Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

The incorruptible Duncan delivers his report

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I came fresh to the Metroid series, with the latest instalment Metroid Prime: Corruption, being my first time in the mighty morphin', bounty hunting, power armoured boots of lead character Samus Aran. My Wii is still fresh enough to have the new-console smell of Styrofoam still clinging to it, and as yet it's been a mixed bag of excellence and disappointment. The party games are all good and fine - Wii Sports or Brain Academy, etc. - it's often the company you're with that actually makes the gaming experience. The more 'hardcore' gaming has so far been less dependable. Red Steel was a poor cousin of the N64's GoldenEye, despite the vast technological advantages it should have had over its venerable ancestor. Call of Duty 3 was poorly put together, with the in-game drivers used to calibrate the Wii Remote at turns ludicrous or plain lazy. On the other hand, the Wii version of Resident Evil 4 was a brilliant piece of gaming, by far the best version of the best Res game to date. What the Wii really needed was an original, Wii-only title to be its big shiny killer app. The Wii has proven it can punch well above its graphical weight, wedged between its two HD competitors. I had to beat an old lady to death with a tire iron and have my Editor hide the body just to get hold of a Wii console - but it has lacked the Halo or the Grand Theft Auto crowd pleaser to really pull in the masses. No one covets a Wii because they absolutely have to play the new Tiger Woods franchise, the new outing by that megalomaniac mustachio'd plumber, or a new mini-game compilation. It is a testament to the strength of the Wii, or at least its marketing, that it has managed to cement so much popularity thus far without a game that shows off its abilities to the utmost. At long last the much-delayed Metroid Prime: Corruption really shows what 'The Little White Box that Could' is actually capable of.

Righty, do you want to hear the manifold reasons why this is an excellent title first, or me illogically bitching over small details and making sweeping, disparaging remarks over entire social and national groups? Of course you want to hear the bitching, but eat your positive vegetables before your bitter, dark humoured desert.

For the newcomer, Samus is an improbably slim and attractive blonde, whose taciturn nature makes the Master Chief look like a parrot with Tourettes after one glass of wine too many. Sam's calling is as an intergalactic Bounty Hunter (not that the concept of getting paid ever seems to get mentioned) who specialises in atomising the biomechanical threat of Space Pirates. To do so, she comes equipped with a space ship and a stomping great set of power armour with a cannon for a right arm. So gunplay comes easy, shoe-laces, less so. To add that ludicrous, distinctly oriental Je ne sais quios, said armour can turn Samus into a small metal sphere about a foot across that can roll about the joint at high speed, handy for escapes and hurling oneself into giant marble-run puzzles, whose elaborateness is matched only by their inexplicability. Whilst the narrative is actually pretty thin all over, it is the presentation and design that makes for an engaging experience, rather than any emotional realism or character development.

MP: C is not actually the first-person shooter the uninitiated to the series will assume that it is from the box and the TV spots. Sure, plenty of FPS games will say that they have puzzles in them, Half-Life 2 certainly made that claim, but in reality you never really had to do much more than push a heavily defended button or shove a crate as part of a physics engine showboat poorly disguised as a puzzle. MP: C may feature a lead character with a cannon instead of a right arm, but the actual experience turns out to involve roughly the same amount of Prince of Persia style hopping about and puzzle solving as it does the bullet distribution. Despite the broody visuals, the sci-fi trappings, and menacing alien design, what you have here is Zelda in big-boy metal pants. There are a lot of very close comparisons to be made between this title and The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker, right down to the exact same sound effect playing when you open a locked door using essentially the same methodology, i.e. you defeated a big bad ice guy, so now you can backtrack and open those fire doors by freezing them. Rotate the rotating thingy on the upper level, come down and push the button this reveals, go down another tier and shove over the boulder, reveal door, cue twee sound effect. This isn't a negative criticism exactly, as Windwaker is one of my all time favourite games, but the style is a little bit of a departure if you were expecting something a little more Gears of War. But just as Nintendo did with Windwaker on the GameCube, Retro Studios have taken a comparatively modest graphical engine and just squeezed every single drop of performance and goodness possible from it for your gaming enjoyment. The game's visual design is flawless, pretty enough to stand up against the PS3's HD bellowing, and finely crafted enough to even deflect all the opprobrium that should be directed at yet another game world consisting of hackneyed fire/swamp/ice/jungle themed levels. Just imagine how engaging a game world has to be to get me to backtrack through ten minutes of ice/fire world because I now have the flame/freeze power to go and melt/freeze open a locked door, and I'm actually pleased to do it and did not instead set fire to my entire home entertainment and urinate on the ashes. Yes, hep cats and hep kittens - it is better to do something well than to do something novel and bugger it up, and MP: C sticks to this formula excellently. You are unlikely to see a single game mechanic that has not been well covered by previous Nintendo related titles, and most of those in Zelda alone, but it is so well put together, with such attention to detail, that it remains highly engaging throughout.

Take for instance the process of powering up you arm cannon with new properties so you can access new parts of the map. Rather than having a faintly tedious weapon swapping procedure (heat beam, ice beam, Baileys Irish cream, whatever) your gat will simply do the required damage when pointed at the relevant object. Your interaction with the world as a whole is seamless and smooth, partly due to intelligent level design, and partly thanks to the responsive and sensitive remote drivers Retro Studios created for their game. No other Wii title has made the remote feel this intuitive and responsive in nearly any situation, and the motion controls actually do what they're supposed to do. Call of Duty 3 occasionally asked you to perform an action by moving the nunchuck away from the screen, but players soon found out that what they actually had to do to get this to register was to perform a violent mime of catching a truly enormous fish. In this title, a delicate flick of the nunchuck will cast out an energy lasso, and jerking it back will be responsively mimicked on screen to various handy effects.