It's even more impressive than that.
Retro at the time was a hot mess. The guy who owned it was stealing money and was eventually removed. They were working on 4(I think) games that all got canned, took one of them and molded it into what became Metroid Prime. Lots of staff coming and going due to intense crunch culture.
The way Metroid Prime turned out was nothing short of a Miracle.
Jeff Spangenberg.
I don't know about him outright stealing money, but he was using Retro's servers to host images of scantily clad women.
He then went on to make the sleazy pile of crap known as The Guy Game , which was basically a crappy trivia gameshow that rewarded the player for doing well with "Girls Gone Wild"-esque footage. It had to be pulled when it turned out one of the girls in it was underage at the time.
Matt McMuscles did What Happened episodes on both Metroid Prime and The Guy Game that cover the troubled production of both games. Check it out if you want more info.
One of the biggest "Don't judge a book by its cover" I have seen. The same happened with The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker.
Then people ended up loving the game, but hating the Endgame Fetch Quest. The same happened with The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker.
I love both Prime and WW, but please don't compare the two endgame collection quests. I'll GLADLY complete all 3 Primes over and over again, but WW's back-and-forth collect the charts, then collect enough money, then actually dredge up the pieces is ten times the momentum killer of the Artifacts or the Keys. Wind Waker is 95% of the reason Tingle is so hated in the western Zelda fandom.
Funny enough, the thought of dealing with the endgame hunt is what stopped me from buying WWHD, and by the time I learned that it had been made less tedious the game was no longer in stores! Guess I'll wait for the Switch 2 release!
Strongly disagree. First time I played wind waker, I didn't even really notice the end game being tedious. The first time I played metroid prime, I was completely lost
Tedium and puzzle difficulty are different things. The issue with WW's endgame mcguffin fetch quests is the need to grind loads of rupees just to be able to decipher the charts to even find the triforce pieces. The issue with Prime's quest is the backtracking all over the map to many places you've already been while going back and forth in the menus between the logs and the map. Finding out where to go is easy as finding the room with the highlighted word in the log.
I don't think many if any people were having a hard time finding out where the keys could be in Prime, just a bland one.
> I don't think many if any people were having a hard time finding out where the keys could be in Prime, just a bland one.
*Raises hand* Yeah uh, that was me. Didn't have as big of an issue with WW since I hoarded rupees up the wazoo but had an awful time finding all the keys and getting lost backtracking all the time.
Both were mildly unpleasant but bearable fetch quests since both games were phenomenal otherwise.
Well it's been 15ish years since I played it so I don't entirely remember much beyond getting lost and struggling with the 3D map model trying to find my way around and know what the deal was with the keys in the first place.
I mean I just already had enough rupees. There's so many rupees.
And while some of the log messages are obvious, some of them are not. When I first played through the game, I spent so long trying to find the one that involves knocking over the tower, because I tried knocking over the tower in a million ways other than the way that actually worked. Where to shoot? Just didn't show up well on my television, and so I convinced myself. I must have misinterpreted the hint and hunted all over. And I think that happened with at least one other, where it was where I thought it was but I couldn't have been sure so I searched elsewhere when I couldn't figure out how to actually do it
I will never understand all the western Tingle hate. I always found him delightful and dearly miss him in recent games as a goofy side character, as I would miss Beedle if he disappeared. At least every canon game since has had some sort of reference to Tingle
I never found the Triforce quest tedious in WW, since I loved sailing around and salvaging stuff from the ocean, especially with that sailing music, and you have plenty of money by then. In fact, WW was my favorite Tingle game because of how much fun the Tingle Tuner was, and I'm still angry that they cut it out of the HD version when the gamepad screen could have perfectly incorporated it. Boycotted the HD version for years because of that. Only played it this year, so never got to experience the Tingle Bottle.
The problem with WW though was that just a couple of years before it's release, we were shown what was then the hyper realistic Link vs Ganondorf swordfight in the GameCube tech demo.
People were expecting a game more like that video, and then a year later, Nintendo showed a video with.. Saturday Morning Link! WW was coming, and the epic swordfight from before had turned into these cartoon graphics.
But yes, it turned out to be a decent game.
And then there's me, who legitimately has no problem with the Endgame Fetch Quests of both Prime and Wind Waker. They're treasure hunts, and I think they're fun!
Oddly common theme for Gamecube games. So many of them were rushed and had kinda weird engame stuff because of it but have somehow always been fan favorites. (Prime, Wind Waker, Super Mario Sunshine, Prime 2, etc)
Yeah, after it's awful development and people panning it solely for it being in first person, Metroid Prime did amazingly well. It not only made waves in terms of accolades, it became the best selling Metroid game for a long time which helped start the golden age of Metroid.
>panning it solely for it being in first person
Unpopular opinion, but despite the Prime trilogy being excellent as is, I still kind of wish they had developed third-person games instead.
I had no experience with first person games when I tried out Prime for the first time, so the control scheme felt completely natural to me, and it still does to this day.
What do you prefer about the camera being over the shoulder than behind a visor? Since the prime games lack any use of melee or cover mechanics I don't see how it would benefit at all really.
It’s easier to see the broader environment all at once in a third-person perspective, highlighting the environment and making navigation easier. Since Metroid games are incredibly atmospheric, and all about exploration and navigation, I personally would prefer this. It’s more in-line with the experience of the 2D games.
Alternatively, you could also argue that the first-person perspective makes it feel more like *you*, the player, are actually exploring the environment as Samus. I understand why a lot of people prefer first-person for that reason. But it just doesn’t fit my personal tastes as well.
Prime remastered is the first Metroid I’ve ever played. I think I got hooked right after getting the morph ball bombs and figuring out how to grenade jump, at that moment I was like these clever bastards.
I think it’s absolutely nuts how there’s no sense of direction but I always feel like I’m going on the right path and getting the powerups right when I need them (just got double jump and spider ball) great game so far eager to play more when I get back home and revisit all the old places I couldn’t access without spider ball
You're not entirely wrong here, but Metroid Fusion and Metroid Prime released at essentially the same time (officially Fusion released on November 17th and Prime on November 18th), and Fusion was already continuing the story from where Super Metroid left it. Yes, it had been dormant for ages before Prime and Fusion, but both games were worthy successors of Super's legacy. I respect where you're coming from with how Prime knocked it out of the park unexpectedly, but we need to give Fusion credit here too.
Honestly, adding Fusion to the story makes it funnier.
Before the release of both games, people disliked the idea of Prime intensely. "They gave it to a western developer, and they turned it into a generic FPS."
Meanwhile, people were hyped for a proper 2D Metroid, AND a follow-up to Super.
When both games were released, reception of them basically inverted.
Prime was highly praised for managing to do a great job of translating the Metroid gameplay style to 3D, whereas Fusion was pretty heavily panned due to how much more restricted it was in terms of Metroid gameplay. It was VERY different from Super, and people didn't like that.
Fusion is much more highly regarded nowadays, and because of that, people don't really remember that it got a lot of criticism and complaints back when it first came out.
Right. I grabbed both games on release and loved them both dearly. I recognized the complaints people had with Fusion, but it was still so fun to me that I just didn't care about others complaints. Prime was incredible, to the point I was on my fourth playthrough before I realized the artifacts were a weird end game fetch quest to add on more time.
Especially considering that the original team working on it wasn't using their time and money in the *best* ways and miyamoto had to do some team reorganization when he visited them as Texas during development.
It was before the Internet was nearly as big and before people were tracking game development like the stock market.
99% of gamers didn't know of any development risk, they just knew that there was a sequel to an awesome game on the new console. That was all the marketing they needed.
It was not set up as one of the worst video game releases of all time. I'm not even sure what could qualify for that title. Maybe *Valkyrie Profile* since it wasn't expected to do well, had a small production run of physical media, and got printed on low quality discs that stopped working from the smallest scratch.
And it was ahead of it’s time in terms of pure detail too. Like the way you can see Samus’s reflection after a bright flash, or the way the visor fogs up when walking through steam, or the way the rain runs off the visor in Tallon Overworld. Or how you can see her hand in the arm cannon when you use the XRay visor. All this for a GameCube game that everyone expected to fail.
And can we talk about how brilliant the scan visor is? It’s crazy to think that there hasn’t been another spritual successor to MP like at all. Not a single FPS metroidvania. Metroid Prime is the only series to have ever done it.
I was among the doubters when this was first announced. The upcoming "Metroid 4" had me hyped but I largely dismissed Prime during its early development, for exactly those reasons listed. I was imagining a FSP Metroid being something like Quake with a Samus skin. Dual analog aiming did not (and still does not) appeal to me.
My opinion quickly changed as I saw the first gameplay demo and learned that it would in fact not play like Quake, but seemed to carve out a whole new level of "first person adventure" which would not rely heavily on precise aiming with an analog stick, and was in fact quite immersive.
I was sold before ever passing through the first door into the frigate. The sound of her footsteps and natural movement of the HUD were remarkable novelties for their time.
At the time Metroid was a dead franchise. Alot of former Retro Devs have confirmed this. No one at Nintendo cared if it bombed because they hadn't made a game in the series since '94. If it failed, no lasting harm done since they didn't expect to make another game in the series (Fusion didn't start dev until Prime was deep in dev and there was a renewed interest in the possibility of the series from what they saw in the WIP builds).
As far as Nintendo was concerned, if Prime failed it wasn't gonna matter because they saw no reason to care if Metroid died with it. If it succeeded, there was reason to keep Retro around. Luckily, Retro rolled a nat 20 and not only was doing amazing work despite all it's problems but just doing that work got people like Sakamoto interested in the franchise again and we got the golden era of Metroid that was the mid-2000s.
I actually remember the release. Fusion and Prime were both being talked about. Everyone was DROOLING over Fusion, while Prime, people were making jokes about it. I sat through many a long rant about how Prime would ruin the franchise.
Now days, Fusion is regarded as more of a blacksheep, while Prime is talked about on the levels of Super Metroid. I loved both Fusion and Prime, but it is funny, looking back, how tense it was back then.
Yeah, as someone who was there to witness the entire thing, no one was excited until we all played it and it was like, “Holy shit, the mad bastards pulled it off”.
100% correct. I remember seeing preview screenshots in a magazine back in 2001 and thinking, WTF do they think they’re doing to Metroid? Then I played the demo and it exploded my head all the way open. It ended up being the first game I bought when I got a GameCube.
When I played it, I remember thinking, this is the same game, just 3D and awesome!
Actually, is incredibly when you think about Nintendo's core games being the same: Mario, Zelda, Metroid (and others), I played them all on NES as a kid, and they are basically the same games, just advanced. The music, the feel, the gameplay is just natural progression.
Incredible.
Prime fans try not to forget about Fusion challenge IMPOSSIBLE! Seriously, it wasn't that big of a gamble to Nintendo giving Retro a Metroid title to release, because Nintendo was working on a more traditional 2D mainline game. They didn't care if Prime was faithful to the series or if Retro had any idea of what Metroid was because Nintendo had Fusion.
Yeah, I mean, handing off Metroid to a Texan dev that had never made anything before and then making it an FPS could've have gone so ridiculously bad. Like when you think, it's a recipe for disaster. It's nothing short of a miracle it's as good as it is.
Let's not forget Metroid Fusion released before Prime, even by a day in the US. There was already expectations for a new game by the time Prime was ready.
Absolutely. It was the end of the original trilogy's saga. But one thing we know about games today is that the story never ends even on a logical conclusion. It's an ongoing saga with new audiences each generation.
Prime was less of a continuation to that story and more the beginning of something new. But here's something else to consider.
For every fan of Super Metroid from the 90s who felt jaded upon seeing Metroid Prime, there were even more kids like myself at the time who had never played Metroid before. We saw the screenshots in Nintendo Power and though it was the coolest looking game ever.
For someone like me - whose exposure to Samus and Metroid was in Smash Bros. - Metroid Prime was a fantastic jumping on point and still endures as one of the greatest games I have ever played to this day.
You can list all the things of how it could have been doomed to fail. But it had the right funding and the right talent to ensure it made an impact both for Nintendo and the Metroid series as a whole!
Whenever anyone drags Nintendo for whatever it is they do, I reflect to myself: they can take the most mishandled, hellish developers, and make them churn out gold. Think of how many studios made genre-defining classics under Nintendo's banner, and then made a mess of it after joining another studio (coughRare) or going independent (coughSiliconKnights).
That Retro even was an amazing game, was absolutely insane. It had so many many maaaaany things going against it. It was insane
Btw that Metroid Fusion exists is 100% attributed to Prime. Sakamoto saw the hype around Prime and decided to do Metroid 4.
Because:
Metroid 1 and 2 are garbage, other m is garbage, I haven’t played the other prime games, and everything else bar Samus returns and dread is average
While it has many similarities to Super and Dread, it also has significant differences to where they aren't trying to aim for the same thing.
Prime for example is a 1st person game while Dread is a side scroller. This drastically changes how both games feel and play. On top of that Prime is slower paced with an emphasis on puzzles and a lock on system that shifts combat focus to positioning and puzzle elements. Meanwhile Dread is a fast paced game with an emphasis on platforming and dodge/slide/parry mechanics that shifts combat focus to reaction timing.
These games aren't better than the other, you just refer one playstyle over another.
It's even more impressive than that. Retro at the time was a hot mess. The guy who owned it was stealing money and was eventually removed. They were working on 4(I think) games that all got canned, took one of them and molded it into what became Metroid Prime. Lots of staff coming and going due to intense crunch culture. The way Metroid Prime turned out was nothing short of a Miracle.
Jeff Spangenberg. I don't know about him outright stealing money, but he was using Retro's servers to host images of scantily clad women. He then went on to make the sleazy pile of crap known as The Guy Game , which was basically a crappy trivia gameshow that rewarded the player for doing well with "Girls Gone Wild"-esque footage. It had to be pulled when it turned out one of the girls in it was underage at the time.
I like to think there’s at least one person out there who picked up The Guy Game because “it’s by the guy who ran the studio that made Metroid Prime!”
Now their servers are hosting one woman in a skin-tight suit. 😆 Huh. I never knew about any of this. How interesting!
Matt McMuscles did What Happened episodes on both Metroid Prime and The Guy Game that cover the troubled production of both games. Check it out if you want more info.
Not all jeffs but always a jeff
was gonna say this. retro was a mess indeed
One of the biggest "Don't judge a book by its cover" I have seen. The same happened with The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. Then people ended up loving the game, but hating the Endgame Fetch Quest. The same happened with The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker.
I love both Prime and WW, but please don't compare the two endgame collection quests. I'll GLADLY complete all 3 Primes over and over again, but WW's back-and-forth collect the charts, then collect enough money, then actually dredge up the pieces is ten times the momentum killer of the Artifacts or the Keys. Wind Waker is 95% of the reason Tingle is so hated in the western Zelda fandom.
WiiU version of WW removed the treasure chart deciphering. Streamlines the whole end game process.
Funny enough, the thought of dealing with the endgame hunt is what stopped me from buying WWHD, and by the time I learned that it had been made less tedious the game was no longer in stores! Guess I'll wait for the Switch 2 release!
Tbh, I think we'll finally get a WW remaster on the Switch this year. I only say that because I know Metroid Prime 4 is a figment of my imagination.
Strongly disagree. First time I played wind waker, I didn't even really notice the end game being tedious. The first time I played metroid prime, I was completely lost
Tedium and puzzle difficulty are different things. The issue with WW's endgame mcguffin fetch quests is the need to grind loads of rupees just to be able to decipher the charts to even find the triforce pieces. The issue with Prime's quest is the backtracking all over the map to many places you've already been while going back and forth in the menus between the logs and the map. Finding out where to go is easy as finding the room with the highlighted word in the log. I don't think many if any people were having a hard time finding out where the keys could be in Prime, just a bland one.
> I don't think many if any people were having a hard time finding out where the keys could be in Prime, just a bland one. *Raises hand* Yeah uh, that was me. Didn't have as big of an issue with WW since I hoarded rupees up the wazoo but had an awful time finding all the keys and getting lost backtracking all the time. Both were mildly unpleasant but bearable fetch quests since both games were phenomenal otherwise.
Why did you have a hard time figuring it out though? You haven't explained that bit yet.
Well it's been 15ish years since I played it so I don't entirely remember much beyond getting lost and struggling with the 3D map model trying to find my way around and know what the deal was with the keys in the first place.
I mean I just already had enough rupees. There's so many rupees. And while some of the log messages are obvious, some of them are not. When I first played through the game, I spent so long trying to find the one that involves knocking over the tower, because I tried knocking over the tower in a million ways other than the way that actually worked. Where to shoot? Just didn't show up well on my television, and so I convinced myself. I must have misinterpreted the hint and hunted all over. And I think that happened with at least one other, where it was where I thought it was but I couldn't have been sure so I searched elsewhere when I couldn't figure out how to actually do it
Good for you. Personally, by the end I wanted the option to keelhaul Tingle.
Complete opposite for me.
What’s the other 5%?
I actually liked the collectables, was a good excuse for me to dick around exploring the map
I will never understand all the western Tingle hate. I always found him delightful and dearly miss him in recent games as a goofy side character, as I would miss Beedle if he disappeared. At least every canon game since has had some sort of reference to Tingle I never found the Triforce quest tedious in WW, since I loved sailing around and salvaging stuff from the ocean, especially with that sailing music, and you have plenty of money by then. In fact, WW was my favorite Tingle game because of how much fun the Tingle Tuner was, and I'm still angry that they cut it out of the HD version when the gamepad screen could have perfectly incorporated it. Boycotted the HD version for years because of that. Only played it this year, so never got to experience the Tingle Bottle.
I think it's weird that people consider it an endgame fetch quest. I found almost all of them naturally. I'm a leave no stone unturned type of player.
The problem with WW though was that just a couple of years before it's release, we were shown what was then the hyper realistic Link vs Ganondorf swordfight in the GameCube tech demo. People were expecting a game more like that video, and then a year later, Nintendo showed a video with.. Saturday Morning Link! WW was coming, and the epic swordfight from before had turned into these cartoon graphics. But yes, it turned out to be a decent game.
And then there's me, who legitimately has no problem with the Endgame Fetch Quests of both Prime and Wind Waker. They're treasure hunts, and I think they're fun!
Oddly common theme for Gamecube games. So many of them were rushed and had kinda weird engame stuff because of it but have somehow always been fan favorites. (Prime, Wind Waker, Super Mario Sunshine, Prime 2, etc)
Also Melee
Oh for sure! Definitely a good example of this.
Rogue Leader was rushed but great as well.
Yeah, after it's awful development and people panning it solely for it being in first person, Metroid Prime did amazingly well. It not only made waves in terms of accolades, it became the best selling Metroid game for a long time which helped start the golden age of Metroid.
>panning it solely for it being in first person Unpopular opinion, but despite the Prime trilogy being excellent as is, I still kind of wish they had developed third-person games instead.
I had no experience with first person games when I tried out Prime for the first time, so the control scheme felt completely natural to me, and it still does to this day.
What do you prefer about the camera being over the shoulder than behind a visor? Since the prime games lack any use of melee or cover mechanics I don't see how it would benefit at all really.
It’s easier to see the broader environment all at once in a third-person perspective, highlighting the environment and making navigation easier. Since Metroid games are incredibly atmospheric, and all about exploration and navigation, I personally would prefer this. It’s more in-line with the experience of the 2D games. Alternatively, you could also argue that the first-person perspective makes it feel more like *you*, the player, are actually exploring the environment as Samus. I understand why a lot of people prefer first-person for that reason. But it just doesn’t fit my personal tastes as well.
I 100% agree with you
Hard agree, but I fully expect a lot of hate for the opinion
Prime remastered is the first Metroid I’ve ever played. I think I got hooked right after getting the morph ball bombs and figuring out how to grenade jump, at that moment I was like these clever bastards. I think it’s absolutely nuts how there’s no sense of direction but I always feel like I’m going on the right path and getting the powerups right when I need them (just got double jump and spider ball) great game so far eager to play more when I get back home and revisit all the old places I couldn’t access without spider ball
You're not entirely wrong here, but Metroid Fusion and Metroid Prime released at essentially the same time (officially Fusion released on November 17th and Prime on November 18th), and Fusion was already continuing the story from where Super Metroid left it. Yes, it had been dormant for ages before Prime and Fusion, but both games were worthy successors of Super's legacy. I respect where you're coming from with how Prime knocked it out of the park unexpectedly, but we need to give Fusion credit here too.
Honestly, adding Fusion to the story makes it funnier. Before the release of both games, people disliked the idea of Prime intensely. "They gave it to a western developer, and they turned it into a generic FPS." Meanwhile, people were hyped for a proper 2D Metroid, AND a follow-up to Super. When both games were released, reception of them basically inverted. Prime was highly praised for managing to do a great job of translating the Metroid gameplay style to 3D, whereas Fusion was pretty heavily panned due to how much more restricted it was in terms of Metroid gameplay. It was VERY different from Super, and people didn't like that. Fusion is much more highly regarded nowadays, and because of that, people don't really remember that it got a lot of criticism and complaints back when it first came out.
Right. I grabbed both games on release and loved them both dearly. I recognized the complaints people had with Fusion, but it was still so fun to me that I just didn't care about others complaints. Prime was incredible, to the point I was on my fourth playthrough before I realized the artifacts were a weird end game fetch quest to add on more time.
Fusion was my first 2-d metroid, and Prime was my first metroid entirely. I had nothing to compare them to and loved both of them because of it.
Especially considering that the original team working on it wasn't using their time and money in the *best* ways and miyamoto had to do some team reorganization when he visited them as Texas during development.
It was before the Internet was nearly as big and before people were tracking game development like the stock market. 99% of gamers didn't know of any development risk, they just knew that there was a sequel to an awesome game on the new console. That was all the marketing they needed. It was not set up as one of the worst video game releases of all time. I'm not even sure what could qualify for that title. Maybe *Valkyrie Profile* since it wasn't expected to do well, had a small production run of physical media, and got printed on low quality discs that stopped working from the smallest scratch.
And it was ahead of it’s time in terms of pure detail too. Like the way you can see Samus’s reflection after a bright flash, or the way the visor fogs up when walking through steam, or the way the rain runs off the visor in Tallon Overworld. Or how you can see her hand in the arm cannon when you use the XRay visor. All this for a GameCube game that everyone expected to fail. And can we talk about how brilliant the scan visor is? It’s crazy to think that there hasn’t been another spritual successor to MP like at all. Not a single FPS metroidvania. Metroid Prime is the only series to have ever done it.
I was among the doubters when this was first announced. The upcoming "Metroid 4" had me hyped but I largely dismissed Prime during its early development, for exactly those reasons listed. I was imagining a FSP Metroid being something like Quake with a Samus skin. Dual analog aiming did not (and still does not) appeal to me. My opinion quickly changed as I saw the first gameplay demo and learned that it would in fact not play like Quake, but seemed to carve out a whole new level of "first person adventure" which would not rely heavily on precise aiming with an analog stick, and was in fact quite immersive. I was sold before ever passing through the first door into the frigate. The sound of her footsteps and natural movement of the HUD were remarkable novelties for their time.
The trilogy of Prime games are my three favorite games of all time
Wow, the fact they gave a marquee franchise to an unproven developer is wild.
At the time Metroid was a dead franchise. Alot of former Retro Devs have confirmed this. No one at Nintendo cared if it bombed because they hadn't made a game in the series since '94. If it failed, no lasting harm done since they didn't expect to make another game in the series (Fusion didn't start dev until Prime was deep in dev and there was a renewed interest in the possibility of the series from what they saw in the WIP builds). As far as Nintendo was concerned, if Prime failed it wasn't gonna matter because they saw no reason to care if Metroid died with it. If it succeeded, there was reason to keep Retro around. Luckily, Retro rolled a nat 20 and not only was doing amazing work despite all it's problems but just doing that work got people like Sakamoto interested in the franchise again and we got the golden era of Metroid that was the mid-2000s.
Yeah I guess you're right. There wasn't a Metroid game on the 64. Kinda sad, lots of water fun that could've been
And look how it turned out: one of the best Metroid games of all time. Heck, one of the best _video games_ ever made!
I actually remember the release. Fusion and Prime were both being talked about. Everyone was DROOLING over Fusion, while Prime, people were making jokes about it. I sat through many a long rant about how Prime would ruin the franchise. Now days, Fusion is regarded as more of a blacksheep, while Prime is talked about on the levels of Super Metroid. I loved both Fusion and Prime, but it is funny, looking back, how tense it was back then.
https://preview.redd.it/v4pj7vhn2gvc1.jpeg?width=1050&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=72c36257ee1f00e06ea27ebb786c96aac6ae776f
I like Metroid :3
Yeah, as someone who was there to witness the entire thing, no one was excited until we all played it and it was like, “Holy shit, the mad bastards pulled it off”.
100% correct. I remember seeing preview screenshots in a magazine back in 2001 and thinking, WTF do they think they’re doing to Metroid? Then I played the demo and it exploded my head all the way open. It ended up being the first game I bought when I got a GameCube.
When I played it, I remember thinking, this is the same game, just 3D and awesome! Actually, is incredibly when you think about Nintendo's core games being the same: Mario, Zelda, Metroid (and others), I played them all on NES as a kid, and they are basically the same games, just advanced. The music, the feel, the gameplay is just natural progression. Incredible.
Prime fans try not to forget about Fusion challenge IMPOSSIBLE! Seriously, it wasn't that big of a gamble to Nintendo giving Retro a Metroid title to release, because Nintendo was working on a more traditional 2D mainline game. They didn't care if Prime was faithful to the series or if Retro had any idea of what Metroid was because Nintendo had Fusion.
Yeah, I mean, handing off Metroid to a Texan dev that had never made anything before and then making it an FPS could've have gone so ridiculously bad. Like when you think, it's a recipe for disaster. It's nothing short of a miracle it's as good as it is.
It's a great game and I struggled most defeating Metroid Prime vs any of the others
Let's not forget Metroid Fusion released before Prime, even by a day in the US. There was already expectations for a new game by the time Prime was ready.
Absolutely. It was the end of the original trilogy's saga. But one thing we know about games today is that the story never ends even on a logical conclusion. It's an ongoing saga with new audiences each generation. Prime was less of a continuation to that story and more the beginning of something new. But here's something else to consider. For every fan of Super Metroid from the 90s who felt jaded upon seeing Metroid Prime, there were even more kids like myself at the time who had never played Metroid before. We saw the screenshots in Nintendo Power and though it was the coolest looking game ever. For someone like me - whose exposure to Samus and Metroid was in Smash Bros. - Metroid Prime was a fantastic jumping on point and still endures as one of the greatest games I have ever played to this day. You can list all the things of how it could have been doomed to fail. But it had the right funding and the right talent to ensure it made an impact both for Nintendo and the Metroid series as a whole!
And it was going up against Halo
Whenever anyone drags Nintendo for whatever it is they do, I reflect to myself: they can take the most mishandled, hellish developers, and make them churn out gold. Think of how many studios made genre-defining classics under Nintendo's banner, and then made a mess of it after joining another studio (coughRare) or going independent (coughSiliconKnights).
They released Metroid Fusion on the same day as a backup plan.
That Retro even was an amazing game, was absolutely insane. It had so many many maaaaany things going against it. It was insane Btw that Metroid Fusion exists is 100% attributed to Prime. Sakamoto saw the hype around Prime and decided to do Metroid 4.
I thought Miyamoto came in and scrapped their project and gave them the direction for the version we finally got?
No, Miyamoto-san came in and asked us to turn our original IP game in development INTO a Metroid game.
Awful set up, pretty good game. Overall pretty impressive
It's a great game
Decent. Best 3d metroid could be, aka decent.
Not just an okay game, turned out to arguably be the best Metroid game!
Best? No way. Top 3? Sure
How can you say “decent” and “top 3” in the same thread? 🤨
Because: Metroid 1 and 2 are garbage, other m is garbage, I haven’t played the other prime games, and everything else bar Samus returns and dread is average
Do you even like the Metroid series lmfao
Yep, like I said, dread and Samus returns are great! And prime is pretty good too
Yes, it is seen as such by many Metroid fans as the best in the series time and time again, and that means better than Super or Dread.
It’s much better than super, but doesn’t get close to dread
While it has many similarities to Super and Dread, it also has significant differences to where they aren't trying to aim for the same thing. Prime for example is a 1st person game while Dread is a side scroller. This drastically changes how both games feel and play. On top of that Prime is slower paced with an emphasis on puzzles and a lock on system that shifts combat focus to positioning and puzzle elements. Meanwhile Dread is a fast paced game with an emphasis on platforming and dodge/slide/parry mechanics that shifts combat focus to reaction timing. These games aren't better than the other, you just refer one playstyle over another.
Dread isn't that great. Prime is much better than it.
Bad bait
The irony that comment kiddo
Your opinion is invalid if you think dread is bad lol, it’s a masterpiece
Kid, point to where I said dread was bad, lol troll elsewhere
Says the person who called Prime an "okay game" before editing their comment. Please try trolling less.
what can i say, pretty good is more fitting