So, after sitting all day at work, with a little white box of joy sitting in my truck taunting me viciously, I get home and pop Metroid Prime 3 into my Wii. Sweet, it only takes 4 tries before it actually reads my disk (my Wii has issues, my doctor prescribed penicillin), and I'm off and motion-controlling. When I finally get control of Samus, what am I greeted by? FUCKING VOICE ACTING MARINES!

Holy shit, lets rewind here for a second.

I'm put Metroid in my Wii, right? My Wii didn't magically begin to play xbox games and I'm all the sudden playing Halo 2, right?

A trademark of the Metroid series has always been the complete isolation. The crushing desolation that Samus faces as she ventures alone against an entire planet bent on her destruction. This feeling for me is completely summed up in probably the best piece of game art I have ever seen that has been featured here before (credit to transfuse of deviantart):



Samus, all alone in the dark, with only the light from her arm cannon for comfort. That is how the original Metroids felt, and part of what made them so compelling. So why the hell am I all the sudden running around chatting it up with flag officers? Even better yet, the first 'level' feels just like a canned and reprocessed sci-fi shooter. Baddies boarding your capital ship, marines dying left and right, ships getting lanced by huge frickin' lasers out the windows, you know the drill.

The other thing that made me feel 'off' about MP3 so far is the ease of item acquisition. I haven't played a whole lot (*POTENTIAL SPOILER* I'm moved on to the 2nd planet *END POTENTIAL SPOILER*), but I've gotten 3 energy tanks, all of which required nothing interesting or challenging to do. They were just lying around, and I happened to come across them. *POTENTIAL SPOILER* Same thing with the grapple beam; its just sitting at the beginning of a level, waiting to be picked up *END POTENTIAL SPOILER*.

Power ups, especially energy tanks are usually hard to come by. Sure the games will throw you a few bones now and then as way of ensuring you have a base amount of health/missiles to survive. But I'm two hours into the game and I already have 400 health. Not to mention every other enemy seems to drop red energy pickups. At this point, I have never even come close to losing 1/8th of my health, which doesn't feel right for a Metroid game. This bad taste in my mouth might also be due to starting with the morph ball, bombs, space jump and charge beam; but it sure as hell feels like I've been given too much stuff off the bat.


And this was one of the easier ones to get

But maybe I'm being too harsh, I say. I press on. The wiimote controls actually do more or less live up to the hype. Being able to free look while moving. what a novel idea! These controls are a very welcome change to the series, and I think at least initially make the game slightly harder; battles are no longer just a spasm of hitting the lock-on button while churning pure energy out of your arm cannon. Now you have to actually aim for once, which certainly makes the game feel more interesting and frantic when 50 headcrab things are swarming you at once.

Now the question, and the point of this blog. Does any of this matter? Am I a lone whackjob who is the only one muttering to himself about the original NES metroid and the 30 health/short beam you start with? At what point is changing some of the core ideas behind an IP refreshing, and at what point is it detrimental to the feel of the IP? Am I just wearing horrendously bitter shaded retro goggles?

I'm still very excited about this game, and after getting past the first true boss battle (which is complete EPIC WIN), the game has gotten much lonelier. I think it will definitely wind up being better than MP2, but probably not MP1, only due to the sheer awesomeness of hearing original Metroid sounds while playing in luscious 3D.

So, how do you guys feel about the different direction MP3 starts out on? Yay or nay?

P.S. On a side note, we should petition Niero to add [spoiler][/spoiler] BBcode tags to black out text. Would make writing blogs about newly released games a lot easier, because I sure as hell would have said more (maybe not a good thing)