Metroid Prime (GameCube)

Developer:

Retro

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Release Date:

2003 (2002 NA)

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Systems:

GameCube, Wii

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I'm trying to figure out what the game's moody title music reminds me of. I think it might actually be Deus Ex, but I feel like it could turn into Perfect Dark at any moment. Not a bad place for a theme to be.

This week on Super Adventures I'm playing Metroid Prime, the sequel to the legendary Super Metroid! Well, kind of. It came out the exact same day as Metroid Fusion and I think that's considered to be the older twin (it even claims to be "METROID 4" when it starts up.) So I guess this is Metroid 5 then?

It's definitely not the fifth game in the timeline as they've slotted it in between Metroid and Metroid II for whatever reason. I didn't realise the Metroid games had enough of a story to require making interquels, but that's probably because I rarely finish the things. Plus it's been six years since I've played any of them and my memory's pretty fuzzy. Though at the time this was released fans had actually been suffering through an eight year gap between games, as the series skipped the N64 era entirely. The series also skipped the Wii U afterwards, fading away again despite the run of continuous Metroid Prime sequels and spin-offs.

Developer Retro Studios were responsible for the three main Metroid Prime games but after putting out the non-HD remake compilation Metroid Prime Trilogy for the Wii in 2009 they've been keeping themselves busy making Donkey Kong Country sequels instead. Though it was announced last month that they're taking over development on Metroid Prime 4! Is that a good thing? I wouldn't know, I haven't even played this first one yet.

Okay I'm going to play Metroid Prime for an amount of time somewhere between 'barely giving it a fair shot' and 'enough to bore the hell out of everyone reading', and take screenshots along the way. There will also be writing under these screenshots because... I don't know. Maybe I like writing about video games? No, that doesn't seem right.

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Three save slots, how old school. Though I'm glad to see them, because the way this menu screen looks I thought I'd put my one of Alien Quadrilogy DVDs in by mistake.

It does have some special features, but I don't get to check them out as I don't qualify. If I beat the whole of Metroid Fusion then connected it with a link cable I could unlock the original NES Metroid game and if I beat the whole of Metroid Prime and connected Fusion I could get the Fusion suit to wear. But I don't really want to as it's kind of ugly. I expect the image gallery's also locked behind beating the game, but I'm going to leave that as a mystery.

Things I can do include altering my visor opacity, the HUD lag and the game's hint system, which aren't options you'll find in your typical game menu. Then again games like this typically keep your visor out of your face entirely (to this day I'm still not sure if Gordon Freeman's wearing his HEV suit helmet or not.)

The game begins with a bit of narration, because I'm playing the European version. The original US version doesn't have it, but the people who played that weren't missing much.

"The cosmos. In the vast universe, the history of humanity is but a flash of light from a lone star. The light from a single person should be lost in space and time, but among the stars there's one light that burns brighter than all others: the light of Samus Aran. Her battles extend beyond her life and etch themselves into history. Here, another chapter of that history will be written."

It's official: Samus Aran is the most important person who has ever lived in the Smash Bros. multiverse. There's apparently another narration hidden on the disc that no one ever got to hear, supposedly recorded by legendary voice actor Jennifer Hale, which fills in some of the backstory. Hale also apparently provided the in-game voice (well, the miscellaneous grunts of pain) of Samus Aran, but the unused narration talks about her in the third person so it doesn't seem like it's Samus herself actually talking there.

Anyway in the final game all we're told is that an unidentified distress beacon has been tracked to a derelict space vessel in orbit above Tallon IV, so Samus has flown over to check it out, looking just as she did on the box art to Metroid II and Super Metroid. Once she's somersaulted out of her ship the camera does a few orbits of her to check her out, then flies into the back of her head GoldenEye 007 style.

Alright here I am, looking out at the outer hull of a spaceship covered in weird orange lines with a whole lot of HUD in my face. Always nice to find a game that gets straight to the action without a half hour of unskippable intro first (though the intro is unskippable).

But hang on, why does Samus walk like a tank? The left stick moves me forwards and backwards and turns me left and right, like I'm playing Doom with default keys. Well, it's more like GoldenEye I suppose seeing as I'm steering the crosshair, with the camera only turning when it has to.

I can use the left analogue stick to aim and strafe, but not both at the same time, as holding 'R' lets me look around without moving and 'L' lets me move while locking my view to a target. The C stick just has to sit this one out I guess, though I don't really understand why. Maybe it's an attempt to simplify things for Metroid fans who've never played a first person game before, maybe it's an attempt to make me tear my hair out and cry, I don't know.

I got through the 'lock on and shoot four targets' part of the tutorial and then it moved on to teaching me about switching visor mode and scanning targets. So here I am a little bit inside the ship, scanning a Space Pirate with severe back problems. It's like using the tricorder in that Star Trek game, except with windows coming up all over the screen showing me stuff. Which I appreciate. I also appreciate it snapping me out of scan mode if I hit the fire button, which is the one I'll be pressing if I start getting shot at and panic.

It seems like Space Pirates came in and attacked this research lab, then something came in and attacked the Space Pirates. Judging by the injuries it probably wasn't the little parasite bug things I found around the body when I came in (though I locked on and shot them anyway).

I saw a few more of the little parasite creatures heading down this vent (they were hard to miss as there was a cutscene), so against all logic and sanity I'm going to find the crawl button and then head in there myself to investigate.

Before that though I want to mention a couple of things about this hallway. First, that blue hexagon door is gun-activated like the ones in the earlier games (or maybe it just chose to surrender when it realised that it was outmatched). Second, it's very flat. I mean there's plenty of detail in the textures and there's pipes sticking out everywhere, but there aren't a whole lot of moody shadows to give it depth. The light sources aren't really casting light they're just tinting the vent blue.

Samus isn't really into crouching, but I used her morph ball ability to roll through the vent and got a full map of the ship for my trouble. The camera switches to third person mode when she's a ball, which makes sense as this mode's more about navigation than violence and you can see where you're going better when you can also see you. Well in theory anyway, I've actually got very little say in where the camera's pointed now as the C-stick still refuses to be helpful.

Third person view also makes sense because what's the point of turning into a ball if you can't see that you've done it? First person view in ball mode would either be like driving a tiny car from bumper-cam or taking a ride in an invisible washing machine; either way it kind of takes the fun out of it.

Not much need to study the map screen right now though, as mysterious vent aside there's only really one way to go. Plus I've got a little mini map in the top right corner and it's actual 3D! I figured it was showing me my equipped weapon or something at first, until I got further into the ship and saw rooms and hallways on it. In my defence, how many first person shooters give you a 3D map on the HUD? None are jumping to my mind.

Anyway, here I am in one of those rooms doing a bit of first person shooting against a Space Pirate survivor. Only a little bit though, mostly the strafing bit, as the game's handling all the aiming for me. Seems to me that I'm missing out on half my gameplay here, but then maybe I'm more fond of aiming than some players. I don't even have auto-aim turned on when I play console games. Not because I'm particularly good at them, but pulling off a headshot brings me joy and I feel that if moving a crosshair over a target is what the game's about then I should be the one that does it.

Taking this guy down took a fair few shots and cost me some health, but fortunately the ammo is infinite and he left me an purple energy orb worth 10 HP when he died. Just like in the classic games!

Definitely something going on in this place, and the game is eager for me to scan some computers to learn what that might be.

Turns out this research in this lab was all about "infusing phazon", whatever that means. But scanning one of the computers inadvertently turned off a turret waiting to ambush me on the other side of the room, so that worked out. It's weird though that scanning an object also activates it, so I only find out what a button does after I've pressed it.

For instance, I had no idea this console was going to activate the metallic sphere door lock. I'd better head back and see if the scientists left any of their giant metal ball keys lying around for me to swipe. (If I wasn't bright enough to work this puzzle out myself there's a holograph of Samus' morph ball projected from the lock that makes it obvious). 

I'm glad there's no cost to using the morph ball mode. My missile launcher costs missiles to use, but the gun and the morph ball are free. Even the morph ball form's three bombs recharge, so for once the bombs aren't sold separately!

The game put two turrets on the other side of the metallic sphere door to blast me when I rolled inside! What I should've done was immediately stand up, lock on to a turret, and send a missile its way. What I actually did was panic.

I tried to roll back into the other room to get a wall between me and the deadly bolts of death but the awkward third person camera left me spinning around looking for the door. So I switched back to Samus mode and worked on getting myself facing the turrets again so that my lock on would lock on to them.

I blasted them both in the end, then used my charging effect from my charge blast move to suck in the missile ammo they dropped (which is a clever feature). But I didn't come out of the room of surprise doom with much health; only 40/99 energy remaining. I'm going to have to be extra careful with the next set of enemies to make sure I kill them and collect their health without throwing away any more of mine.

Seriously? Right after the turret ambush room I get the boss fight room? Isn't it traditional to give the player a couple of health kits before a tough fight?

The game helpfully told me that I can use 'B' while I'm locked on to dash to the side but I'm struggling to get the hang of it. Turns out that the best way to learn is not through intense life-threatening pressure. I've at least worked out that I want to fire between the rotating blue forcefields, not at them, and scanning the creature revealed that her weak point is her mouth. You know, the bit the atomic breath is coming out of that any sane person would be trying to get away from.

I am chipping away at her, damage is being dealt, but she's kicking my ass faster than I'm shooting her face. Whatever I do I seem to lose health whenever she fires and I don't have much left.

Well I saw that coming. Though I was surprised to find that the death screen is significantly less dramatic than the Super Metroid one where all her clothes explode.

Wait, "Continue from last save?" What last save? I haven't found a save room yet! Oh for fuck's sake.

Seems that I'm getting put back at the start of the bloody game again. Probably for the best really, as it seems I could do with going back through the tutorial again and learning how to shoot straight. Well, learning how to step left and right anyway.

20 MINUTES LATER

Turns out that there was a save room next to the turret ambush room next to the boss room! They could've made that a bit more obvious. I didn't notice the door at all the first time around, possibly because I never look at the mini map.

The save machine doesn't look too healthy for me with those lasers coming out of it, in fact they look more useful for slicing than for saving, but I can't argue with the results. In fact it even refilled my energy, which is a big help seeing as those two turrets destroyed me just as thoroughly as they did the first time I got this far. So that's a good omen for the boss fight next door.

Time for Parasite Queen vs. Samus Aran, round 2.

ONE BOSS FIGHT LATER

Turns out the boss fight is piss easy if you use charged shots, I lost just 7 health this time. But it was one of those bosses that blows the whole base up when they die and now I need to evacuate in a hurry. This is all the movie Alien's fault. Not just the timer, all of it.

I had 7 minutes, now I have less, but all the exits from this room have been blocked by falling room so I'm a little stuck at the moment. Man, I hope it's not expecting me to bomb every inch of floor to open a secret passage because there's a lot more floor space to cover when the floor's 3D.

Though a 3D level requires a 3D map to properly view it and this one is a work of art. It's one of the finest maps I've ever seen in a first person shooter, partially because I rarely ever see them anymore. Or ever really. I do remember Jedi Knight having a 3D map but this one's far better, partly because it's not trying to show every bit of geometry so it's actually clear and readable instead of being a complicated mess (and partly because it reminds me of The Crystal Maze). It's so good in fact, that it even lets me use the forbidden C-stick to move it around. Though if it could just show me the way out that'd be cool.

Oh hang on, I only had to take a few more steps forward for a scripted explosion to blow open part of a pipe, giving me a new exit into the spaceship's waste processing system. Which is right up on my list of places I wanted to visit, just above "Biotech research area". Seriously though, never go to biotech research areas, especially on spaceships. Most of the time all that's going on there is boring science work and if anything exciting does happen it's probably something that's best to hear about from a safe distance away.

SOME PIPES LATER

I kind of feel like I'm playing one of the Jedi Knight games now, making my way through the inner workings of a ship. I can't tell if this is a trash compactor or a combustion chamber or what, but there's a big piston type device in front of me and it seems kind of dangerous.

At first I waited for it to move back, then raced to the opposite end of the pipe, but it was a dead end. So I think I'm supposed to follow it down to its end instead. Well that's what I'm going to do at least and I just hope I find a second exit down there before it runs out of down and switches back to moving up again. Though if this turns out to be the plunger in a giant pinball table, Sonic Spinball style, that could be cool.

You know what else would've been cool? A save room after the boss fight, so that I won't have to fight it again if this ends badly. The game's trying to turn me into a nervous wreck.

Hey look who I've found in a cutscene! It's my old buddy Ridley the Space Dragon! He's looking very cybernetic right now, but I wouldn't know if that's a new thing or not.

The game asked me to do some grappling here using the 'L' trigger on hooks hanging from the ceiling to cross a fairly harmless and extremely shallow chasm, but now might not be the best time for a tutorial seeing as I have two minutes left before the ship explodes! I find I'm better at following instructions, taking in new information and performing simple tasks when I'm not stressing out over a time limit.

I managed to reach the airlock, but Samus got hit by an explosion and it blew pieces of her suit off revealing a slightly smaller suit beneath them! I've never liked those ridiculous spherical shoulder pads of hers but now that they're gone I realise she looks much better with them than without them. She looks a lot like she did in Metroid 1 actually and she's been depowered to match. Yep, the game made me take time out of my busy escape to learn how to use a grappling device that it took away from me just seconds later.

Well I've done it, I've beaten the prologue! And seeing as I've already gotten to play around with the suit upgrades you collect later I might as well call it a day and write up a conclusion.

Though, on the other hand... I kept playing Super Metroid for ages after answering a distress call, exploring a research station, meeting Ridley, escaping before the place self-destructed, and then following him to a nearby planet, so it's only fair I continue with this for a bit too I guess.

Damn, I chased Ridley down to Planet Daikatana! It's just like level one of Daikatana, all green and rainy and miserable, and it's even got the waterfalls. If I come across any oversized insects or mean little frogs I'm going to seriously reconsider playing this any further.

I'm also kind of regretting playing the GameCube version now, as I'm sure that Metroid Prime Trilogy on the Wii looks a lot better, with its remastered graphics running on more powerful hardware. Or at least less flat and indistinct.

Metroid Prime Trilogy (Wii)

Oh. I guess not!

The updated version in Metroid Prime Trilogy does support widescreen though, expanding the field of view instead of just cropping the top and bottom of the screen. I think it really helps as original Metroid Prime seems to suffer from a bit of tunnel vision. The HUD does get stretched on the Wii version, but I don't think it looks that weird. Also they changed the controls so you can look and walk at the same time! Though it uses the Wiimote to aim which I'm not all that keen on either. It's not very comfortable for me.

Anyway there's exits all over this surprisingly square block of level for me to check out, but the first thing I did was jump into the water to check out the waterfall. There was nothing behind it! No secret cave, no hidden items. I'm sure that breaks some kind of video game regulation. I love the way the water dripped off the visor when I jumped out though, and how was quickly replaced with rain drops, so I'll let it off. It's funny how dated the game can look in some places and how great the graphics are at other times.

CHOZO RUINS WEST

Lil' gits leaping out of the sand, thinking that they can surprise me. All they are to me is a renewable source of free health.

I've been going around and exploring, running into dead ends and doors I can't open yet, but my suit's computer has just pinpointed the source of the ground shaking on my map and identified the origin as being a 'hive totem', so I guess I'm heading there now. Not that I want to go to a hive.

Hang on, I can see shadows here! So this game engine can do pre-calculated lightmaps when it feels like it. It certainly helps to give this area some depth.

I went through some ruins, shot some enemies, got past some lasers and now here I am in the hive totem room. I know it just looks like a brown mess in this screenshot (and in the game), but I'm in the centre of a large room filled with acid, trying not to accidentally walk off this tiny island of safety while I'm shooting at the insects flying around in circles around me.

They've got a pattern: eventually one of them starts hovering on the spot and makes the "I'm gonna charge at you now" noise, which is my cue to slowly turn to get them in view so that I can use my lock on and blast them. Once all the insects are down, I get to shoot that machine on the right for a bit, then it does a thing and the next wave of insects comes out. Gotta admit, it's getting a bit repetitive now. Still, at least it's better than Daikatana.

The hive totem turned out to be a missile launcher for my suit! These Space Pirates sure like to set up base in ruins full of ancient suit upgrades only compatible with their arch-nemesis' trademark power armour, not that I'm complaining.

With the missile launcher upgrade I can now open those locked doors I've been coming across. Plus I found an energy tank in the next room that doubled my max health! There was also a hole in there, but it's too small to get through without my missing morph ball ability. The game could've just let me enjoy having 1% acquired items for a bit, but nope it had to immediately throw another dead end in my face.

At least I found a save room on the way back out, so my negligible progress is now safe.

TEN MINUTES OF EXPLORATION LATER

I went searching all over the Chozo Ruins area, looking for locked doors to shoot missiles at, but it turns out I should've just gone next door. I've got a good feeling that's the crucial morph ball upgrade up there, behind a wall that just sprung up.

The game figured it'd be fun to lock me in a Serious Sam style ambush situation and fill the room with enemies to shoot at. Though unlike in Serious Sam, here I've got unlimited ammo, the dead monsters are dropping 10 health pick ups for me, and aiming is optional (though I'm encouraged not to if I want to be able to strafe around them).

It wasn't long before the waves of bugs ran out and as the champion of this arena I was finally allowed to go up and collect my prize.

Oh come on, a boss fight? I want to go up and collect my bloody prize!

I'm grateful for the reminder of how to dash though, as I'd totally forgotten. Maybe this time I'll actually get the hang of it, and hopefully soon as he's one of those boss enemies that likes to charge at you.

His nose reflects all my shots but his ass is a glowing weak point so I think I know what to do here. Weirdly it won't involve dodging out of the way at the last second so that he slams into a wall and gets stuck/dazed, because he doesn't do that.

With the boss down I was finally able to collect the morph ball ability. I was expecting something to come and run off with it so that I'd have to fight another room of enemies first, but nope it is mine now. Even better, the game actually shows you how the bloody thing works!

Turns out that Samus curls up and the two sides of the shell come together around her.

I've always wondered what was going on with that thing. Did she shapeshift into a sphere? Did it work like a poké ball? The answer is that she tucks her knees in and keeps her head down. I'm genuinely amazed that this game actually answered that mystery for me. Now I just need to find a Pokémon game that explains how poké balls work.

First though I need to work out how to get back to that save room I found so I'm in no risk of ever losing my hard-earned ball power. Well unless I get blown up in a cutscene again, or start playing a sequel.

Now that I have the morph ball power up I've been checking back on dead ends around the Chozo Ruins to see if any have small gaps I can roll through.

This room looks promising, though I'm a little put off by the floor being acid. Seems like an obvious clue that I should stay clear of the place until I get my acid-proof waders on. Unless it's actually the path to the acid-proof suit and I need to quit being a cowardly baby. Either way I'm sure that jumping in and then out again onto that island over there isn't going to kill me, just hurt a whole lot.

Well I got across the acid relatively intact and discovered a hole in the floor leading somewhere mysterious. Seemed like the smart thing to do was to drop into it, so I did, and then I had to watch as Samus burned to death in a pit of acid. Well I watched the health meter go down anyway; Samus was obscured by the floor she was stuck under at the time.

That was kind of mean of the game I reckon, but the message has been received. I'll leave the acid zone until I'm acid proof. In fact I'll backtrack to the Daikatana zone and see if there's any missile doors or morph ball gaps there.

TALLON OVERWORLD

I used the power of missiles and morph ball to reach this underwater area!

Acid's a bit of a problem for me, water not so much. I can hang around underwater indefinitely, just watching fish swim by, because: spacesuit. If I'm not going to run out of air on the hull of a space vessel then I can handle a trip underwater just fine. The air on this planet might not even be breathable for all I know.

Sadly my trip to the bottom of this pool turned out to be entirely pointless as I couldn't jump high enough to get back out on the other side and Samus swims about as well as you'd expect from someone wearing heavy power armour. I kept trying for a couple more minutes, then cancelled my Subnautica expedition and went off exploring again instead.

IMPACT CRATER

I found a place and got a thing!

It's the Artifact of Truth and it's the first of twelve, apparently. A message popped up telling me to scan the Totems in this area for clues on where to find the others, which honestly doesn't sound like something that'd be much fun for me. I have been scanning things along the way though, like interesting looking objects, writing etched onto the walls, log entries and stuff. Sometimes I even read the scan results, as that's where a lot of the game's story seems to be hidden.

Turns out that ship I was on at the start of the game was actually a Space Pirate frigate full of Space Pirate experiments. So they hadn't actually boarded the vessel and killed the scientists in an act of space piracy, they were the scientists! Maybe they should stop calling themselves Space Pirates to avoid future misunderstandings like this.

CHOZO RUINS

I got a message on my suit telling me that War Wasp activity is high in the Burn Dome (marked by a question mark), so I ran back to the Chozo Ruins elevator and I'm heading straight over there now! Well, I'm working on it at least. I've decided that deactivating this War Wasp is my goal for the night and I'll quit taking screenshots once it's done. If I can get it done.

The orange areas are places I've been already, the blue areas were added from a map I picked up, so I just have to figure out which of the blue paths is going to get me to where I want to be. Hey I just realised that I never did check out what's on the other side of that morph ball tunnel back at the hive totem room.

Well I've found a side view bit where I get to drive my ball around and ride these little lifts. Not all that interesting, but I like that the game's still throwing new things at me.

Though I'm getting a little tired of every area having two or three exits to it, which each have two or three exits, and so on. Or two exits and an elevator in this case. All these doors are just trying to lure me off track and distract me! The map says the door on the left is the one that's going to take me to the War Wasp so I'll go that way.

Well the door on the left led to some kind of magnetic rail that required a 'spider ball' ability to climb and the door on the right took me to an energy tank, so I guess my only option is to go down the elevator. Nice of the game to tell me what power up I was missing instead of leaving me to wonder by the way.

MAGMOOR CAVERNS

The elevator's taken me to a new area altogether so I'm definitely going in the wrong direction now but at least I'm headed somewhere new. Maybe even somewhere with a spider ball power... oh crap, my health is disappearing! Bad room!

This is just like being in the acid all over again, except the whole room is acid. Wait, the acid room, I didn't even check to see if there was another exit in there! I just jumped down the first hole I saw and gave up when I got burned. Right, I'm heading back to the elevator.

CHOZO RUINS

There was another door leading out of the acid room! Now I'm making progress... except not really, because the morph ball ledge on the left is blocked by boxes and I don't have any bombs to clear the path.

"Not yet, come back later" is this game's core message.

I have a feeling this room's for later as well. I mean I can jump up on those platforms, and I can survive getting knocked into the acid whenever a vicious rude plant tentacle shoots out of the wall and shoves me off, but I can't seem to find the two final runic symbols switches needed to open the gate on the other side.

It's annoying because I'm so close to that Burn Dome now that I can practically smell the War Wasp! Not that I know what a War Wasp smells like. I don't even know what a regular wasp smells like. Plus I'm wearing a helmet and breathing my own air supply so I'm not being exposed to any odours. The important point I'm getting to is that I'm right outside the place now so I've pretty much ran out of alternative paths.

Oh hang on, turns out a room I passed through along the way has lots of ledges around the outside that I didn't notice. Time for more first person platforming, yay!

Well I made it into the Burn Dome and it's not entirely what I was expecting. I figured that I'd have to fight a giant wasp, when really I'm fighting this spinning flame thrower device (plus any stray wasps that wander down from the hive in the ceiling).

The trouble is that the flames are spinning around faster than I can run and I keep getting toasted. I might just have enough health to tank the damage with after collecting two extra tanks, but I wish I could figure out a way not to. Maybe the morph ball can move faster; I could change form, roll to safety, change back, get a few shots in, change into a ball again...

Well it was a nice idea, but it didn't work out and I still took a ton of damage. I eventually figured out that I could just jump over the flames, but by then it was too late... I'd pretty much already won. And I got my morph ball bomb ability back as a reward! I'll get those massive shoulder pads back yet.

Now where the hell was that room with the boxes that needed blowing up?


CONCLUSION

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GameCube discs are really small. Really small. I mean I knew this already, but when I opened the box I realised I'd forgotten just how tiny they are.

It's always seemed pretty obvious to me that I wasn't going to like Metroid Prime, that's the main reason it's taken me until 2019 to finally play it. I finally gave the original Metroid platformers a fair chance to win me over a few years back and found that I liked them more than I expected to, but playing a first person shooter with a single analogue stick has always seemed to me like a quick way to banish my soul into a dimension of infinite frustration. Plus I'm a fan of lining up headshots in my first person shooters, so a lock-on button and enemies that soak up hits is the opposite of what I'm after.

But to my great annoyance I found that the controls weren't actually a deal breaker for me. I really missed that right analogue stick sure, but as much as I hate to say it I got used to not using it. In fact I think I preferred the GameCube controls to the Wii controls in the end, because even though using a Wiimote let me aim and move at the same time like in every other decent FPS ever made, it also accurately simulated what it's like to hold a gun arm up in front of you for hours. My arm was already aching enough after the prologue on the Space Pirate frigate. Plus insects and creatures burrowing out of the ground aren't the type of enemies you want to bother manually aiming at anyway. A bigger frustration was the slow turning and floaty crosshair, as you can't lock onto an enemy if you're not facing it.

The retro arsenal seemed like something that would put me off as well, as so far my selection of weapons has been either a sci-fi energy blast or a sci-fi energy blast they call a missile, and there was no hope it'd ever give me something as solid as a sniper rifle or even a shotgun. It wouldn't even give me the satisfaction of hitting a reload button! But combat is all about holding the lock-on button and tapping the A button until everything on screen is dead, with a bit of strafing if there's room, and infinite energy bolts suit that task just fine. The weapons are... fine.

I was much more keen on the retro music though; it was great hearing those old Smash Bros. tunes again. The graphics, I'm not sure about. The game reminded me a bit of 2003's Unreal II so I suppose its visually of its time. It's got that same sort of 'Those are nice detailed sci-fi textures but where are the shadows? Oh hang on, there's some in this room over here' look to it. The art design elevates it a bit though and it definitely looks less plain than some of the other shooters of the pre-Doom 3 era. Plus I love the look of that 3D map. I love the fact that it even has a map, especially considering that it's absolutely bloody essential.

It's even considerate enough to mark the next objective on there occasionally so you're not as entirely lost, though it leaves it up to you to find your own way there. All the dead ends and backtracking should've gotten demoralising for me, but there were always so many other places for me to try next that I was happy to stick with it. In fact I'm being tormented by the temptation to put the game back on again just so I can turn some more blue areas to orange.

We've had plenty of proper open world first person shooters since, but this more like a very large Doom level where you need to collect a new skill to get through to the next area instead of a red keycard. Actually it's like Hexen's hub done right. It's a bit Dark Souls actually, with the separate areas each with their own elaborate set of winding paths (linked with shortcuts) that eventually lead to boss fights. Basically what I'm trying to say it's that it's a Metroidvania, believe it or not, and a surprisingly similar one to Super Metroid. Except here you're shooting 3D spiky things crawling on 3D platforms in 3D! I kind of see why people like this game so much, as in that respect they nailed it.

At this point I feel comfortable in saying that Metroid Prime was probably the best first person shooter sequel to a platformer since Duke Nukem 3D... unless you feel that GoldenEye 007 is obviously a sequel to James Bond: The Duel, in which case it was the best since that. Either way it did a much better job of bringing its franchise into 3D than Castlevania 64 did. Plus it's not total crap, so it can have a star:

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Thanks for reading all of those words! Unfortunately I've used them all up now so next time all you'll be getting from me is various grunts of pain.

Also I'm a big fan of comments so if you leave one for me in the box below I'll definitely appreciate it. Unless it's rubbish, then I won't.