Metroid Prime
Apr 28, 2023 21:04:15 GMT -5
Post by anayo on Apr 28, 2023 21:04:15 GMT -5
Metroid Prime (Gamecube, 2003)
In the early 2000s my N64 wasn’t aging very well. Its 3D graphics that blew me away a few short years ago were starting to look lego-like and robotic. Human hands seemed particularly hard for the N64 to render. In 007 Goldeneye, one of my favorite N64 games, the NPCs didn't have fingers on their hands. They just had “meat mittens” with fingers painted onto them. This looked weird to me even when I got the game for Christmas in 1999.
In another N64 title, Super Smash Brothers, the final boss was the “Master Hand” - literally a disembodied glove who would try to kill you. He had fully articulated fingers. As a kid I would think, “Maybe one day graphics will be good enough for an entire character to have hands like that.”
Human faces on N64 looked really silly, too. There weren’t enough polygons for actual facial features, like cheeks, lips, eyelids, etc. A character's “face” was just a few polygons. Then they’d paint facial features on top of those using a texture map.
In some N64 games, they would make characters emote by substituting different textures for different facial expressions. The underlying geometry didn't change, but swapping out eye or mouth textures would let characters react to stuff.
This only seemed to work for toony art styles, though. For more realistic games, the characters’ faces tended to stay frozen in one permanent expression, even while they were delivering spoken lines of dialog. I guess you were supposed to use your imagination to picture their lips moving.
That’s why when I saw the first commercial on TV for Jak and Daxter for the Playstation 2, it blew me away. It meant the PS2 was powerful enough to sculpt the actual topology of characters' faces, then morph the 3D model itself during the delivery of spoken lines. Video games weren't supposed to look like this. At the time, this level of detail was closer to pre-rendered CGI. The next gen consoles were just so staggeringly beyond their predecessors that it made me feel left out.
In 2003 or so I won an online Nintendo sweepstakes. The prize was a year's subscription to Nintendo Power. So, I started getting what amounted to 90 pages of Nintendo ads in the mail each month.
This reinforced the feeling that the gaming world was moving on without me. I was also a 13 year old with no allowance or job, so the Gamecube's retail price of $150 may as well have been $150,000.
The only options I saw were to replay Banjo Kazooie or 007 Goldeneye on my N64 for the 500th time, or to find new things to play in the preowned N64 section of my nearby EB Games. If I had chosen from their S-tier N64 games, this probably would have done the trick. The trouble was, I only seemed to have about $20 at a given time, and it was never clear when I could replenish that sum after spending it. So, I would buy whatever looked the coolest while costing the least, hoping to stretch my money as far as possible. That's how I ended up with stinkers like Armorines or Turok 2.
If I had been more cognizant about my options, I would have looked more closely at the family PC my Mom kept around for my younger siblings to play edutainment titles. I suspect it was at least a Pentium II CPU with an 8 MB 3D accelerator card. This was more than enough for PC games that didn't quite measure up to Gamecube, but ran circles around the N64. But I wasn't informed enough to realize this was even an option.
I don't exactly remember what finally persuaded my parents to greenlight the purchase of a Gamecube. I do know this: I had saved up about half of the retail price. So, my Dad agreed pay for the other half. We would do this with the understanding that it was 50% Dad's and 50% mine, since there were titles he was interested in playing, too. When I ran it past my Mom, I remember her mainly being concerned that I kept my grades up and didn't let it consume my life. She said something like, “You can't play it 24/7, okay?”
We drove to the mall and came back from EB Games with the following:
- one Indigo Gamecube
- Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears (for Dad)
- Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell (for Dad)
- Sonic Adventure 2 Battle (for me)
- one 3rd party memory card
- one 3rd party controller
Then we went to Home Depot because Dad needed supplies for a project. Honestly I don't remember what we were there for. I was pinballing all over the place obsessing over playing Sonic on my new Gamecube.
Around this same timeframe, I was hearing a lot about Metroid Prime. Nintendo Power was praising it to high heaven. Metroid Prime also got a lot of storefront marketing, with posters and cardboard standees at EB Games, Wal-Mart, and similar venues, all showing an orange, metallic space warrior striking a cool pose. I'm describing Samus Aran in such generic terms because 13 year old me had no idea about Metroid on the NES or SNES. But the word on the street seemed to be that Metroid Prime was a huge deal, and that anyone with a Gamecube needed to experience it.
I bought Metroid Prime pre-owned from Blockbuster for $20. It felt awesome to get a recent AAA title for such a low price. As for what it was like to actually play it, I'm not even sure where to start, because Metroid Prime completely slam dunks anything the N64 could do. Just this opening part had me collecting my jaw from off the floor.
Just compare this to Samus Aran's appearance on N64:
Every moment had me in awe of what I was seeing. It didn't feel like technology manufactured by humans, it felt like magic. I felt like I had to get up on the rooftops with a megaphone and let everyone know about this game. One time, one of my Dad's coworkers was over at our house. I can't remember the guy's name, just that he was a bit younger than my Dad and seemed nice to me. My impression was that he seemed genuinely interested in hearing what I had to say and didn't look down on me like I was a nuisance.
I asked the coworker if he liked video games. He said yes. I asked him if he had seen Metroid Prime before. He said no. So I pulled him into my room and made him watch the opening sequence where Samus boards the space pirate frigate. The coworker seemed enthusiastic, although after a few minutes he made a beeline for the door, since he had come over to do stuff with my Dad, not see Metroid Prime.
On that same space pirate frigate, 13 year old me really liked how you could scan each dead space pirate and it would explain the circumstances of their death. “Cause of death – severing of the spinal cord.” “Cause of death – corrosive acid burns.” “Cause of death – electrocution.” I was at the same age when the Sega Genesis version of Mortal Kombat was objectively better than the SNES one thanks to the secret code for unlocking the fatalities, so this makes a certain sophomoric kind of sense.
Upon landing on the surface of planet Tallon IV, I loved how I could scan enemies and my suit's computer would explain how they fit into the local ecosystem. It left me with the impression that Metroid Prime wasn't merely a game where you were a player in a virtual world which designers had filled with enemies for the sole purpose of opposing you. Metroid Prime's “enemies” were supposed to be wildlife. It was nothing personal. I had never seen a game try to justify itself so naturalistically before. I guess you could argue it was carrying on in the tradition of Half Life (1998), but if you hadn't already gathered from my earlier acknowledgement about failing to use our family PC as a gaming platform, 13 year old me didn't know about Half Life. Metroid Prime was my Half Life.
Metroid Prime was so full of thoughtful touches that didn't have to be there, but the designers went out of their way to include them anyhow. By now everyone knows about how raindrops patter against Samus's visor, or how firing the power beam at point blank range into a wall creates a mirror image of Samus's face in the glass. But personally my favorite detail was how Samus's power-ups all had a scientific basis, or at least the pretense of one, like using thermal and x-ray optics to perceive otherwise unseen things in the environment and using these perceptions to achieve your goals. This elegantly tied in to my earlier observation about Metroid Prime's naturalistic justification for its own premise. It also lent the game a sense of thematic consistency, which felt hard-hitting and profound to me in 2003. Sadly as I write this 20 years later, this is still a rare quality in video games.
13 year old me loved reading the lore from the extinct Chozo who once lived on Talon IV, and the journal entires of the space pirates who had arrived to carry out their nefarious schemes. I got so invested in the overarching story that when the game ended, Samus had slayed Metroid Prime, and departed from the planet while the Chozo were all still dead and buried, I got upset that nothing could be done to bring the Chozo back. I earnestly wanted to see their civilization restored from ruin. This was probably my first experience with a bittersweet finale.
13 year old me was so captivated by Samus Aran and her adventures that I tried making up my own original character inspired by her. My OC was instead male, wearing a space suit closer to the black ones from Crysis (2007.) But the key difference was that instead of an arm cannon, my original character had shapeshifting metal on his forearm similar to the T-1000 from Terminator 2. Unlike the T-1000, my OC's liquid metal could actually reproduce complex machines with chemicals and moving parts. My “gameplay premise” was supposed to be that he would use his scan visor to assimilate enemy technology from afar, reproducing their tools and weapons to overcome challenges in an area. I know this is all just the derivative spitballing of a teenager trying to pay homage to something he thought was cool. My point is just to illustrate how much of an impact Metroid Prime had on me at the time.
Metroid Prime Remastered (Nintendo Switch, 2023)
Metroid Prime Remastered feels smaller and more confined than it did in 2003. In some ways it reminds me a lot of Castlevania for the NES. Both games feel long, but actually they're quite short. They just make it seem long by gatekeeping small areas so that advancement is challenging and takes a long time.
In other ways, Metroid Prime feels quaint, because it ignores the checklist all triple-A games consult these days. There is no crafting. There are no unlockable cosmetics. There is a skill tree of sorts, but it makes no effort at being an open-ended, quasi-RPG designed to make you feel like you're in control of your own destiny. You're supposed to unlock Metroid Prime's power ups in the correct pre-ordained sequence. Metroid Prime has no multiplayer modes. It makes no effort to keep you playing after the end credits. It feels unceremonious, yet confident in its own vision. Modern games rarely have such focus.
Metroid Prime's story is basically that of the movie Aliens (1986). In Aliens, Ripley goes down to an alien planet to investigate Xenomorphs, a dangerous alien species, only to realize that the authorities want to harness this species as a weapon. So, she destroys the aliens to prevent this from happening. In Metroid Prime, Samus Aran goes down to an alien planet to investigate Metroid Prime, a dangerous alien species, only to learn the Space Pirates want to harness Metroid Prime as a weapon. So, she destroys Metroid Prime to prevent this from happening. It works. I'm not complaining that it doesn't. I just found it funny that 13 year old me couldn't have picked up on this. I didn't end up seeing Aliens until age 16.
Metroid Prime's entire gameplay loop is basically this one moment in Doom (1993):
Doom would do this thing where they would place a helpful pickup just close enough for you to see, but just far enough to keep you from reaching it. This sent a message to the player conveying the need to keep exploring and reach the goal by some other, indirect way. It's tantalizing and makes the world seem deeper and more mysterious. Metroid Prime basically does this over and over again until the game ends. It works. I love it.
Metroid Prime's soundtrack is timeless. I can't perceive any changes at all since the Gamecube version, because one does not improve upon perfection. All I can really add in 2023 is that I hear some influence from Trance music I didn't notice before. There's a particular sample that sounds like somebody whistling which shows up in both Metroid Prime's “Phendrana Drifts” and the trance track “Liebe” by Ayla from 1998, apart from other general stylistic similarities:
I'm very happy that Metroid Prime got a remaster on Nintendo Switch. The overhauled graphics and widescreen support address key shortcomings that emulators couldn't. It's a joy to play in handheld mode, and even on a 4K OLED screen it looks so nice that I daresay the Switch could continue to deliver great experiences in 2023 and onward so long as development were in the right hands. The underlying game is a masterpiece. I hope this is an omen of things to come for both the Nintendo Switch and the Gamecube's library of classics trapped on original hardware.