Metroid Prime – Critical Miss #31

September 30, 2021September 30, 2021 / atomicbobomb / 1 Comment

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In a Phazon Supernova

I’m very excited about the upcoming release of Metroid Dread in October. It’s been over ten years since the last completely new Metroid game, and over 20 years since an all new 2D game in the series. While I have only played Super Metroid before now, there is another game in the series that gets bought up as being of equal, or possibly even greater, quality than the game: Metroid Prime. Released on the Gamecube in 2002, Prime was met with no small amount of ire from the series’ fans. It was the first 3D game under the Metroid name, developed by a western studio, and it changed the traditional 3rd person gameplay perspective into a 1st person shooter. Fans wailed that it was a true Metroid game before they had even played it; they had to because, once they did play Prime, they realized what an interesting, unique, and true take on the series the developers at Retro Studios had made.

It always blows my mind how good some games on the Gamecube look and Metroid Prime is not an exception. There are games with strong art styles like Windwaker and Mario Sunshine that will always look good, but even more realistic styles like Resident Evil 4 and the remake of the first game look practically next gen. Metroid Prime looks incredible for the console it released on with its clean textures and great models for the variety of enemies. The game would not look out of place as a PS3 or 360 game. It’s disappointing then when the GUI and the different visors cloud up the graphics. The transparent read out of Samus’s helmet is something you get used to and learn to look past, but it sometimes makes enemies to your side hard to spot or read how many missiles are left in your arsenal. The X-Ray and Thermal visors can be fun and are more often than not utilized well, but they just cover the screen in a homogenized filter.

While the graphics are great, the music and story I was more lukewarm on. While the music is good, and hearing remixes of Super Metroid tracks in areas like the Magmoor Caverns reminded me that I love that game’s soundtrack, it tends to be more atmospheric in nature and something I can’t bring to mind easily. I only have a basic knowledge of the story happening in Metroid Prime—something about Space Pirates trying to weaponize Metroids again, but this time with a new element called Phazon. Most of the story is fleshed out through pieces of lore and information you can scan from items in the world. It’s great when you get a tip on how to beat an enemy, but having to stop the game to scan things like computer screens to learn about the Space Pirates plans is not very engaging and completely breaks the pacing of the game. Which is disappointing because, at its bones, Metroid Prime is a fun game to play.

As the first game in the series to be in 3D, Metroid Prime had to translate the gameplay of the series into a completely new style; not only did it have to work around the z-axis, but it was also a FPS. The developers managed the transition beautifully though with Prime having the same core gameplay loop of its earlier, 2D siblings. The player explores the world of Tallon IV to find power-ups and abilities that unlock new areas to explore. The feeling of isolation the series is known for comes across well in Prime too. It’s just you against the world while you fight enemies, scour for secrets, and solve puzzles. Prime empathizes puzzles a little more than Super Metroid, but not by much. The world never feels like a Zelda dungeon to explore with that series love of puzzles, but you will come across many rooms on Tallon IV that take some clever thinking to pass through.

Even though Prime is a 1st person game, there are moments when you play in 3rd person. These are when using one of Samus’s staple abilities: the Morph Ball. I thought the transition of Samus emerging from the ball and the camera going into the back of her helmet would get tedious, but it never did. The switch is so quick and feels so natural, that I never minded it. The Morph Ball itself is fast and smooth to control leading to great feeling sections and puzzles to solve with the technique. It is mostly used to explore the world, but can be used in combat when Metroid attached itself to you and needs to be blown up by a bomb or as a quick way to gain some distance from a large boss.

The hardest hurdle to overcome when looking at a FPS from the Gamecube era is the controls. Nowadays, FPS controls are pretty universal: move with the left stick, aim with the right stick, fire with the right trigger. Things don’t seem to have been as clarified back in the 6th generation of consoles. Metroid Prime’s controls feel very clunky, and downright alien, to someone who is used to modern FPS controls. The left stick is used both to move Samus and aim your cannon, the big green A button is used to fire, and the C-stick (which would be the right stick on a more traditional, non-Nintendo controller) is used to swap between different cannon types. The game lets you lock onto enemies by holding down the left trigger, but they have to be near the center of the screen making flying enemies or ones close to the ground difficult to shoot. If you want to aim independently of moving your character, you hold down the right trigger, but even this feels strange since the aiming reticle constantly fights with you to return to the center of the screen. I did get used to these bizarre controls after a while, but the first few hours in the game were a mess of fighting with muscle memory.

Once you have a grip on the controls though, the combat in Metroid Prime is very satisfying. Swapping between all your different cannons and visors towards the end of the game can get tedious—and the tiny d-pad on the Gamecube controller meant I often switched to the wrong visor in the heat of battle—but it just feels good charging up beams, blasting missiles, and strafing around enemies. There is a good variety of enemies to fight and all have different methods for disposing of, keeping combat engaging. The bosses are all unique and interesting to fight too; all with gimmicks or little puzzles that need to be figured out in order to beat them and are all the right balance between tough and fun to fight. This all leads to an excellent difficulty curve throughout the game. I never felt over or underpowered while playing. Even when revisiting early areas with end game weapons because new, tougher enemies were now patrolling them.

You are alone on the world of Tallon IV and it’s up to you to find the necessary upgrades in order to overcome the challenges the alien planet poses. Like any other Metroid game, Prime is a deeply explorative experience and exploration is only rewarding if the world you adventure through is interesting. I’ve mentioned my problems with how the story is told in the game, but I’ve always been a more mechanics driven player than a story driven one. What I find appealing in a game that asks you to explore the world is interesting level design and rewards to find. Prime is not bad in this sense at all, but I found the world to be lacking compared to other Metroidvania games and even Prime’s older, 16-bit sibling, Super Metroid. The world of Tallon IV just seems small to me, which is pretty silly because the size of the world is huge, but so much of it is just rooms connected by winding hallways that it starts to feel repetitive. There are tons of secrets to find—more so than I even found since I ended the game with only about half of the missile expansions—but something about the 2D sprite work of Super Metroid made looking for the secrets feel more organic and satisfying. The level design is solid throughout, with clever ways the room layouts subtly guide players to where they need to go, but there are few places where the biomes of the world intersect or connect, usually by elevators. This means you end up travelling the same routes over and over again while backtracking since the map is tied up in only a handful of choke points.

And I said the dreaded word; the dirty word in video games that often turn people off from a game or a series or an entire genre: backtracking. I’ve never really had a problem with backtracking in games as long as there was still something to do on the way, like fighting the new enemies in old areas in Prime, and it was done for a good reason. Backtracking through Metal Gear Solid for the keycard puzzle was horrendous while backtracking in the first half of Dark Souls made me appreciate the level design so much more. There’s a lot of back and forth across Tallon IV in Metroid Prime, but it never bothered me for the most part because I knew it was leading to a new area to explore, a new upgrade to play with, or a new boss to fight. But then came the Artifacts.

After you have collected all the necessary upgrades, you will still have to unlock the final area of the game by finding twelve Chozo Artifacts hidden around the world. There is an area near the beginning of the game where you can get hints where all the Artifacts are by scanning pillars. This helps to some extent, but I would suggest using a guide as I did for this last scavenger hunt. I had only found four or five Artifacts by the time I had collected everything and that was with pretty thorough searching. Turns out, you need the X-Ray visor and the Plasma Beam—pretty much the last two upgrades you will find—to get nearly half of the Artifacts in the game. It seems strange for a game that empathizes exploration and finding secrets that so many of these are required to reach the end game before you can even think about looking for them. It would be so much more rewarding if they could be found by clever, curious or even knowledgeable players throughout their regular playthrough. If you use a guide and just write down the rooms they are in, the path to the Artifacts are easy to map out and the puzzles are satisfying to solve, but there’s no denying that the pacing of the game suffers due to this choice. It’s not quite putting a stick in the spokes of a bike, but more like a pleasant ride down a quiet road only to hit a mile of wet concrete to slog through.

Once I was in the space boots of Samus Aran, once I was exploring the alien world of Tallon IV, once I was blasting away monsters with the Charge Beam, I was in. Metroid Prime is a great game, no doubt, and I think I may even like it more than Super Metroid at this point. It is a very strongly designed, atmospheric, and engaging game to play. Now I see why people are clamoring for Metroid Prime4 and why everyone is begging Nintendo for the Prime trilogy to be ported to the Switch. With Dread releasing in a few weeks, the future’s looking bright for Samus. But is it the brightly twinkling stars she is heading for? Or a supernova of a sun just before it collapses into a black hole?

Resident Evil 4 & 3rd Person Controls

October 16, 2020 / atomicbobomb / Leave a comment

The first Resident Evil game I ever played was Resident Evil 4. I first played it to completion little over two years ago and I fell instantly in love with it. The gameplay was intense and powerful, the story was campy and dumb in the best way, and even the briefcase menu screen made inventory management fun. I knew the game’s place in history and how it changed up the formula from previous Resident Evil games at the time, but it wasn’t until I played those earlier games that I understood how different, but oddly similar, the fourth game in the series was to its kin. And all it took was a simple change in the camera.

Resident Evil 4 was the first mainline game in the series to abandon the fixed camera angles in favor of an over-the-shoulder 3rd person camera. And, while every game in the series previous was a mix of action and horror, Resident Evil 4 focused much more on the action side of the gameplay, being mainly a 3rd person shooter and leaving much of the survival horror aspects of the series behind. There are still effective moments of horror in the game like the Regenerator enemies the sewer section with the invisible bug creatures, but the game focuses much more on action and tension created by the relentlessness of the enemies. I think the shift in the camera is the culprit for this gameplay and tonal shift.

In the early Resident Evil games, each room, hallway, and staircase had a fixed camera, or multiple, to show the area. They could not be moved in any way and were mostly implemented due to hardware limitations. But the designers discovered an interesting side effect from the restrictive camera system: claustrophobia. With the limited view and narrow level design, the early games instill a sense of tightness in the player, a sense of being trapped and not knowing what to expect in upcoming areas. The camera in Resident Evil 4 is used to create a similar feeling, but by different means.

The camera in Resident Evil 4 hangs just behind Leon’s shoulder, following behind him as he explores the decrepit Spanish village. Even though the camera can be moved around, its movement is smartly locked in a certain degree of movement where Leon is facing. This still limits the view on the player, especially with Leon’s model taking up quite a bit of the screen. With this restriction, the game still has a sense of tightness and claustrophobia to it, even with its much more open level design. You never know when a village is shuffling up behind you or even just outside your peripheral vision. Many modern 3rd person shooters like Control offer a free camera, able to look any direction regardless of where the character is facing, but this just wouldn’t have worked for Resident Evil 4.

At its core, Resident Evil 4 is still a horror game, even though it focuses more on action. Without the dank, cramped environments of the previous games to provide scares, Resident Evil 4 uses complete relentlessness. When in combat, there are many enemies coming from all sides. The limited camera makes it impossible to keep track of all enemies at once and this allows them to sneak up out of view and grab Leon unexpectedly. The developers know this too and use it to apply stress to the player, having enemies come at you from all angles. Often you will be backing away from an approaching village right into the hands of another. Every combat encounter turns into a balance act of killing the enemies in front of you while also keeping mental tallies on any you know who are coming near and keep your distance from them all.

Besides hounding Leon from all directions, the enemies have been designed around the new camera in other ways. The villagers are typically slow moving to accommodate the narrow camera and stiff tank controls, but they can jog in quick bursts to gain distance on Leon. They can close distance surprisingly fast if not tended to, but the game gives the player ways to deal with that. Enemies become stunned when they take enough damage, stopping to clutch their legs or head or wherever they’ve been shot. Shoot them in the legs enough and they become staggered, allowing Leon to roundhouse kick them. This is an important technique to learn because it not only does damage and can hit multiple enemies, but it gives you invincibility frames and sends the enemies flying back. An up close blast from a shotgun also knocks enemies a good distance, granting you a little bit of breathing room and precious seconds to assess the situation and make a plan.

The majority of enemies are melee, with a few having ranged weaponry or tossing their axes or sickles at you from afar. You would think that in a 3rd person shooter, most enemies would also be armed with guns. This is indeed the case for most games in the genre, but those types of enemies would not have worked in Resident Evil 4. While the combat can be hectic, with snap decisions needed in the heat of a fight, the camera and controls give the shooting a more slow-paced and methodical feel. With the enemies being slow and having to reach Leon first to damage him, the player has plenty of time to focus the camera where it needs to be, to run to spot where they are safe enough to stop and shoot, to even dash past enemies if they are overwhelmed, low on ammo, or just don’t to waste the bullets to fight.

Resident Evil 4’s combat is some of the best out there, especially for an over-the shoulder camera system. It not only shaped action games at the time, but its influence can still be felt today. Take the 2018 God of War. The camera is as close to Kratos in that game as it is to Leon in Resident Evil 4, but the latter is a methodical shooter while God of War is a fast paced hack and slash. The camera’s closeness to Kratos never felt like it worked as well as it should. The game constantly had to have immersion-breaking indicators and arrows pointing to enemies off screen or throwing range attacks. The game mitigates this a bit by limiting the enemies to face in individual encounters compared to other games in the series, but it doesn’t handle the shift in the camera perspective as well as Resident Evil 4 had over a decade earlier.

It must be frightening to design a new game in a series so radically different than its predecessors. It has to retain what fans loved about the earlier games and the new stuff has to be as good enough for players to enjoy immediately. This must be why Miyamoto spent the few months of Super Mario 64’s development perfecting Mario’s controls. Likewise, I think the Resident Evil 4 developers knew how important the new over-the-shoulder camera was to the game. They clearly designed everything around it and made sure everything worked well within the new camera system.

It honestly blows my mind when people say they can’t play the game due to the camera or controls. Sure, the controls and camera can feel weird when you first start, but the game is so expertly crafted around them that you quickly get used to them. From the camera subtly creating a tight feeling to how the enemies are designed, the game perfectly utilizes the 3rd person perspective to heighten every minute of Resident Evil 4’s gameplay.

The other major complaint against the game: Ashley—that’s a whole other post there. Stay tuned.

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door – Critical Miss #12

January 31, 2020February 18, 2020 / atomicbobomb / 1 Comment

Heart & Craft

I’ve been trying to build my Gamecube collection lately, but it’s a tricky endeavor. Nintendo games tend to retain value and add the fact that the Gamecube is one of Nintendo’s lowest consoles, you have a recipe for expensive games. I was grateful when a friend borrowed we their copy of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. It had been on my list for years but the game still goes for at least $50-$70 online, for a game released in 2004. That’s full price nowadays for a game over 15 years olds. But, I must admit, after playing the game, I see why it’s still so expensive and sought-after.

To get the obvious out of the way, the first thing that needs to be brought up when discussing any Paper Mario game is the art style. Thousand-Year Door, like other Paper Mario games, uses a paper aesthetic for the art. Characters are paper cut outs and turn on their axis when changing directions. Things like hidden stairs and bridges are often revealed by a turning page or unfolding out of a wall. I found myself wishing that the game would go further with the paper aesthetic, but it still adds a lot of charm to the game.

By far the strongest aspect of the art style is the character designs. A lot of NPCs in the game are classic Mario enemies, but there are a ton of new character designs on display. Be it the wrestling champ Rawk Hawk, the penguin detective Pennington, or the race of Punis, all the character designs are bold and colorful and extremely charming. One character, Ms. Mowz, has become one of my favorite character designs in video games. She a little mouse femme-fatale, burgular who wears a little red mask and silhettos. She’s extremely cute and her design perfectly encapsulates her personality.

The story of Thousand-Year Door is simple and fun. The overarching plot is Mario searching for the seven crystal stars in hopes it will lead him to Princess Peach, who has been kidnapped by the X-Nauts. In between chapters, Peach Princess interacts with a computer, TEC, who’s fallen in love with her and Browser works to catch up to Mario and claim the crystal stars for himself. The writing throughout is clever and often very funny. My favorite gag in the game is the creature hiding in black chests that curses you, but the curses all turn out to be new abilities for Mario and are very useful.

The main plot of the game usually takes a backseat to whatever adventure Mario is currently on for a crystal star. The game is split into chapters and each one is varied and unique. The first chapter is a standard RPG story as you raid an abandoned castle and fight a dragon. But soon you will be entering a wrestling league, trying to reclaim your body after being turned into a shadow, or solving mysteries on a train like it’s an Agatha Christie novel. Chapters find a good balance of combat, puzzle solving, and witty dialogue, with only a few struggling with that balance like the train section or the pirate’s cove. The game feels like it wasn’t satisfied with telling a standard, epic RPG story, but instead wanted to explore different types of storytelling in an RPG format, and it pulls it off phenomenally.

I had only one minor complaint about the game and that is some sections require too much backtracking. The levels are designed as left to right rooms, like a 2D level in 3D, and when the game asks the player to go back and forth across these areas, like on Keelhaul Key and the trek between Twilight Town and the Creepy Steeple, you soon realize how boring the sections are after you solved all the puzzles during the first go around. The worst sections of this are the train to Poshley Heights, which is literally just a five room hallway, and the search for General White, which has you going through nearly all previously visited areas in search of the old Bob-omb.

A major difference The Thousand-Year Door has from standard RPGs is the leveling system. You don’t gain random stat increases as you level up, you don’t get skill points to spend on perks, you don’t even get new armor for more defense. Instead, each time Mario defeats an enemy, they drop star points, and after collecting 100 star points, Mario levels up. As soon as he levels up, the player has a choice to increase Mario’s health, Flower Points (the game’s magic points), or his Badge Points. Attack increases come by finding new hammers or shoes to improve Mario’s basic attacks or by equipping different badges to Mario.

Throughout the game, you will find many different badges. These badges can be equipped to Mario based on how many Badge Points Mario has available and how many points each badge requires. The badges provide a multitude of benefits ranging from new attacks, stat increases like more health or defense, or passive perks like randomly dodging some attacks or decreasing the cost of special moves. This system is extremely interesting because it encourages creativity from the player and is how the games lets players make builds or classes in the game. You can build a magic class by equipping all the badges the decrease the FP costs of special attacks, a tank by using the defence badges, a dex type class by using the badges that give you the best chances to avoid damage, or you can just mix and match all the different types of badges to whatever fits your playstyle best.

Mario isn’t alone on his journey, of course. Throughout the game, Mario will make new finds who will join his party and adventure alongside him. These characters range from familiar Mario enemy types with personalities like Goombella the Goomba and Koops the Koopa Troopa to completely new designs like Vivian, one of the Siren Sisters, and Madame Flurrie the wind spirit. There is even a baby, punk-rock Yoshi that the player gets to name! I named my B. Idol. All the party members are rather one dimensional, but, along with their strong designs, they feel more like cartoon characters and it works well in the game. Mario’s new friends all have unique abilities to help him solve puzzles and find hidden items in the overworld: Madame Flurrie blows away loose pieces of paper, Admiral Bobbery can blow up certain walls, and Koops can spin across gaps in his shell to collect items or hit switches.

Your party members also aide you in battle and, much like the story, the combat in Thousand-Year Door is simple, but extremely fun. Mario only has a jump and a hammer attack along with any badge attacks you have equipped, and those attacks can only hit certain enemies. Flying enemies or enemies not in the front row are out of reach of Mario’s hammer but can be easily jumped on. Spikey or flaming enemies will hurt Mario to jump on but are vulnerable to hammer strikes. Your partners attacks work in the same way. Some attacks can only hit ground enemies in the front row, some can jump on any enemy but is dangerous against spiky enemies, and some, like Vivian’s fire, can hit any enemy.

The combat is pretty easy throughout, but it is one of the most fun battle systems in an RPG. There is a puzzle-like mechanic of knowing which enemies can be struck by which type of attack. While in most RPGs, the player is only required to navigate menus to select an attack and watch it occur, Thousand-Year Door uses an Action Command style meaning the player must do a specific action for an attack to do more damage or be effective at all. These actions could be pressing the A button at the right time, holding the joystick to the left and releasing, the right time, entering a random string of numbers, or rapidly pressing the triggers. This keeps the battles engaging the entire length of the game because they feel like tiny minigames to focus on. Many have stated the the combat in Thousand-Year Door is too easy, and it is very easy with only the final boss being a real challenge, but I found the battle system to be too engaging and simply too much fun for it to bother me.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is a truly excellent game and an easy recommendation to anyone. The story and art style is charming and fun for anyone to enjoy it, and the combat is easy enough for an RPG novice to play while still having the Action Commands to engage anyone with more experience in the genre. This game has quickly climbed to the top of my list I wish to be rereleased for the Switch and, based on how fans have been begging Nintendo to return the Paper Mario to the style of Thousand-Year Door and how much critical acclaim this game has rightly gotten, I don’t feel alone in wishing for it.