Metroid Prime: Great Game or Greatest Game?

[Architecture]

I definitely have had to readjust my fingers coming back to this game. I think the biggest error is the inability to fine-aim and move at the same time. It makes acquiring certain lock-ons a tad more difficult and frustrating than is ideal.

 

Still, the overall design of Metroid Prime jazzes me to the point that I overlook some of the cumbersome control choices Retro made.

[SecretAsianMan]

One of the things I like about Prime's design is that it figured out a way to do it without being a dual analog shooter.  Metroid is not about fighting off waves of enemies, it's not even about fighting more than one enemy most of the time.  I think making Prime play like Halo would have been a mistake.  I like Halo too, but Prime is much more purposeful in it's combat encounters.  It's fine to not like the way Prime controls but to me it's a strength more than a weakness.

[Architecture]

A game doesn't have to play like HALO to separate body movement and head movement from one another. Gone Home, for instance, will almost certainly feature dual-stick controls when it lands on PS4, but I don't think any of us would accuse it of being a bombastic, HALO-like experience. They could have even preserved the lock-on mechanic and still enabled the C-stick to move Samus's head. Hell, Call of Duty's aiming down sights mechanic essentially works the same way, except that the lock-on is less perceptible.

[SecretAsianMan]

That's true, but I still think that making Prime a stick shooter would have significantly changed the design of the game, to it's detriment.  Maybe it wouldn't have become Halo, but I think the encounters would be much less interesting if I were lining up headshots all the time instead of being more deliberate in my movements.  I think the restraints they had in the controller made for a more memorable experience in the end.

[JonCole]

SAM, I find it interesting that you define dual-analog more of a genre than a control method. It strikes me as similar to the arguments that Resident Evil better accomplishes its survival-horror goals by having an unconventional third-person shooter control scheme. I never found that argument particularly compelling, but the parallel is thought-provoking.

 

I don't see why dual-analog as a control scheme would automatically have gameplay implications on how Prime works. Halo is actually an interesting example, because I can see the argument that Halo 4 (and to lesser extents, 3 and Reach) is very similar to modern FPS games in terms of the number of enemies, the aiming, the powers that speed up encounters, etc. But Halo 1 and 2 have a much more deliberate pace that really doesn't seem all that different from Prime, in my opinion. Most weapons don't have ADS and the number of enemies on screen at any given time except in large arenas can typically be counted on one hand.

[SecretAsianMan]

I'm phrasing my arguments poorly if they're coming across as a genre definition, although now that I think about it maybe it is.  I certainly don't mean to imply that all games that use the two stick control scheme are the same.  I do still think that it would have changed the enemy design in Prime.  To me a completely free looking system means you care about where your shots are being placed.  The Prime system feels to me that it cares more about where I'm placing myself which was much easier to accomplish when I didn't have to worry about my specific aim too.  Granted, I played Prime 3 with the free look on and aimed all around, but that was more because of the Wii's unique controller.  Obviously Prime was much more limited in this so they had to work around it.

[lobotomy42]

Was the dual-analog system already considered "standard" when Prime released? My recollections was that it was Halo which solidified that control setup for console, which hadn't come out too long before Prime.  But I am no shooter expert, so I may be incorrect.

 

Also, didn't the games essentially have free-aiming in the Wii re-release? That would suggest the limited controls were not central to experience, unless I'm wildly misunderstanding how they were implemented.

[SecretAsianMan]

The first Halo was released about 1 year before the first Prime, which is probably too late into the development of Prime to have made an impact.  The Wii version did implement the free look that Prime 3 had, but even Prime 3 still relied heavily on the lock on which makes it different from a completely free look like a normal console shooter has.

[JonCole]

Was the dual-analog system already considered "standard" when Prime released? My recollections was that it was Halo which solidified that control setup for console, which hadn't come out too long before Prime.  But I am no shooter expert, so I may be incorrect.

 

Also, didn't the games essentially have free-aiming in the Wii re-release? That would suggest the limited controls were not central to experience, unless I'm wildly misunderstanding how they were implemented.

 

You make a fine point and I think that my issue with Prime would have been minimized had I played it soon after release, but I picked up a GC late in the cycle so dual-analog was further cemented as the standard and Prime felt an exception at that point.

 

I also believe you're right about free-aiming in the motion controlled re-release, though the game wasn't really altered in any way to make the free-aim more or less useful. Really, my issue with the Wii version was not the control configuration, but more that it used motion control at all. In essence, my ideal Wii remake would have had a choice between motion controls and a remapped GC layout to the Wii Classic Controller with free aim on the right stick.

 

I'd just like to restate that I'm not attempting to make any objective judgment on how the game controls, I'm just saying that my familiarity with dual-analog made Prime more unwieldy than it probably would have felt without that preconception. Similarly, I had a hard time getting used to Resident Evil 4 after having played Gears of War on 360, despite the fact that RE4 had the lead on it by a fair margin. Maybe RE4 is just more my kind of game, but I managed to beat it on GC nonetheless while I only got 5-6 hours into Prime before just deciding I wasn't having all the fun in the world with it.

[SecretAsianMan]

I'd just like to restate that I'm not attempting to make any objective judgment on how the game controls, I'm just saying that my familiarity with dual-analog made Prime more unwieldy than it probably would have felt without that preconception. Similarly, I had a hard time getting used to Resident Evil 4 after having played Gears of War on 360, despite the fact that RE4 had the lead on it by a fair margin. Maybe RE4 is just more my kind of game, but I managed to beat it on GC nonetheless while I only got 5-6 hours into Prime before just deciding I wasn't having all the fun in the world with it.

 

I don't think anyone believed you were saying the game or its controls were bad.  I don't think that Prime controls were perfect (I had the same issue as Architecture with trying to acquire lock), nor do I think dual analog controls are terrible.  I played Prime before Halo so I didn't have a problem with it.  I'm actually like you a lot in that I play a lot of FPS games, but these days I'm not really a console gamer anymore.  My number one frustration with controllers is that almost all the buttons are face buttons to be pushed by your 2 thumbs.  It's one of the reasons I prefer mouse/keyboard (along with the more common reasons like accuracy).

 

That really didn't have anything to do with the topic.  Metroid Prime is great.

[lobotomy42]

The first Halo was released about 1 year before the first Prime, which is probably too late into the development of Prime to have made an impact.  The Wii version did implement the free look that Prime 3 had, but even Prime 3 still relied heavily on the lock on which makes it different from a completely free look like a normal console shooter has.

 

Geeze, you're right, it's been so long since I've played Prime 3 that I'd completely forgotten that it still had the lock-on mechanism.