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Metroid Prime: Great Game or Greatest Game?

Metroid Prime  

28 members have voted

  1. 1. Is Metroid Prime, in fact, the best game ever designed?

    • Yes
      12
    • No
      16


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Yeah. What Prime did so well is to realize that Metroid was an adventure/exploration game with shooting, not a shooting game with exploration. 

 

I was kinda glad about Other M, which seemed to restore the balance of adventure/action to the original ratios. Bad cutscenes, though, for people who care about that stuff.

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Yeah I gotta agree with Twig.  As much as I love Prime (and I do, a lot) I can't say that it's the greatest game.

Oh yeah? Well then what is, Mr. I-know-a-better-game?

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Joke answer: Clearly [insert AAA shooter] is the best game

 

Real answer: Honestly I don't have a game I think is better because I don't think comparing them in that way serves any purpose.  I don't think there is a greatest game, just great games and Prime is certainly one of them.

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I think that asking whether something is the "greatest game" is never going to produce anything but bickering, but I do believe that Metroid Prime is an absolute masterpiece of tone, setting, and storytelling. In many games (the Mario series), the act of playing is the fun part, but Metroid Prime was all about the act of observing. You'd open up a new room, and it just felt natural, real, and living. I still remember the first time you come out on Phendrana Drifts, or that large area right in front of the crashed spacecraft. Even backtracking felt fantastic to me, since you'd fight your way down into the Phazon Mines or whatever, and then slowly come ambling out, even more badass. The first time a particular flash of light reflected Samus' startled expression on the inside of her visor made me audibly gasp. 

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Real answer: Honestly I...think there is a greatest game,...and Prime is certainly [the best].

 

Weird, I don't remember saying that.  Oh well, it must be true.

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I voted that, yes, it is the greatest game. But I acknowledge that my reasoning is that when I was 13 it was the only game I had played that was great in the way that it is. Basically, it informed how I thought about games for most of my teen years, so I think of it as being the best game.

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I forgot how frustratingly brutal some of the boss battles are. I'm currently stuck on the rock-thing (which I believe drops the spider-ball upgrade). I don't think I have enough missiles to defeat him, but I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.

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See, I figured the poll was an obviously facetious question. There probably is no "greatest game." Metroid Prime is just good enough that the hyperbole applies.

 

 

 

 

Also, don't forget that it's the Citizen Kane of games.

 

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Yeah I don't think you can seriously throw the term "greatest game" around any more than you can throw "citizen kane of games" around, at least not seriously. Those 2 don't mean the same thing, but both are incredibly loaded and of ambiguous meaning anyway.

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I honestly don't think Metroid Prime is even near the top of greatest games ever.

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For what it's worth, I can't imagine a better "First Person Metroid game" than Metroid Prime.  The studio nailed so much of what I considered essential to a Metroid experience.

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I have a lot of fondness for it, but if pressed I'd probably put Super Metroid as the 'greatest' game.

 

I think calling Metroid Prime the Citizen Kane of video games might have been the beginning of the end for that particular comparison.

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So i would still place Super Metroid as the best game in the series, but i do think there is an argument to be made for Metroid Prime being one of the best games of all time and an easy second spot for the series.

For starters, it's a fairly remarkable feat that they translated the mechanics and feel of Metroid so successfully, not just to 3d environments, but to a first-person perspective. First person platforming? FPS boss fights? It turns these things into strengths rather than have them as anchors dragging the experience down? I think it owes to how Retro radically rethought how to approach first-person games. (Or, at the very least, took cues from other 3D japanese games of the time, the control scheme certainly has a lot in common with how the N64 Zeldas of only a year or two prior handled.)

Yet, even with those things considered, the game has some very western flourishes, beyond simply the chosen perspective, such as the diegetic hud presentation and the emphasis on narrative through discovered log entries. I think the game ends up being this really beautiful cohesion of western and japanese design ideals, and is absolutely better for it.

Then there's the really phenomenal art direction served by a powerhouse of an engine, pushing some of the best visuals the GC ever saw while doing it at 60fps and at the progressive scan resolution. Not to forget that powerfully distinctive soundtrack composed by the composer of Super Metroid, and including many remixes of Super Metroid themes. (There's also a really rich ambient soundscape in the game, try turning down the music some time.) The presentation of the game is so good that i can go back to it and it barely feels like it's aged at all, it still looks and sounds marvelous. (It's a 2002 game, think about how well other games from around then hold up.)

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Retro, I think, are one of the best, if not the best, art-driven development studios in the industry. Their artists come up with these gorgeous locations and set pieces, but they don't compromise on how they play and they don't let the art development overwhelm the production like in many other studios. It helps that, while they're art-driven, their technical and game design chops are rock solid.

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Not to sidetrack the conversation, but I have never finished Super Metroid because I every time I try to play it I get stuck after about an hour.  That didn't happen to me in Prime.

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I really couldn't enjoy Metroid Prime too much because the controls (both the original GC and the updated Wii) were too problematic. Honestly, if you're making a FPS on console I just want dual-analog. I can theoretically appreciate being limited by the GC's controller scheme and proficient adaptation to motion controls, but I expect a degree of control comfort while playing FPS games and grappling with that stuff was just too damaging to my overall experience to love Prime. For this same reason, I had trouble enjoying Zelda on Wii because I had become accustomed to the relatively consistent control scheme on N64/GC. Games with less complex controls were much more easily enjoyable for me on Wii, like the Mario platformers.

 

Also, I've just wanted a standard SNES/GBA 2D Metroid game for so long that any game not delivering that in recent memory has just been tainted by that desire.

 

Both complaints are not really criticisms of Prime as much as they are personal barriers to enjoyment, but it's hard for me to fully appreciate the game in a critical sense when pervasive nagging issues are in my way.

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I really couldn't enjoy Metroid Prime too much because the controls (both the original GC and the updated Wii) were too problematic..

 

Huh.. It was the opposite for me. For so long I just couldn't play dual-stick FPS games decently.. Then came Metroid Prime and it just felt so natural to me, for some reason.

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I think I have a pretty irregular taste for FPS console games with respect to most of the Thumbs community, I eat up practically every mainstream FPS because it's just comfort food for me. I usually play every COD for 6 months post-release and prestige like 5+ times. I play every Halo on launch day. I rent 10-hour B-quality FPS games because I know I can just tear through them in a day or two.

 

So, having an FPS with a non-standard console control scheme was weirdly stressful for me.

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