So far from release? It comes out in a month. I think it seems fine to make a thread about it. But that's just my opinion.

I have to say, the more I learn about Metroid: Other M, the less excited I am about it. The awkward amalgam between a 2D platformer and a FPS just rubs me the wrong way. I'm all for experimentation when it comes to trying to freshen up the old staples, but the mechanic where you point the remote at the screen to go into FPS mode where you freeze in place just sounds like it'll be annoying in practice. Kind of like shooting in MGS2 and 3.

As for the platforming parts, I honestly have no idea what the hell I'm seeing. Sometimes it looks like a traditional 2D game that's rendered in 3D, and sometimes it looks like a 3D platformer with guns. And we hold the remote sideways instead of using the nunchuck, eh? That could work I guess, but that type of control works better for straight 2D games (New Super Mario Bros. Wii) than it does for 3D platformers. Super Mario 64 DS is proof of this. But maybe Team Ninja made it better, I don't know.

---

So... Samus talks now. That's something. I hate saying that it's a bad thing just because it breaks from the norm and it isn't like how it was I was a kid. But, it seems like this is a bad thing.

One of my favorite aspects of the Metroid series was that you always had a sense of seclusion. You're on this planet all by yourself, and there are monsters and pirates everywhere. It's hard for me to even explain WHY I like it so much. It wasn't because it added some kind of Silent Hill-esque horror element to the game, it was just fun to be on your own. Metroid 1-3 did it great, as did the first Metroid Prime. But Other M feels like it's the next step down the wrong hallway that we started to go down with Metroid Fusion and Metroid Prime 3. It feels like whoever is in charge thinks that they need to use their game to tell a detailed narrative because that's what video games do these days.

I want to go into more detail about Metroid's narrative, or lack thereof, but I can't finish this right now. Maybe I should just incorporate it into that revised review of Metroid Fusion that I promised Polly a year-and-a-half ago.


Edit: http://kotaku.com/5598501/what-if-the-next-metroid-is-a-bad-game

God damn, really? I thought it was set for 2011.

just keep all the gaming discussion threads separate so people can choose which ones to read and reply to rather than having to wade through a huge thread

Wait so, after you beat the game you can watch yourself play the game you just beat. Who the hell would want to do that?

Sounds like a weird thing in a Metroid game. Also kinda cops out on the storytelling after the Prime games gave us all those cool scans to tell the story. I quickly tire of cutscenes; the Primes got around them without having a lack of story.

Yeah, the problem is you have to scan them all to get the story. Huge chore if you ask me.

As a machinima enthusiast, the idea of the game combining cutscenes and gameplay on its own intrigues me.

As a Metroid enthusiast, the idea of them advertising the game as "it has two hours of cutscenes!" is a tad worrying.

if only metal gear solid 4 had been so honest TWO HOURS OF GAMEPLAY

I think the "It's about the STORY" shit has gotten a little out of control. RPGs, sure, but it's fucking Metroid. A bad monster does a bad thing, take your amazing array of weapons and abilities and go blow it up.

I've been keeping tabs on Other M and its development for quite some time, and I'm pretty much convinced at this point that the game is going to be garbage. warning there are going to be And rage!

What really blows my mind is that even though in the Prime games, Samus doesn't talk, they still got Jennifer Hale to do her grunting and other vocal utterances. Jennifer I've done a shitload of voiceovers in videogames alongside voiceover vets like Cam Clarke and David Hayter, to name a few Hale. At least Retro didn't cut corners on quality, even with something as minute and seemingly unimportant as the sound of someone's grunting and wincing in a fucking videogame.

Who do they get to do Samus in Other M? The hell if I know, but I do know that how she sounds is making alarm bells ring in my head, mainly because it's putting me in mind of Yuna's voice actress in FFX. Ya know, the chick who is pretty much the main character of the game and yet the developers hired a no-name no-talent chick off the street to do her voice? Remember how well-recieved that was with western audiences? Now imagine two hours of that shit, with someone like the person voicing Samus while she says absolutely laughable one-liners like "It's time, Mother." (I'M EMOTING I'M EMOTING CAN'T YOU TELL THAT I'M EMOTING?!)

As someone that used to be a huge fan of Metroid back in the day, watching Metroid be gradually driven into the ground and buttfucked over the last decade has been a demoralizing experience to me. The only saving grace was the Prime games, and even then I argue that there didn't need to be more than one Prime game, but I'd easily take Prime 2 and 3 over Fusion and Zero Mission any fucking day of the week.

And the funny thing is, I don't hold Team Ninja responsible for the trainwreck that Other M is going to become. They just got hired to do the job they got paid to do. The assclown that needs to be held fully accountable for how badly they fucked up the Metroid games in the last decade is none other than Yoshio Sakimoto. This is the asshole that thinks playing soft piano music while a poorly-voiced Samus talking whimsically about how naive she was and shit makes people excited to play a fucking videogame. It doesn't. If I wanted to watch women talk whimsically about how naive they used to be, I'll watch Lifetime original movies, thank you very fucking much!

Oh, and just in case I haven't driven home the point how much of an incompetent asshat Sakimoto is, I should also bring up the fact that just this year, he went on record as saying "It's been many years since Metroid has appeared on a videogame console." Excuse me? What? Are you telling me that Metroid Prime 1, 2, and 3 don't exist, either in your mind or in the real world? Because if I'm not mistaken, Metroid Prime Trilogy got released on the Wii just last year, wasn't it? And you can't defend what this asshole said. You can't try and say "Oh well he meant a traditional Metroid game." because Other M is as much a sidescroller as Mario Galaxy is a 2D platformer.

This isn't a coincidence. Metroid Prime: No cutscenes, no talking. The Metroid experience put into a first-person perspective with incredible visuals, atmosphere, and music. Game goes on to be the best-selling Metroid game ever made to date.

Metroid Fusion, Zero Mission: Shoves in story, spoken dialogue, leads the player along the nose, very linear, destroys Samus as a character for people to connect to while playing the game. Games go on to become the worst-selling Metroid games to date. Zero Mission sells so badly that the GBA re-release of the original Metroid outsells it.

There is a very definite commonality here: To my knowledge, Sakimoto had nothing to do with the Prime games (to the point that he seems to disavow their existence), and those games sold well and are pretty well-regarded. The games Sakimoto has been involved in have done very poorly. The reason to me is obvious: Sakimoto is the one runing Metroid.

My supreme hope is this: After Other M goes on to underwhelm (it won't outsell Metroid Prime, the best-selling game in the series), and if Retro proves they've got platform gaming chops, then Nintendo will hand over development of a new 2D Metroid to them, and hopefully do for Metroid what NSMB Wii did for Mario, and hopefully what DKC Returns will do for, well, DKC.

Vanor pretty much hits it on the head. Except that Zero Mission wasn't nearly as bad as Fusion in my opinion. It got a little weird towards the end, but it didn't bog the game down with long winded dialogue segments. And again, sales numbers aren't a direct representation of quality. If you like or dislike something, tell us why YOU feel that way. Plenty of underappriciated gems have sold like crap over the years, and plenty of polished turds have sold millions.

I thought Zero Mission was alright. Sure, the press gave a load of attention to the fact that "THE STORY DOESN'T END WHEN YOU BLOWED UP MOTHER BRAIN" and the epilogue segments were a little silly, but it managed to put forth some excellent storytelling segments with not much dialog, not nearly as much TEXT TEXT TEXT as Fusion anyway (which also wasn't that bad).

I'd dare say that it made me appreciate the original NES version that much more.

That said, Samus doing wrestling moves on monsters in the Other M trailers looks a bit stupid.

I could argue Metroid has always been pretty linear, unless you sequence break.

Zero Mission isn't as bad as Fusion, though that's like saying that pissing in someone's soup isn't as bad as shitting in someone's salad. One isn't as bad as the other, but it's still pretty bad.

Zero Mission feels like a much smaller game compared to the original Metroid. Another problem is that it really just feels like Super Metroid spliced in with the original. Super Metroid isn't a bad game, but I've already fucking played that game, and as a result there's nothing all that exciting or interesting in Zero Mission that I haven't already seen in Super Metroid.

It's called diminishing returns. You give people the exact same thing over again, people begin to lose interest in it. This even happened to Metroid Prime, hence why the first Prime is the best-selling one (though there are other reasons why I didn't like Prime 3).

And in general it's obvious that Sakimoto has no respect for the player in regards to Metroid. It's obvious more people are getting frustrated by developers shoving in movies and story that intrude on the gameplay for the player (Pat talking about FF X-2 comes to mind). But the greatest strength of games that distinguishes them from other forms of entertainment is that they are interactive. The player is actively involved. The player should be the one in the driver's seat kicking ass. Metroid isn't about Samus. Samus is in a spacesuit because it makes it easier for us to put ourselves in her shoes, and behind the driver's seat. When she starts talking and starts having a "backstory" it is no longer about the player, and the player simply becomes the spectator guiding events to their inevitable conclusion that they have no control over.

This is why both Fusion and Zero Mission sucked, because they intruded with the story and were doing retreads when they should have instead focused on expanding the universe in an interesting way. Instead they put the limelight on Samus when it should be obvious that Metroid is not about Samus. Metroid is about being lost in an expansive, vast alien world, filled with hostile creatures that want you dead. Maternal feelings and whimsical naivety have no place in Metroid. They shouldn't even call it Metroid: Other M, they should just call it The Chronicles of Samus Aran, so that way people wouldn't feel tricked when they bought a Metroid game expecting the Metroid experience, but instead wind up with bullshit that has no business in a Metroid game to begin with.

Like I said, after this game goes on to flop and disappoint and if DKCReturns does well (which given Retro's handling of Metroid, I think it will), then hopefully we'll get to see them make a new 2D Metroid, either for the Wii or 3DS.

Doesn't seem like you've lost interest in Mario

Looks interesting. I'll give it a shot.

FUCKING REHASH PIECE OF GARBAGE.



ANOTHER GREAT FRANCHISE RUINED, GOD DAMMIT.

Giving Retro the reigns again would rock. Corruption was the weakest in the Prime trilogy, but I hesitate to call it a bad game. Better than Fusion, at any rate.

The biggest problem I have with Zero Mission is that after Fusion, Metroid players complained that the game couldn't be broken. And they were more right than they knew at the time; you can pick up power bomb expansions early but can't use them until you download power bomb data. So Zero Mission is full of sequence breaking. Except it isn't. You have a web of things that you can do, but you can't ever go someplace you weren't intended. The only sequence break in the game would be (again) early power bombs, and it can't be done.

ZM lets you actually explore and you don't have to follow the Chozo Statue hints to the letter ala Adam. The Metroid Gear segment at the end is tacked on at best and the whole Pirate Ship sequence is a waste. It should have ended like Metroid 1, after the Tourian escape.

The one thing I like about Team Ninja is that they haven't made a Metroid-type game before, meaning (hopefully) programmer oversights. Those oversights are what made the Gunpei Yokoi trilogy and Prime 1 so fun to break. Even after beating the game, you can go back and find another way.

Heh, yeah, but I don't count the 3D Mario games as real Mario games (and as such haven't played them much, and in the case of Galaxy not played them at all). NSMB Wii was the first real Mario game to come out in damn near 20 years, and it had awesome multiplayer, so I'll forgive Nintendo for not changing things up too much...this time.

They want Samus to talk? That's fine. They want there to be more story? That's fine, too. HOWEVER, Team Ninja are not the people who should be doing these things with Metroid. When I look for good storytelling, I do not look to the Ninja Gaiden franchise or Dead or Alive: Nekkid Girls Edition. There are plenty of people who could do this right, but these aren't those people.

One thing in particular that I absolutely hated was how Samus wouldn't shut the hell up. Even when she wasn't talking, she was talking. She narrated all over everything like Tidus with ADD. She narrated in place of actual dialogue at times. This is not good writing.

Apart from that, the third person shooting looks wonky and inaccurate as hell, which comes as no surprise.

If this game turns out to actually be good, I will be shocked beyond belief.

I don't have an animated gif to this effect so I'm just gonna have to ask you to imagine me standing up, sweeping everything off my desk in one motion, kicking over my chair and walking out of the room.

Spyda and I were talking about Other M and female protagonists in general and how irritating it was when a female protagonist's victory is based around showing she's just as capable as a man, instead of overcoming an outside obstacle regardless of her sex. I really, really hope that her relationship with Adam is professional and on the level and not as obviously fixated around sexual tension as it seems to be, but... fuck. Nothing wrong with Samus interacting with men but when it comes down to "buh get out of the way Samus buh you can't be trusted because you have a vagina - I mean you can't be trusted because you're a deserter, let us manly space marines take care of this MAN'S WORK" and then have her show them all up because she's so coooooool, it just... ugh. She's a goddamn 6 foot 3 genetically-enhanced mutant who was raised to be a warrior by bird people and spends most of her time floating around in space alone. You really don't need to prove to me that she's a strong, independant career woman. I think I'm just rambling and not even making any sense right now.

How the fuck do you start making opinions like that if you havent even played them

Fucking Mario 64 was one of the best games on the system, Galaxy is a great game, and theyre just as much a Mario game as anything else. NSMB Wii's multiplayer wasnt even that fun.

NSMBW's multiplayer is fantastic if you play it right.

And by that I mean murder all your friends and horde all the powerups for yourself.

Proof

I am of the opinion, however, that Super Mario Galaxy is possibly one of the best Mario games out there.