Wasn’t there a legacy powerup that returned in Echoes that wasn’t in the first Prime? Was it space jump? In hindsight they probably shouldn’t have dared with that one
It was Screw attack
2 Likes
yup, although its function is mainly to give you multiple horizontal jumps (i think 5?). they also included wall jumps, and Corruption goes on to add a ledge grab for good measure
it was a pretty strange implementation, but precisely because i wasn’t expecting it it became exciting to go back looking for places to use it. kind of highlights the designer’s conundrum in making a new metroid, trying to maintain the novelty of new powerups while still having them feel like natural extensions of your ability set; i think i would prefer to see them err on the side of experimental, though.
2 Likes
This is why I love Echoes so much. It just plays around with so many hallmarks. My hope for Prime 4 is that they get weird, alien and brutal like Echoes.
5 Likes
speaking on that previous note, i just reached Frozen Bryyo and wow, the oddly large-scaled level design had been bothering me before (virtually every gap requires a double jump), but the giganticism really works for it here. i love seeing them embrace that greater freedom to design wide open, ambiguous-boundaried spaces
1 Like
This Echoes is good discussion would have driven me nuts but then I remember I haven’t played it since release.
I remember my lasting complaint is the combat did not work with the MP control scheme and I kept wishing for normal FPS controls (did not have this problem with MP1.)
2 Likes
the way samus moves her fingers around in her glove to change weapons is my favorite part of metroid prime
9 Likes
Yeah some of the bosses and Ing generally are really unforgiving with that control scheme. Amorbis requires so much looking up, careful ground movement and its early in the game so Dark Aether really hammers the suit. Carefully moving in and out of light areas while a tall boss is attacking is rough.
I do think that they got creative with the morphball bosses (although they’re just as if not harder). Boost ball guardian doesn’t even have any light crystal points(!!) and its trajectory is extremely hard to react to and predict consistently.
I hope they stick with a less traditional FPS control scheme just because I think so much good environmental immersion comes out of it.
@cylindrome Looking forward to your impressions of the rest of the locations. Are you playing on Wii?
the worst part of prime 3 is how her hand position in the cannon is no longer like a gun grip but rather a wiimote grip
5 Likes
i love the level with the giant terraforming engines chained to the planet
2 Likes
ah, no, i’m running it in Dolphin 5.0 on a toaster with all the speedhacks turned on. it’s been mostly smooth once you get accustomed to the mouse controlling camera velocity rather than position. just ran into this issue though; hopefully it will self-resolve
1 Like
did an enemy literally just drop a physical cheevo to pick up when i killed it bahaha
1 Like
I usually enjoy Wii controls but the Prime series controls better on GC imo. The Goldeneye controls are good–not the best for combat and that’s the weakest part of Echoes but I don’t particularly think it’s improved with a Wiimote.
Thinking about how this moment characterized Samus more than any monologue in Fusion or Other M
10 Likes
i worry for prime 4 for a lot of reasons but chiefly the probability of standard twin stick controls
3 Likes
i like this morphball “ladder”, where you’re expected to manoeuvre in between the spokes to slow your descent. feels very crunchy. i’m not sure if there’s anything else quite like that in the series.
12 Likes
Damn it, I thought I’d managed to get myself stuck messing about sequence breaking in Zero Mission.
So far this has aged really well, some fugly backgrounds but lovely music. Too bad the last 3rd is rubbish.
1 Like
Thread theme
4 Likes
i think zero mission just took the puzzle-lock design ethos too far for me, where the box you’re stuck in at any given point is so tiny that there’s barely room to stretch your legs. it’s like taking that first setup where you become trapped in the area with the morph ball and can’t leave until you pick it up, and extrapolating that into an entire game. i can see how it’s nifty and satisfying for some, but after however many games of playing with the same toolset i was after a little more.
the controls also feel kind of tacky and impactless, for instance when you jump the initial liftoff speed is higher than what you hit the ground with (super also behaves like this after you get the high jump). i wonder if they were worried the long climbs at the beginning of the game would turn players off otherwise. with all the other liberties they took in the design i’m not sure why they were compelled to exactly incorporate the original map; all it does is lessen the sense of discovery for returning players. though some of the ad hoc solutions they came up with to get you around in a specific order were pretty funny, like firing you upward though 7 screens after Ridley to get to the screw attack.
5 Likes
This is a major problem that most non-dialogue action-explorers face.
Why is it always a binary dilemma with can’s and should’s when the varying capacity of understanding from an individual player determines what a “can” should be and what a “should” can be?
Maybe a better approach is designing a world where a preliminary path is easily accessible to all and managing the curiosity to tread off that path leads to accessing the deeper parts of the world. Lizard is a great example of that. Of course, you need an open world setting to allow such potentiality for breaking the formal ritual cycle of play, but that’s the untapped beauty of games like La-Mulana and Bubble Bobble.
Lizard just downscales the difficulty of breaching the edges of those play-formalities.
(There’s also another major discussion worth having regarding Reversals and Recognitions in Aristotle’s Poetics that would work tremendously in game semantics, where, instead of a linear character in a play/tragedy that uses these devices, it is instead placed on the player’s agency itself.)
I think more games would benefit from being low-level icebergains that partake in degrees of sequence breaking (just a progression of a-ha’s to entice the player).
Super Metroid had its own prologue-sequence on the space station that was basically a tutorialized microcosm of the overall playthrough on Zebes. Quite ingenious really. It’s just a shame that the X-Ray ability wasn’t innate and needed to be acquired mostly for the sake of extra power-tokens. It would have been much better to make planet Zebes completely open-world/hub-like so that the sequence of play could be more modular according to the player’s temperamental agency.
5 Likes
how’s the prologue sequence like a tutorial, exactly? I’m curious
edit: i think i meant to say how’s it like a microcosm but oh well this comment is a year old now lol