. It feels like when you first played Golden Eye on the N64, it just feels right. The left hand ‘nunchuck’ controller moves you forward, back, left and right whilst you rotate and point with the Wii-mote. You can lock the view with the left trigger and use the wii-mote to snipe small enemies or you can lock onto a moving target, have it drag you around whilst aiming elsewhere. It’s brilliant. Really brilliant. It gives you the potential for mouse like accuracy but without the slightly clinical feel that that interaction can lend a game, the best comparison i can come up with is that it’s like using a steering wheel on a driving game, whilst it might be harder to start with the interaction is deeper, more intuitive and ultimately more rewarding. It’s a reall shame that the underlying game doesn’t match up. And seriously, no multiplayer!
TFLs daily peversions of language:
I waited 45 minutes for a train this morning.
Apparently it was “delayed due to late running”. Late running, that’s not a reason, that’s just a description of what a delay is.
Also after listing literally every London Underground line (except DLR) they still insisted on saying that “there is a good service on all other London Underground lines”. As if the service is ever good anyway. Grrrr.
