Metroid Prime: Remastered [NSW]

[Asura]

Playing through this, and it seems fantastic in port terms. One of the best examples I've ever seen, and really shows up the shoddy work so many companies push out as ports. It's 60fps, widescreen, and the gameplay seems a flawless replica, with only a few key visual changes which improve things while fitting perfectly with the original art. Multiple control schemes even.

To be clear, Nintendo are charging £35 for an older title here, so it really needs to be a good port. But honestly it just seems like a fantastic one, which raises the bar for this kind of title.

I missed out on it the first time around, and I've encountered a bit of a difficulty spike.

->Open Spoiler<-

The bit where you first fight an elite pirate (which breaks out of the big glass jar).

The fight itself is not the hard part. It's that the nearest save point beforehand is quite far from the fight, then, after the fight, I can't seem to find another save point before I die. I'm at the point where I've done this same 20-30m of gameplay about 5 times now and I'm probably gonna turn to a walkthrough, and if there's not a save point I'm somehow just missing, then I might check out. I dunno.

Generally the save-point structure of the game is one of those curious things that reminds you this is an 00s game. At least you can standby the Switch, though, so it's not as bad as some things (I straight up sold on the 3DS Tales of Abyss for this reason).

[Nu-Eclipse]

Playing through this, and it seems fantastic in port terms. One of the best examples I've ever seen, and really shows up the shoddy work so many companies push out as ports, including Nintendo themselves.

Corrected.

[Asura]

Corrected.

No arguments, honestly. I bought the Switch Mario Kart 8, but then it was when the Switch was brand new and I was able to sell my WiiU one to CEX to get £20 off the price. Similarly, I pre-ordered the Mario Collection without realising that they'd phoned in Mario64, which made me hesitant. I only took the plunge on Prime Remastered because the pre-release commentary from places (I think Digital Foundry) were so positive.

[Nu-Eclipse]

No arguments, honestly. I bought the Switch Mario Kart 8, but then it was when the Switch was brand new and I was able to sell my WiiU one to CEX to get £20 off the price. Similarly, I pre-ordered the Mario Collection without realising that they'd phoned in Mario64, which made me hesitant. I only took the plunge on Prime Remastered because the pre-release commentary from places (I think Digital Foundry) were so positive.

In some fairness, MK8D is full 1080p & 60fps (whereas MK8 on WiiU was only ever 720p with that weird 1 frame-skip glitch that Nintendo couldn't be bothered to patch out with an update) so I can see some value in that port and everybody on here knows of my disdain for MK8 in general!

Totally agree with you about Super Mario 3D All-Stars being totally phoned in. Nintendo obviously took full advantage of classic consumer FOMO to sell such an underwhelming compilation - all three games on it could've and should've been far better quality ports than they were.

Nintendo's port quality record is as mediocre as the rest of em so I too am shocked with the effort that was put into Prime Remastered.

[fuse]

I played this recently too, having also never played it on the GC/Wii. Would agree that it looks great and moves nicely, and is generally in pretty wonderful shape for a game now in its 20s.

When I started I remarked about it feeling a bit floaty, but it made sense that this was mostly to do with it being an adventure game from a first person perspective rather than a 'real' first-person shooter. Later on I feel like it suffers a bit of an identity crisis though, and it does suddenly become much more about the combat, pitting you against room after room of space pirates. That would be fine if combat wasn't so specific on top of that - switching visors, having to eyeball the colour of the enemy to know which weapon you have to switch to, and so on. It doesn't feel particularly great, and combine that with the scanning and the very text-heavy method of story-telling, and I do find it's a very stop-start-stop-start kind of experience that isn't as smooth and seamless as I was hoping for.

Wonderful remake of a great game, just for me it has the unfortunate responsibility of coming after Super Metroid, which is a much smoother experience and does the environmental storytelling thing much, much better.

[Asura]

Gah, still stuck on this same bit.

I tried this time getting so far, doing some of the puzzles, then turning back and going back to the save point. But the game throws even more enemies at me on the way back, as if to beat you with the "no, you do this at MY pace, NOT yours" bat.

I'm just bored ****less now of activating that laser, and doing that bit where as the ball, you have to rotate the sections of that tall vertical column. Done it 10 times now.

[briareos_kerensky]

You mean the three-coloured column in a room with some Metroids in it? IIRC you need to clear it once, after that you have all the power-ups to skip it entirely.

[fishbowlhead]

Stuck this on for the first time since getting it, got up to the first planet save point. It really does look great, very nice update.

[dataDave]

I tried this time getting so far, doing some of the puzzles, then turning back and going back to the save point. But the game throws even more enemies at me on the way back, as if to beat you with the "no, you do this at MY pace, NOT yours" bat.

Rooms respawn when you’re more than one room away, that’s all. It’s not out to get you.

[Asura]

Nah, that's it, I'm done.

Tried two more times, which makes it 10 goes, or over 5 hours of in-game time (because I'm proceeding slowly as I've got to preserve health). In both cases, I got through the rooms, did the puzzles, killed the boss. But sooner or later after that, I've died and am all the way back to the prior save, with nothing but another wasted half-hour.

Finally caved and looked up a walkthrough, which reassures me this is just how the game is. Google "Metroid Prime" and things like help or difficulty and you'll find 50 posts etc. that all say the same thing, where people are surprised at the sudden hike.

Some places suggest farming shield energy by going 2 doors from easy rooms then running back, killing the enemies and getting their power-ups abd repeating that process. I dislike respawning enemies in games at the best of times and generally try to ignore they exist, so anything which reinforces that is a non-starter. I also saw suggestions of going around and getting e-tanks, but I'm still missing the power bomb and grapple beam, and none of the guides explain which power-ups are needed for which e-tank, and I just can't be arsed wandering through the world, killing random chozo ghosts for an hour probably to find, when reaching an e-tank, that I can't get it.

Realised from the walkthrough I'm actually really near the end of the game (which I hadn't realised), so I guess that's why there's this sudden swerve in difficulty.

It's a shame, as I was enjoying it up until this point. But I hate "losing progress" in games at the best of times, except where the game's combat etc. is so ludicrously entertaining so as to make up for it, and this definitely doesn't qualify.

EDIT: For the record, it's this bit of the game:

I'm sure with a few more goes I could do it, but I'm just not having enough fun to consider putting in the time.

[dataDave]

You definitely shouldn’t try the sequel. That’s even better. Imagine a whole game built out of Phazon Mines, only with harder enemies and a corrosive atmosphere.

[Asura]

You definitely shouldn’t try the sequel. That’s even better. Imagine a whole game built out of Phazon Mines, only with harder enemies and a corrosive atmosphere.

I honestly might not mind. The problem isn't so much the difficulty; it's the massive change in difficulty all of a sudden; I've had 10 goes at this, whereas for the entire game in the run-up to this, I've only died twice, and in both cases it was just because I wasn't properly paying attention while playing in handheld mode.

I went back to it and spent several hours getting the E-Tanks to max out my health. I said I wasn't going to go back to it, but changed my mind after looking at a few more walkthroughs and just realising how close to the end I am. If I'd found I was midway through this'd probably be different.

[Asura]

I think something might be wrong with search, as I just searched for Metroid, got 4 pages of results, none of them were this thread. Even did a ctrl-f for the string "Remas" to be sure.

I finished this today! Time on the clock on the end screen was 15hrs, I suspect my time was closer to ~20 due to my repeated attempts at the Phazon Mines where I tended just to shut off the Switch.

In Remaster terms, I think it sets a fantastic bar. It's effectively what I believe, if I somehow could enforce this, is the required level of quality if you want people to pay for a remaster. It's properly widescreen, 60fps. It's 900p, but then, it is the Switch (and I would always take solid 60 at lower res over a choppy 1080p, but I know not everyone shares that opinion). It doesn't screw around with the original game to any great degree; I think, critically, most would play it and think "yeah, it looks just like the original" when in practice it looks a fair bit better in many ways, and I think that's a sign that they nailed it. It looks like how you remember the original, unless you know it absolutely inside-out.

The game is almost entirely the same, in gameplay terms. There are some very minor changes, but they're pretty inconsequential unless you're a speedrunner. The only one which will matter to most people is how the game now has various control schemes; I tried all of them to some degree and they all seemed fine, but I went with the default scheme (which is like a hybrid of the original's with a modern FPS game's).

Also, one other thing if this ever bothered anyone who played the original, or games in general - they've added colour blindness modes. I'm sure this would be useful, because there are some enemies in the late-game where you have to react to their colour, and that might be tricky otherwise.

That does, however, mean that the game has everything good about the original and some of the bad.

Metroid Prime is a much-beloved game, and I don't want to "drag" it. There's just a few bits and pieces. The game requires a lot of to-ing and fro-ing (which, admittedly, a lot of games of this template require), and there are many situations where you come up against a barrier where you need a power-up to progress... That's fine. But I had expected by the game's end, you would come back to the early areas and be leaping around them with all manner of movement options, skipping over obstacles and past enemies. There certainly are parts of the map which are like that, but there are still a few where I found myself saying really?!, and that interrupted the flow a touch. The final movement power-up is earned very close to the end of the game, also - so by the time you get it, you don't really need to do very much, which means you don't use it all that much unless you happen to want to explore (which hits on another problem I'll touch on below).

I think, also, there are a couple of situations with enemies where you have to figure out a solution, using the array of tools at your disposal. This is good. But some of them are far from savepoints, so repeatedly trying until you hit the right answer would be a bit tiresome.

The game has something of a difficulty spike, if you don't make an effort to locate missile upgrades and e-tanks. When you get to the Phazon Mines location, the difficulty jumps up several notches. As said above, that's ~85% of the way through the game, and I'd gotten that far practically without dying, then suddenly I died 10x in a row. I resolved it by going back and exploring to find e-tanks and missile upgrades, so when I tried again, I literally had 2x the health and 2x the missiles, which is great. This process also meant I found many of the "scavenger hunt" items for the game's big final objective.

But that also meant that when I finally got the Grapple Beam (final ability for movement) and Power Bomb (unblocked connecting corridors between many areas), suddenly I had very little reason to revisit anywhere. I'd done everything.

This might be a personal gripe, because the game's structure means not everyone's experience is going to be exactly the same.

Admittedly, this is approaching Prime, which in some ways resembles Zelda with its upgrade framework, after playing stuff like Breath of the Wild in the modern day, which give the player nearly all of their "skills" very early on, and essentially give you the entire game to play with them.

Outside of these minor nitpicks though, the game still plays well, and is worth playing through as a great example of something which, in many ways, is quite unique (outside of its own sequels).

I was concerned I'd struggle with the end bosses, but honestly they weren't so bad. I died once on each.

Anyway, I'll probably chuck the copy in trading at some point soon, so watch out for that I guess.

[Golgo]

Just finished it, having never played the original release. Metroid Fusion is one my faves so I had high expectations here - didn't think it could live up to the hype, but it really does. Totally nails the feeling of isolation that is key to Metroid. The environmental design, both in terms of structure and aesthetics, is breathtaking. Had no problem with the 'backtracking' - key events/locations are cleverly spaced and it gives you a good amount of time to experiment with the new tech and source more goodies (much more so than the recent Metroid Dread, the pacing of which I now realize was severely awry - it just chucked abilities at you hand over fist). My upgrade 'track' here was fairly steady so I didn't experience any severe difficulty spikes, although it's true that you need to be much more methodical when you hit the mines. There were some minor control niggles (morph ball 'building momentum' thing definitely doesn't work as momentum should, some finickity stalactite drops, plus the end-game mushroom hopping in the dark tried my patience a bit), but overall it played like a dream. I was a bit disappointed with the music, having been led to expect it was a truly epic masterpiece. It sounded very...videogamey, sometimes in a bad way. Cheap synths, sometimes drifting into something like crappy euro-pop, although there were some good individual themes. The ambient sound design was exceptional, however, responding ingeniously and convincingly to the spatial and material qualities of different areas. Loved that. Bosses were good - kind of 'rote' but suitably epic. I do hate the cheap trick of bosses spamming waves of minions, though, which happened twice here late-game. Apparently I took the game really quite slow (about 22 hours play-time) and I got 80% of stuff/scans. But it felt like I'd given the place a thorough shake out. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it.

Post-credits treat/spoiler:

->Open Spoiler<-

I know getting Samus to remove her crash helmet was a cute nod to the first game, but I wish she'd kept it on as she looked naff and a bit dopey.