Metroid Prime

 GameCube, Metroid Prime (2003) game

My first proper encounter with Samus Aran came with this game, not counting the playable version in the original 'Super Smash Bros.' on N64 and a cameo at the end of one of the tracks in 'F-1 Race' on the humble Game Boy. Nintendo in their infinite wisdom (or for some other reason), deigned not to update the series on N64 from the 2D days of yore. And so it was left to 'Prime' for her introduction into 3D. And I liked it, it was a strong mix of shooting, scanning and environment-spanning puzzles á la 'Zelda' - I would say that series is probably the greatest influence: traversing a large game world, collecting power-ups to unlock other areas. In fact it was pretty much one big dungeon. There was some variety in locations, from the verdant, watery Tallon Overworld, to the seething lava pits of Magmoor, snowy land of Phendrana, Egyptian tomb-like Chozo Ruins, and the brown caves of the Phazon Mines (interspersed with beauteous shocks of purple and blue Phazon, unfortunately deadly to the standard Samus suit), though as I'll explain later the environments weren't quite varied enough. Having enjoyed the Wii sequel recently (not to mention the 'Cube sequel a good few years back), it had made me want to revisit the original, especially heading into winter with those dark, chilly days, you just want a long, involved challenge to warm the brain cells.

Last time, way back in 2006, it took me from January to August, getting stuck on occasion, and with an ultimate completion of a measly 74% (and on Normal difficulty, too!). The main reason I got such a low rating was because I foolishly ran through the opening level on the crashing Frigate and failed to scan things so right there was a hole in my Log Book Entries. This time I was resolved to take it more carefully and try for 100%. Percentage completed may not sound all that important, you have after all finished the game when you finally defeat the Phazon Metroid Prime creature, but you're so schooled in scanning all the time that you want to collect them all and I was quite disappointed not to achieve my goal: ultimately I managed to find 96% of the items, and 97% scans, but I let myself down on a couple of occasions that may have made the difference. The big one was not realising that when you find one of the twelve Chozo Artefacts which your quest is all about, you go back to the Artefact Temple and the next clue is scannable. Not realising this, I sometimes collected more than one, thus overwriting the existing scan, losing it forever! To me this was a cruel attitude towards the player, I think all scans should have been available at all time so you couldn't fall into a trap in what is a reasonably sizeable adventure - it's harsh to prevent a 100% completion because you messed up on one or two occasions!

The other time I'd already realised I wasn't going to get all the scans and I was working my way through the Mines - in one room you have to Spider Ball up to a platform, then jump across to another using the Grapple Beam and because it was so dark and brown I didn't notice that at first and kept falling into harmful Phazon and having to go back and start again. I could see a console with a red scan on it (usually meaning it activates something, as opposed to the orange variety which are passive scans merely giving more information), and assumed it would bring a platform closer to me, and only after I'd activated it did I realise it shut down a forcefield in the background which had had an orange scan point on it, and now I couldn't scan it. Because the Mines were so tough and irritating I just gave up and accepted it rather than quitting out and going back to my last save (as I'd done on other occasions previously when unsure if I'd got every scan to preserve my record). As it turned out it wouldn't have made much difference, but either way if you miss one you may as well have missed many. I actually had to mark the game down one star from what I would have given it mainly because of this frustrating harshness regarding completion - and this time I was all out to get maximum percentage, it just didn't seem fair!

It was strange that I wasn't even able to collect all the pickups, too. There are one hundred in the game, including the essential upgrades to suit and weaponry, but still I was four short by the end. I even went to the extreme of using an item map that was unlocked in Gallery 3, the bonus extras for achieving a certain level of completion, so I felt since I'd earned it I had the right to use it (whereas I tend not to like walkthroughs or any of that because it defeats the object of the game and my sense of personal achievement). But even then, while I tracked down the last two missile expansions (out of a total of forty-nine, making a grand total of 245 missiles in your arsenal), I was still missing two percent, which I can't account for (22 essential upgrades√, 14 energy tanks√, 12 Chozo Artefacts√, 49 missile expansions√, 3 Power Bomb expansions√ (I think), and a partridge in a pear treeeeeee!). The game is all about collecting and some of them were hidden all too well, and even with the advantage of a mechanical whirring noise to alert you to the presence of them nearby, it was still tough (one of the expansions I missed was unfairly hidden in a tunnel disguised by a bush - unfair because it was far enough away from the corridor that you couldn't hear the telltale noise! Again: cruel).

What I will say is the best part of the game is probably that part where you're equipped to search out areas you've been to before that held points of interest - perhaps a door that was the wrong colour and you needed a different beam weapon to access it, or wall that needed blasting open. It's that exploration and the opening up of your abilities that makes it so enjoyable. That does lead to the other considerable complaint I would level at the game, however: too much backtracking. At some points you do actually enjoy revisiting areas that you'd left behind hours ago in another part of the world, there's a kind of nostalgia to going back there, when you've probably only been there once before. That's because the levels are so long and windy that you have a strong sense of going deep underground or into strongholds of the enemy, and the overriding feeling of the 'Prime' games (and from what I gather about the earlier titles), is the isolation of a single lone woman going into the deeps to face untold horrors. You really get that in spades when your energy tanks are almost depleted and you're limping along hoping against hope there's a Save Station round the next corner because otherwise that last half hour or more is going to be cruelly ripped away from you and you'll have to go back to your last save. And then you stumble upon some new enemy and only have time to realise it needed a different technique to defeat before your visor blinks into oblivion like an old TV set shutting down!

I chose to play it on Hard this time, partly for the challenge, having finished it at Normal before, but also because after three games in the series I'm well versed in its style - the way you lock onto an enemy to circle-strafe them was quite unique back then. 'Zelda' had introduced it into its first 3D entry (another parallel between the two), but to make what had been 2D into 3D, they needed to tweak things a bit. This wasn't a typical shooting game like 'Goldeneye,' this was someone encased in a unique robotic suit so how you interacted with the world would be different. It's actually a little removing because that little puff-puff of gears working when you double-jump for example, or even the movement running along the floor, can feel very airy and loose, you don't feel solidly connected to anything and it is slightly disconcerting. It's different when you come down to earth with a bump, then the jar rattles through the rumble in your controller, and equally when you get shot it affects you in different ways - if it's pure fire then you hear Samus yelp, if electrical energy then the visor will crackle and obscure vision. If it's a high-powered energy weapon then vision can be completely whited out and you do get a really strong impression of being in this suit. Everything, other than being in Morph Ball mode is seen through this visor, and the graphical effects were very impressive at the time: raindrops lingering, steam temporarily fogging the display, the way a flash of light would illuminate 'your' face so you see your reflection, it was all wonderful stuff.

What I would say now in opposition to this is that while the different environments are unique there's also rather a lot of brown! Tallon is brown with green bits, the Ruins are a sandy shade of brown, the mines are a dark brown, and the architecture beneath the violent red heat or crispy snow is also, yes, brown. Maybe Nintendo was trying to subvert its kiddie image of colourful Mario worlds, but 'Zelda' managed to do that and also had much visual splendour, too. As I said before, when you get to the Mines and see them lit by the grisly internal glow of Phazon, especially once you have a suit that protects you from it and allows time to appreciate the view, it really is beautiful and something I seem to remember them expanding greatly in the sequel which was all about Phazon-infected lands I believe. While I'm griping, though, it's a shame your ship only stays in one place, something 'Prime 3' added to and enhanced the experience with. All you can do in this one is use it as a save point. Still, the game does have other graphical flourishes, too, such as creatures emitting light in darkness, the gloom of the underwater areas and of course the flashy fights. It's not limited to the area you're in, either, as you eventually supplement your standard view and scan visors with thermal detection and x-ray which adds new dimensions to gameplay. Maybe not as much as you might think, mainly for solving problems in specific areas, but still, it was another impressive addition.

It's all very well having a pretty game, but it's really all about what you do that counts, and if some areas are so dingy it can make playing in a light room difficult, the challenge still exists. I highlighted one area the game can induce tension, but the bosses are also worth mentioning. My time of a little under twenty-four hours isn't indicative of the actual total time I played for as there were sections occasionally that I had to replay a number of times before succeeding, and some of the bosses would be included in that - the Omega Pirate of the Mines is one example, but obviously the final battle(s) are the toughest, as you'd expect. Arguably Meta Ridley is much harder to beat than what comes after and it took me many attempts before I realised I needed to charge up shots to have a strong enough effect on it, but I have to say I've never liked boss fights, it's always such a chore to work out what you're supposed to do and when, annoying levels of trial and error and they often go on too long (the final battles are a case in point). Such things do irritate and appear like a last remnant of the Olden Days when games were specifically designed to be too tough to beat for most people unless you really dedicated yourself to them. They had less size, scope and power to play with and to increase the lifespan of a game it had to be nearly unplayable! Super tough end of level bosses are relics of that and it is strange that in a time when they could craft pretty large levels and pack them with puzzles and challenges they still went back to that trope: repetitive slog and an anticlimax (and why is it last levels in sci-fi games end in an organic alien world you have to traverse - made me think of 'Flashback' and 'Body Harvest').

I would suggest that if there hadn't also been so much backtracking the game's length would probably be cut in half. Once you get every upgrade and have the freedom of the corridors with the most powerful beam (Plasma), Grapple Beam, all the bombs, etc, it makes getting from A-to-B fairly simple, but it still takes time. Back when you were limited in health and abilities it could be tempting to head towards a previous Save Station so you could recoup health and ammo (missiles that is, as you have infinite power in your beams), but then you'd discover another annoying thing: enemies regenerate! It doesn't make a lot of sense to the story that these Space Pirates (snappy name...), gradually learn more about you and even imitate you later on, but still fail to learn from your rampages through their territory! The same troops and creatures reappear each time you return as if nothing had happened, and I suppose that's just one of those tropes of gaming, much like platforms that have no visible means of floating, or invisible platforms, etc. You just accept it and move on. But it's still annoying when you go through areas you've beaten and end up dead because you ran out of energy. Again: cruel, if par for the course in most games.

To weigh up we have too much backtracking, environments that aren't variable enough, a harsh approach to ultimate completion and recurring enemies. It almost sounds as if I didn't like playing it, but I certainly did. I never regretted choosing Hard as though it was practically new to me as it'd been so long since I first played it, I was already in the rhythm of the series, a veteran, so if the game was rougher with me I was okay with that and it was certainly never unplayable. I haven't even talked about the beautiful physics of being a heavy round ball, no matter that it may as well be magic since how could a grown woman squash into a small sphere like that! But it's typically Nintendo in the enjoyment of simply being a different form and the sense of movement you feel that is so different to bipedal locomotion - you could roll back and forth on a halfpipe for hours (well, minutes maybe - I certainly did when trying to get one of the missile expansions). And there's the secret bomb-based technique for boosting higher than you could from one bomb... It was a good game to revisit and though I'm slightly bitter about not achieving my 100% (maybe in another fifteen to twenty years?), and it is a game that demands a good long play time, not a ten-minute bash when the space between saves is so large, I would heartily recommend it. But don't expect too much, allow the series to grow - there's a lot to enjoy even in this first one. I may not view it as quite the classic 'NGC Magazine' rated it back in the day, but it's still a long and rewarding journey.

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