Metroid Prime

Richard gets hands-on with a young lady who's certainly in the Prime of her life.

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Metroid Prime is a hard game to categorize. It is part platformer, part first person shooter, part adventure game and at times partly puzzling. The skills that you will have just practiced are lost when you land and you must now explore this world to regain your abilities and learn its hidden secrets. As you start venturing out you will soon start uncovering blocked paths that require certain skills to traverse. You'll explore further and perhaps enter a new room to pick up the powerball skill which will let you access narrow tunnels. These tunnels might lead to a new weapon that will let you unlock certain doors. These doors open up to a new suit that shields you from intense heat which in turn will grant you access to more new rooms, and so on and so forth. The games structure is one of constant exploration. More and more areas beg to be explored as you move around. This could quickly get daunting were it not for the excellent map system. At the touch of a button you can view a detailed 3D map which you can zoom, pan, and rotate to examine every nook and cranny of every room. Each room is also given a name, which I found strangely reminiscent of Jet Set Willy (look under the Banyan Tree), and these names tie in with clues that aid your search for the whereabouts of important Chozo artifacts. You may also find maps for entire sections that will let you see unexplored areas you may have missed, as well as tempting you with what you have yet to investigate.

The pacing of the game is remarkably good. Each new area and skill is introduced a bit at a time so you never feel overwhelmed or completely lost. There are rooms which you can save your progress in, and while they're not plentiful, they are frequent enough and intelligently placed so that you'll generally come across one before engaging in a boss battle. The boss battles themselves are hard and often demand you master any new item or skill you may have just picked in that section. You'll be traveling back and forth a lot but the skills you attain help speed up this process. For instance at the outset you'll only be able to jump short distances, but later on you pick up a double jump letting you move further and faster. Enemies will re-spawn in each area and also get progressively harder. To counter this you will pick up more powerful weaponry and extra energy. The different weapons are not only more potent but have their own individual characteristics, such as the ice beam which will freeze some enemies giving you a few seconds to deal that killer blow, marveling as they shatter like glass. The visuals in the game are very strong indeed. They don't quite match the quality of something like Halo, but each room is wonderfully distinctive and it never seems like things have just been copied and pasted in. The enemies, and in particular the bosses, are also very varied and have beautiful fluid motion. None of this ever impacts the frame rate and things stay as smooth as silk throughout.

The sound effects are also very strong alongside a soundtrack that changes to suit the mood of the action. The soundtrack is slow and melodic during quiet moments, heavy and urgent for fighting. As impressive as the soundtrack is it's synthesized using the GameCube hardware and after a while I couldn't help but find it sounding a bit tinny and harsh. When you consider that the next Tomb Raider game has enlisted the London Symphony Orchestra for its score, the soundtrack for Metroid Prime seems all the more weak compared with other titles. The only time you hear any speech in the game is at the very end. When it occurs it almost seems like it was lacking throughout the game because you must pick up the story by reading numerous computer logs that you've scanned. Log entries are a common and useful tool used in games and are great for layering-in sub plots but they do not carry a main narrative very well. The log book entries are so fragmented here that it makes the job all the more difficult. The story that I regaled to you earlier I learned from the manual, which of course I only looked at after playing through the game. I picked up practically none of it from the game itself except for a few names and terms.