Why I Stopped Playing Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

I should say that I'm a pretty huge Metroid fan--if I start getting videogame-related tattoos I'm going to get a little Metroid tattooed somewhere--and that Prime 1 is regularly featured on any Top Ten lists I make--it had a tight set of controls, beautiful environments, a gigantic, breathing world, some truly terrifying boss fights, and some of the best integration of story and gameplay I've ever seen--it told a relatively detailed story without a single line of dialogue, without any cutscenes. The only cutscenes in the game were aesthetic--flyovers of vistas and things like that, to show how cool the world was. The translation of the 2-d game into 3-d was pretty much flawless.

Prime 2 was a couple of steps back--there weren't really any significantly new items to add, and some of them--the light and dark beams--seemed missteps. I'm sick to death of light-and-dark-world games, and the whole "bubble of safe space" got old. really. fast. Most damningly, there were cutscenes and dialogue--rather than getting a story after-the-fact from logs and computer screens, we're narrated the fall of the Luminoth race by a character--much less effective--it gave us more moments in the game where we weren't playing. But it was still a solid game, and I've often said that if that had come out first I would have liked it as much as I did Prime 1, and the fight against the Ing Emperor ranks as one of my personal most intense boss fights of all time.

And now here's Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, to put a black mark on the series.

And it really sucks, because the beginning, I was pretty much loving--it was quite intense and extremely tightly-focused--you catch your breath a second, and then something explodes. You take care of it, and then something else explodes. That's how a game should be--there shouldn't be any wandering, any moments were we can just putz around the gameworld--we should always have a goal in mind. (Of course I hate sandbox games, so.) And there are some amazing setpieces--one involving Ridley that stands out as one of the top moments in any Metroid game.

And then, things just kind of...fall apart.

There are a TON of cutscenes in the game, and about a half-dozen other characters. They're decently-acted, and they've all got their own fun personalities, but...Metroid to me is about being completely alone, in space, on a planet where everything wants to kill you. The game is a pretty obvious homage to Alien--the tagline to which is the brilliant "In space, no one can hear you scream." Metroid should be dark and unfriendly...having Mission Control give you tips on where to go next is kind of missing the point.

But what really got my goat about the game where two bits that I just dealt with. In one, you're trying to destroy a turret that those lovable rascals the Space Pirates have set up. So there's a control underneath it that you use to turn it off/blow it up/whatever. When you enter the room, a pair of SPs set up a trio of locks which you have to deactivate in order to hit the control. You've got to fight the pirates in the room while you climb up to each lock in turn; once all three locks are deactivated, you can go underneath and destroy the turret. Okay, fine. Only problem is first of all, the space pirates are infinitely spawning--every so often, two more appear. Which is fine as well--there should be something more than a simple climbing puzzle here. Where the puzzle fails is the fact that the SPs are able to reactivate any locks that you've deactivated. SO not only do you have to master the jump--which isn't hard, but if you're in a firefight your time is split between jumping accuracy and shooting accuracy--but you've got to babysit everything you've done. Quickly kill the Pirates, go to the next lock, deactivate it, kill the new pirates, go to the next, and repeat. What should have been a quick little setpiece ended up taking me a good fifteen minutes because the enemies kept undoing what I'd done. It's not always possible to take the Pirates out from your perch at another lock--the way the room is laid out, the turret blocks at least one of the locks, so if a Pirate is over there, you've got to make your way over to that side and defeat him before he locks the turret again.

I got through that one okay, but I completely gave up on the boss of the area. He's got four zones where he takes damage, each covered by a sort of shield. You use your normal weapon to destroy the shield, then use a special charge attack to completely destroy the weak point. Said charge attack sucks up a full tank's worth of energy. I've got a total of five tanks at this point of the game, and that's with discovering some of the hidden ones out of my way--I'm a decent Metroid player so I'm pretty sure I've found nearly all of the ones available to me at this time--I wonder how many an "average" player would have. Basically this means that--assuming that my attacks completely destroy each weak spot before the timer on the special attack counts down--I've got just enough energy to destroy the enemy, if I don't really take any damage from him. The immediate solution would be to destroy each shield, charge up the special attack, and let him have it--it's completely possible to destroy a weak spot entirely and still have charge on the special attack--except for a few things. After you destroy a weak spot, the boss puts up a shield which can only be destroyed by bombing it--an attack you have to be out of special mode to do. Also, the boss is capable of recharging his shields, so it's quite likely that your work on that will be in vain. The structure of the fight is such that you pretty much need to concentrate on one spot at a time. And likely while all of this is going on, you're taking damage, and you don't have enough health in order to charge your attack. Most bosses have little crates around the room or some other way of getting a slight charge to your health--this one really doesn't. (One of his attacks, he throws something at you you can shoot, but I didn't get anything more than a health nummie which restores 10 energy...out of 100 per tank. You've got to do this ten times, then, without taking any damage, in order to get an extra charge attack...and this attack is one of his rarer ones.)

At this point I looked at myself in the mirror and said, self, this game you're playing is intent on unraveling every stitch you put in. You're not having fun with it. Let's put it away and play a good game.

So much as it pains me to say it, I think I'm going to stop playing Metroid Prime 3.

If the controls weren't awful, I wonder if I'd feel the same way--I can picture the game on the Gamecube, using Gamecube controls...and I think that'd be a pretty sweet game. It's the fault of the Wii controls, really. There are several different options for sensitivity and locking and all of that, and none of them felt really tight enough--my cursor kept going way over to the edge of the screen, getting stuck beyond the border, not going exactly where I wanted it to. The controls seemed a poor emulation of PC FPS controls--mouse to aim and shoot, keyboard to move forward and strafe. But I'm not playing on a PC--I'm playing with an analog stick. Prime 1's control of having the analogue go forward and turn was infinitely preferable to this. If I'm going to play an FPS, I'm going to play one--but this is a Metroid game, dammit.

But honestly, I can't say I could do a better job--given what the Wiimote is capable of and the context of Metroid, I'd probably come up with the same scheme. I don't really have any other ideas for it--although, if the nunchuck were used for turning and forward/back, and you could strafe with Z and the nunchuck, then maybe we could use the Wiimote solely as a light gun? I think that control scheme would work better, and it's a shame that Corruption couldn't have used it. The game got uniformly excellent reviews, which is another reason I'm sick of most gaming sites--they're too complacent--and I was really hoping this one would be good. (It's one of the reasons I bought a Wii, and along with Mario Galaxy [which was AWESOME!], one of the two games I bought with the system.) It's a shame that the games ends up standing as an example of what not to do.

Fitness

Due to Miracles, I snagged a copy of Wii Fit.

I popped by my local Gamestop cause I was waiting for a friend at the Starbux next door. A woman was in there picking up her preorder; she was standing at the register rummaging through her bag for a gift card.

"Hey," I said to the guy. "Would you laugh if I asked if you had an extra copy of that?"

He smiles. "Ordinarily I would, but someone just canceled her pre-order, so we've got one."

The woman smiles and high-fives me. "I'm not even buying this for my kids," she says. "It's for me."

"Yeah," I say. "I figure maybe I'll drop a couple of pounds."

I played for about a half hour and the game is made of painful, which is all us masochists ask from an exercise program. I used to do yoga before I started college--from a video, cause I couldn't afford classes at the time--and it's funny because intellectually I know I used to be able to do these poses but since it's been about seven years, I just dont' have those muscles.

Some of the poses are relatively hard--I live in an attic apartment and there's slanty ceilings on one side and a ceiling fan on the other, which makes some of the arm-raising exercises pretty interesting. It's good to cheat for things like the leg extensions and the tree pose, which my oddly attractive trainer scolded me about ("You're not strong enough for this exercise yet," he says, and it's like, jeez, man, I bet eighth grade graduation pool parties weren't a horror for you, I bet you never clawed at your own chest and stomach because you were so. goddamn. fat. and. ugly. and. you. hated. yourself. Why am I so sure? Because you're made of polygons)--my balance ain't good enough yet to stand on one leg. (Let's not talk about the dreaded "stand still" test.)

I will join the parade of fat folks that the software calls obese, with a BMI in the low 30s--that's what being 5'7 and 200 pounds makes you. I'd *love* to be a sweet 150, but the software won't let me lose any more than 22 pounds. I favor my left side slightly as far as my posture goes--that might make sense because I'm left-handed--and I am so, so goddamn tired.

From a gaming standpoint, while it's a phenomenon, I don't know if there's necessarily anything to say--you can't analyze Wii Fit in the same sense that you can analyze Killer7. It's not so much a game as it is a piece of software. And we could turn that into a larger point--but it's not one I'm interested in making.

There ain't nothin' more to say: everyone's posting fitness diaries and critiques of the BMI system and stuff like that, anything else I'd have to say would be filler. I just wanted to brag about my good fortune, I guess.

Garcian Smith, Sinnerman

Killer7 is sort of one of my favorite games. I consider most of it to be near-unplayable--it's not a fun experience by any means. And it's pretty much the most terrifying game I've ever played--something about it just gets to me on a very fundamental level. I frankly don't think I have it in me to play it again, now that I know what I'm up against, what I'd have to go through. But it's rare for a work to still feel so brutal three years after playing it, and it's a work that's like nothing else--all of its aspects are uniquely itself. There'll be assholes who snark about the fact that the plot is incomprehensible and that means The Game Is Bad, but frankly it reminds me a LOT of David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE (another work that's sort-of one of my favorites that I'd like to see again but am daunted by cause I know what I'm up against): I can't follow the plot of INLAND EMPIRE if there even is one, but I can follow the emotions and the mood of the story--which is really the point. You don't know exactly what Laura Dern is dealing with, or why, but the ending, in which a group of tertiary characters dance to a lip-sync of Nina Simone's "Sinnerman" while Dern relaxes, smiling, is one of the most cathartic endings of all time. Killer7 is primarily a story about acceptance of responsibility for one's sins, and it features a similiarly cathartic and disturbing scene on a rooftop as its ending: Garcian Smith breaks down with the guilt and the weight of his transgressions: much like Dead Man Walking, the goal is not to Set Things Right--both Dead Man Walking and K7 are set in worlds where immoral acts cannot be undone or righted--but to accept that wrong has been done.

It's necessary that there's another chapter after the ending of Killer7--an epilogue of sorts--where you get to choose whether Japan or the US should be destroyed. As counterpoint, a repeat of the ending of Chapter 1 is played, featuring a never-ending battle between two men that the game pretends are the incarnations of Good and Evil. (Morality is much more complex than that in the game, but I don't feel like discussing that bit here.) There will always be war, the game says. There will always be pain, and sin, and fighting, and struggle: and all we can do is accept our part in it. To be redeemed is not to avoid sin: in this game's world, an avoidance of sin is impossible because no one is innocent. To be redeemed, instead, is to admit to one's portion of sin.

The rest of the plot is noise. All of the political manipulations and contortions the plot goes through are to set up that choice between the US and Japan. For that choice to mean anything, one needs to be physically drained, almost physically ill when making it. To make us physically ill, the game sets up a series of punishing and disturbing scenes which we can't make sense of. The entire game is a psychic attack which is simply context for that choice. It is an assult--the horrific laugh of the Heaven Smiles, the repetitive and catatonia-inducing bursts of static in the loadscreens, the mindless puzzles (almost, to my mind, a deconstruction of Resident Evil's puzzles: if getting a code in one room and inputting it in the next is considered a fair and standard survival horror puzzle, Killer7 takes it to the next logical conclusion: the very first puzzle is basically inputting a combination which is ON THE VERY SAME SCREEN as the place to input it--and yet, why did that puzzle get more flack than those which inspired it?)--all of them are designed to wear down the player.

It is worth mentioning that the outcome of the choice is irrelevant--it amounts to basically a screen which says "Oh no, the US was destroyed!" or "Oh no, Japan was destroyed!" Much like a But-Thou-Must in which both answers are wrong, Destroy-the-US-or-Japan is about the act of choosing. The entire game is set on a path of irrelevant choices--which is why it's set on rails. You can only progress towards your target or away from it. Suda51 seems to love to give us the illusion of choice--if I talk about No More Heroes that'll be one of the things I'll mention--an illusion which only serves to let us know that sin is inevitable.

Ignoring Coin Heaven and underground bonus areas, platformer games only give us one major path, traditionally--we move Mario from one end of the screen to the other--while sandbox games (which I openly hate) give us more freedom--Grand Theft Auto and Morrowind let us dick around as much as there are sidequests to still do, letting us take on the thread of the storyline when we get bored of taking sidequests. Both usually take the concept of the game's ending as an unnecessary-to-examine given which'll happen eventually. Killer7 is the result of examining goals in a linear game; No More Heroes examines them in the context of a sandbox game. I would be very interested in seeing Suda51's take on the MMORPG (another genre I can't stand), which generally *has* no predefined goal. Killer7 is about the inevitability of getting to the right-hand-side of the screen. No More Heroes is about the inevitability of getting bored with or completing all the sidequests. How would one make a game about the inevitability of the point where a game isn't fun enough to continue paying for?

The two-hours-and-fifty-minutes before the ending of INLAND EMPIRE are setting up a wonderfully powerful music video for "Sinnerman," just as the twenty hours before the ending of Killer7 are an emotional context to the Moment of Choice (and really, "Sinnerman" would be an appropriate theme song for that game too.) And the meaninglessness of the choice serves to highlight that, for all the promise of interactivity most games give us, all we can ever do is beat a game, turn it off to have dinner, or delay either inevitability.