Metroid Prime: Hunters - First Play: 30% Complete

Samus pulled her hunter-class gunship into an especially tight flight path insertion. The omnidirectional sublights groaned in protest. She noticed a couple of glints against the starfield that were probably the endlessly rotating Vesper Defense Outpost, and nudged her flightstick in the appropriate direction. As Samus watched the outpost grow in her view port, it became increasingly obvious that something was wrong. The glistening she had first noticed turned out to be an icy envelope encircling the entire station.

Grimacing inside her helmet, Samus turned the Hunter IV’s engines directly at where she thought the landing bay airlock would be and initiated a full burn. The resulting explosion was slightly larger than she expected, but did the job well enough. The icy substance was in fact frozen fuel, and the oxygen-rich exhaust from the sublights did a very nice job of opening up a hole big enough to fly a ship through. Samus smiled as she eased the Hunter IV through the opening and looked for a decent location for mooring. This was going to be easier than she thought.

I really wanted to love Metroid Prime on the GameCube. It currently holds my personal record for the longest time I’ve tolerated right handed controls on any game. However, in the end, the frustrating, uncustomizable control scheme forced me to set down the game for good. If it weren’t for the superb writing and gameplay on the 2d Metroid Fusion for the GBA I would have been seriously out of the loop in the Metroid Universe. Then along came Metroid Prime: Hunters with tantalizing promise of combining great gameplay with an innovative new control system.

Metroid Prime: Hunters on the DS takes a huge risk in control schemes. The hand-holding target locking auto-aim of the GameCube version is completely absent. It is replaced with what is essentially a PC mouse look style of control using the DS’s stylus. After careful consideration, I’ve decided that I both love and hate the new control system. I love it because it offers a precision control unparallel in any console FPS (let alone a handheld system). The tuning is absolutely perfect. I truly feel as in control of Samus as any character in a PC FPS. Additionally, nudging Samus around in morph ball form with the stylus is pure undiluted joy.

However, I hate how uncomfortable the controls are. Hand cramping worse than my NES days quickly sets in, especially in situations which require lots of simultaneous strafing and shooting. The contortions required to have access to all the buttons while still having a good view on the LCD are enormous. Supporting the DS on a pillow of some kind helps, but doesn’t solve the main problem. The DS is designed for hands much smaller than mine. However, I am happy to report that the game is well worth the hand pain I’ve had to endure.

Although the writing in Metroid Prime: Hunters isn’t quite up to the level of Metroid Fusion, it still adequately paints the picture of an intergalactic mystery. The story is largely told through text accessed with Samus’s scan visor. This is a mechanic very similar to ancient PC adventure games like the King’s Quest series, in which studying text descriptions of objects was integral to the gameplay. The text portions of the story are backed up with interspaced cutscenes. These full motion videos look fantastic, playing on both of the DS’s screens simultaneously: sometimes showing separate views on the scene and sometimes stretching the video across both screens. Overall, the movies feel very comic-like, stretching the possibilities of what can be done with dual screen video. The videos are also used to good effect for transitions such as planet approaches or item pickups. Compression artifacts are noticeable, but easily tolerated due to the overall quality of the videos.

Metroid Prime: Hunters also includes interaction with rival bounty hunters for the first time in the series. I randomly encountered these rivals as I explored the various planets and space stations in the Alimbic system. The battles are introduced with short in-engine cutscenes, and play out in much the same way as the game’s multiplayer deathmatches. My initial impression of these encounters is that they do add an interesting element to the gameplay. There was a remarkable variety in the types of bounty hunters, and the weapons they used against me. However, I would have liked to have seen more of a relationship between Samus and her rivals. I’m sure she’s run into them before, and might possibly have a few choice words to say to them over her communications systems.

Under no circumstances should anyone ever play Metroid Prime: Hunters using the DS’s paltry speakers. I’ve mentioned this before for games like Meteos, and it continues to hold true. Use of headphones is highly recommended because the sound in this game is incredible when played on speakers with a decent frequency response and stereo separation. Actually, if you have a stereo Y-adapter lying around, why not plug Metroid Prime: Hunters into your stereo system? You wouldn’t be disappointed if you did. Every sound is painstakingly produced: from the crisp crunch of Samus’s footsteps across a snowy terrain, to the grinding rasp of metal against metal as the Morph Ball rolls down a gleaming corridor.

To make an exceptional game of any kind, you have to love the system you’re developing for. You can’t be afraid to make concessions for texture resolution or number of polygons per model. True artists see a technological constraint as an opportunity for a creative solution and NST, the developers of Metroid Prime: Hunters, prove themselves to be capable DS artists. They squeeze every last drop of power from the DS in this game. Despite texture resolutions that would make most artists cringe, they manage to pull off some truly amazing environments along with a rock-solid framerate. I couldn’t keep my jaw from dropping each time I walked into a new area. Also, hiding the loading screens behind door animations is pure genius. It’s called immersion folks, and a little blinking piece of “loading” text breaks it. Metroid Prime: Hunters manages to avoid reminding the player that they are playing a game despite the limitations of the technology.

My next play rating will continue to cover the campaign mode, and some of my initial online multiplayer impressions. In the meantime, I’ll be in a completely dark room with my headphones on, studying my latest Alimbic artifacts with an archeological intensity in Metroid Prime: Hunters.