Impressions: Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
I'd like to finish the game before I do a full review, but I was so excited last night after playing Metroid Prime 3: Corruption that I just had to gush about it with you. My impressions? Unbelievably good. Granted, I have always been a huge fan of the Metroid series so I may be a little bit biased, but I was a huge fan of Zelda, too, and that didn't prevent me from telling you Twilight Princess was crap. Consider everything that made the original Metroid Prime classic: the music, atmosphere, exploration elements - everything was perfect and melded together. Multiply that by a million, and you get MP3. This is the Metroid game we all dreamt about as kids - the kind we would stretch our infinite imaginations with, filling the gaps in the story of the original NES title. The fullness and richness of the experience is amazing. I've always loved the OCD gotta-catch-em-all aspect of scanning, and exploring the vast universe Retro Studios created for us, but now MP3 has a sort of mini Xbox Achievement system, where you get tokens for performing certain tasks in game, which you can redeem for unlockable extra content. You can even earn tokens for friends, which you can then send to anyone on your Wii friend's list, and they can use said tokens for unlockables. Fantastic.
New to the Metroid Prime series is voice acting. Nintendo has been reluctant in the past to put voices into their first party games, and rightly so. Voice acting has been, as a rule, horrible in games. Only recently have we been seeing a voice acting improve with games like Bioshock, and Metroid definitely is up to par. The added narrative is slightly strange for Metroid at first, but as you play it helps flesh out the incredibly cool Sci-Fi storyline. It just adds depth to the title, and makes it feel like the first "true" Metroid game.
The Wii controls are fantastic. I am a vocal opponent of waggle-controls, but Metroid uses them to a bare minimum. As far as first person shooters go, Metroid has perfected the control scheme for the Wii Remote, just as Bioshock perfected it for the standard controller. While my wrist did start to get sore after about 4 hours of playing, it was still 4 hours of playing. Using the nunchuk for grapple abilities is a fun addition, and I didn't even resent having to move my arm more than 30 degrees at any given time. Amazing!
I'm going to give the game a bit more time. It's possible that it could suck after a while, but I doubt it. With such an amazingly epic game new to the Wii library, it really shocks me that Nintendo isn't pushing it more. Just goes to show that they really don't care about the hardcore anymore. It's ok. We can make Metroid Prime 3: Corruption our little secret.
