I just played Metroid Prime 3 for thirty minutes, and now have a crippling pain in my right hand from mashing the A button. Not to worry, I can still type, especially when livid enough to rant; I'll type through the pain for this.
Metroid 3 is the highest-rated game for Wii according to IGN, but I hate it. Worse than that. I loathe it. I want to burst into the homes of the game designers while they're having a nice family dinner, shake my swollen hand at them, and yell, "Why? WHY? WHY?!" Then I'd grab a handful of mashed potatoes, throw it at their face, dive out the window and laugh maniacally as I run down the street...
You see, I just don't get games like Metroid 3.
The graphics are pretty, the plot and music are fine, and I understand the primal satisfaction of running around and killing stuff. But I'm confused by how capricious and pre-determined it all is! I waste twenty minutes running around a huge level, trying to figure what to do next, only because I overlooked a dark ledge against a dark wall, which I needed to jump on. That's supposed to be fun?
The only reason my hand hurts from mashing A is because the game designers didn't give me an automatic weapon. It's the year 3000, we can fly through space and shoot phazon out of our ass, but no one has automatic weapons? Clearly, the designers thought that firepower should be limited solely by the player's tolerance of repetitive strain injury. Brilliant!
Maybe I'm bitter because I'm dumb: I got stuck on a couple of the puzzles, and now I'm upset and only have myself to blame. That may be. But really good games are those that have more than one way of completing successfully. They have a solid foundation of rules that describe how the world works, and within that, the player can discover any number of strategies that work. World of Warcraft and Katamari Damacy are two great examples where the game world generally functions in obvious ways, and there are few rules on how the player can progress.
Metroid Prime 3, on the other hand, is just a silly disentanglement puzzle under a veneer of flashy graphics.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
What's to like?
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2 comments:
man, a transcript of our big long conversation would be really appropriate. ah well. at least it did its job and helped us avoid work.
i guess the conclusion was, metroid has always been about weird puzzles like that, without much context in the game world. so, you're basically saying metroid ain't for you...which is totally fair!
retro does deserve some kudos for the controls. the high reviews are probably due largely to that, as well as the high regard and nostalgia that metroid has among long-time gamers. still, to each their own.
Yes, the controls have grown on me quite a bit. They are very intuitive and precise. The pump-type controls are a bit of a gimmick, and it's annoying when you're fighting a boss and the Wii loses track of the remote, but overall it's excellent. A definite breakthrough!
I'm just not a puzzle person.