Today I got a chance to sit down with Metroid Prime 3: Corruption for about 2-3 hours. First person shooters have always boggled my mind on consoles. I could just never figure out the whole two analog stick thing. I'm forcing myself to learn for Bioshock, but for a much faster paced game (halo, Counterstrike) I'm all thumbs. Metroid has never been a problem however because of a slower pace and a more emphasis on exploration. However, MP3 seems to be much more fast paced with a bigger focus on combat. After playing Red Steel and seeing the "limitations" of the motion controls on Wii I was quite skeptical that anyone could get it right. Ladies and Gentleman, Retro Studios has NAILED it. The controls of MP3 are completely perfect. Not one flaw. When I first started playing I was disappointed by the slowness of turning. After fiddling with the sensitivity options (expert works best for me) I was amazed. The bounding box is the perfect size and you can go from short quick movements to turn and move to long slow movements. Moving with the nunchuck is very natural (as to be expected). The other portion of the control, the "Lock-on Free Aiming" Works just as well as everything else. While locked on, the camera focuses on the enemy and you're free to aim your weapon around to take out other enemies in the area wile still locked on to your current target. It's all very fun.
The "Achievement" system is interesting, awarding you with Red tokens for progressive awards (completing an area, beating a boss) and Blue tokens for exploration (Scanning Lore, Scanning Hunters). I'm not entirely sure how there awards come into play but they are in abundance. Rumor has it that they will unlock things and you'll be able to trade them over wiiconnect 24. Overall the story is decent but not stellar, the addition of full voice acting (excluding Samus) is wonderful and all of the environmental motion controls are really well implemented. I, personally cant wait until next week when I can play the game all the way through. I'll have a full review for you on The Wiicast, Don't Worry.

Posted in: on Friday, August 24, 2007 at at 4:49 PM