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.