There’s nobody chattering away in your headset, giving you instructions. Metroid Prime is enthralling because it’s so minimal. The moment where you see sunlight again is such a relief. You have to fight your way back out using infrared vision, as all those things in all those tanks make a bid for freedom. There is an extraordinarily atmospheric section where Samus investigates a space-pirate research lab, full of questionable things floating in glass tanks, only for the power to cut out in its innermost chambers, leaving you in total darkness. Because enemies don’t come thick and fast, and most of them aren’t very dangerous, when something aggressive does start attacking me I emit a quiet but sustained scream until it’s defeated. I definitely do not face Tallon IV down without fear – Metroid Prime scares the bejesus out of me. It’s a game about exploring more than shooting discovering, rather than conquering. Samus is more an archaeologist than a warrior, though she faces down some extremely creepy places and creatures without fear. You shoot things with her arm cannon, sure, but you’re spending most of your time using your brain and her slowly reinstated abilities to navigate this planet and figure out what happened here. We can scan what’s around us to familiarise ourselves with its ecology, and search for clues about what precipitated its ruin. We slowly map this planet, figuring out how it fits together, collecting power-ups for Samus’ suit that let us probe it further. The experience that ensues defies easy categorisation, but I would call it a first-person adventure game. After encountering some genetically manipulated horrors on an abandoned spaceship, which then explodes in a memorable escape-against-the-clock prelude, bounty hunter Samus Aran lands on Tallon IV, a beautiful but forsaken planet infected and poisoned by a meteor-borne contaminant. In fact, I didn’t appreciate it in 2003, when I was a teenager, as much as I do now.įor the uninitiated, Metroid Prime is a Nintendo game made by an American developer, Retro Studios, and has a totally different atmosphere to the 2D Metroids you might more readily associate with the name. This game was astonishingly ahead of its time. I’ve been unable to play anything else for weeks, since I downloaded it on a whim after February’s Nintendo Direct. Metroid Prime Remastered is one of those games. But sometimes, you play a game from a decades ago and think, this might actually hit better now. Replaying games from that period today requires a kind eye and a willingness to accept compromising quirks. I wrote a few weeks ago about how bringing games back from the 1990s can be a difficult exercise, given how technologically hamstrung developers were in the early 3D era. A corrected version is on the Guardian site. Most obviously, I referred to the Meta Quest 2 headset as the now-discontinued Oculus Go (even though I’d just been playing with the Quest 2, to compare it with PSVR2 – nice job, brain). W elcome back to Pushing Buttons! First up – last week’s newsletter had a few errors in it.
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