If you weren't a portable gamer, or if a 2D Metroid after eight years of no Metroid sounded like a silly idea, maybe you were getting set for the series to see something it has never seen before: a 3D, first-person action game developed by someone other than Nintendo.
To say that Metroid Prime needed to wow its audience might be an understatement. It was a radical departure from what came before, and it could well dictate what would come after it. But can you do Metroid in such a different way?
I know more about this title than I did Metroid Fusion, but I still don't know how it plays... until now.
Fun Times
Space. Things have gone wrong. We're wearing a rather fancy suit. Metroid Prime doesn't get off to a blockbuster start, but I'm sure it'll turn into something special.
We're immediately thrown into a tutorial-type introduction. This is, after all, somewhat different to what Metroid fans are used to, and the two major mechanics we're told about are scanning and shooting.
Samus is equipped with a scanning visor, which you can bring up with a left press on the D-pad, and scan highlighted objects using the left shoulder button. Entries will be added to your logs, and your picture of this world slowly expands thanks to all the added little details that are revealed when you scan something.
Shooting is, as you might imagine, different on the GameCube compared to the PlayStation 2 or Xbox. The left stick moves Samus around, but the C-stick doesn't do much at all. To aim up and down, you need to hold the right shoulder button, which locks Samus in place but allows you to look up.
It's not ideal, is it, but what does help is that she has a lock-on function. Get whatever you want to shoot in your sights, lock-on, keep holding the lock on button as you strafe around your target, Zelda style. It works well, to the point of it always being the first thing I tried to do in any given shooting situation. The sooner you lock on, the easier your day is.
Frustrations
We're on a ship of some sort that appears to have been raided by Space Pirates, only what they found onboard was something they weren't prepared for. They lay dead or dying - whatever happened here happened recently. I know this because of everything there was to scan telling me so. If the text dump in Fusion was annoying, at least the backstory here is optional.
The problem is, it was often a case of not knowing what I was looking at until I was able to scan it. With a 4:3 screen ratio, and a helmet HUD on top of that, looking around these maps was like walking around your house while looking through a toilet roll tube or something. The view is restricted, especially with a whopping great big weapon reaching into the middle of the screen too.
Further Fun Times
As we're lead through the ship, though, we get to play with all of Samus' toys. The charge beam clears away debris, the morph ball lets us slip through tight spaces, and the rockets let us deal with the remains of the ships defensive systems in a single shot.
It's all tutorial, but it feels pretty good to play. Each ability is stuck on a different button, so if you turn into a morph ball, it's very likely that you did so on purpose, and not by accident. Firing a missile requires you to reach all the way up to the Y button, so those won't go A.W.O.L. too often either.
Sometimes it's a tad fiddly, but I am still getting used to it, and all my learning is taking place in a relatively safe, practical environment.
A lot more scanning and a few more Pirates clinging to life later (should I have shot them? Can you not? Are we just assuming everything is hostile, even if it's on the floor dying?), we're face to face with something more formidable.
Luckily, we can scan it - which freezes time - to reveal its weak point, then lock on to dish out some justice. Why are we fighting this thing? Just because? I mean, it's a threat, sure, but what are we doing on this ship? If we're just investigating, can't we just write down 'Parasite Queen' and move on?
It's not a problematic fight at all, but it does lead to something Samus gets caught out by a few times too often: Countdown timers and imminent explosions.
To say I can't see anything clearly, what I can see is superb. Lighting, detail, effects when you walk through bugs spitting gunk into your face, or through burst steam pipes. Metroid Prime looks fantastic and is nice and smooth, running at 60fps. Because it controls a little funky, it doesn't look absolutely flawless in motion, at least not when I play it, but it is a sight to behold.
I know you. I think. I don't fully understand your significance, especially concerning Samus, but I know you mean trouble. Sensibly, you're not looking for a fight on a ship that's about to explode. I can respect that. How do I get out of here?
Yet another suit upgrade, a grapple beam, allows us to swing our way out of danger. And then it happens.
Just like that, all our gadgets are taken away from us. Say goodbye to the grapple, the missiles, the charge beam, the morph ball... You name it, it's gone. Wherever we're going, we're going to have to Metroid our way back to full strength.
And you know what? I'm looking forward to it. I liked my taster of everything. Sure, I'm not entirely comfortable with the controls, but I like what I'm seeing. What's next?
What's next is exploration. Armed with a weapon and a scanner, you're left to find your way through this world in true Metroid fashion. Some doors won't be openable until you've got stronger weapons, so you work your way through the doors you can access to see where they go.
Along the way, you might spot areas you can't reach or sections which you know for sure you'll need an upgrade to get to, and you file those areas away in your brain under 'come back to this later'. It's not too long before I find some missiles, just sitting around, waiting to be picked up.
Unfortunately, I take a fatal acid bath instead of getting them, but I'm not letting that be the end of my run.
Further Frustrations
I use my missiles to blast through a door to a map room, which would seem helpful, but I can't quite get my head around the map. Prime is full of loading corridors to separate large rooms or different biomes, and trying to remember which tiny pipe is which isn't the best use of my time.
Rooms are named, and the map is rotatable and clearly marked with doors and whether it's been visited already or not, but there's just something about it that puts me off.
After picking up the morph ball, I returned back to this room that I'd decided was a little hub room, and tried to see where to go next. I knew there were two other doors I had yet to walk through, but finding them was a bit tricky. The map isn't super detailed, and then I was caught out by the small field of view of the room through Samus' helmet.
I wasn't stuck for hours; I jumped up some rocks and crossed a bridge, but it felt awkward and cumbersome. It was the path I was meant to take to get where I was going, but having Samus bounce along it like a kid who has just learned to jump was weird. You've got to be confident in your jumps because lining them up means looking up and down, and looking up and down means holding the right shoulder button, and doing that means Samus doesn't move...
Another room with multiple options leads to a room with intense heat readings coming from beyond. I tested that out. I thought I was going to die to the heat, thanks to how slowly I turned to leave - especially when I got stuck on the door on the way out.
I guess that will need an upgrade. What part of the map do we check off next?
Further Fun Times
I was only exploring simple rooms and corridors, but it felt great to explore. I was being led, but it wasn't obvious. I had some agency, and I'm sure as the game goes on I'll get much more. Glancing down at the clock, though, I wanted nothing else but to explore the nearest save room. I could go back to the ship, or through some of the old corridors elsewhere, or I could push on...
Oh good, not too far away. Out of my way, native spike-covered species! I'm on a mission.
Final Word
It was fiddly to control, and I couldn't always get my bearings, but I was enjoying Metroid Prime more than I thought I might.
I'm not a massive fan of the series - I've no idea what they're about, really - and so I don't feel any attachment to its platform roots, versus this first-person reimagining if you will. I'll take the titles as they come and either get behind them and want to see more, or drop them and move on.
Metroid Fusion caught my attention with its looks and perhaps lost a little with its difficulty and the way it dumps its story. Metroid Prime also caught my attention with its looks, but from what I've read and seen, it too might lose a little because of its layout, and I'm not talking the weird control scheme.
Back-tracking is inevitable in a Metroid title. It's part of the schtick, right? You see something you can't do yet and come back to it when you can. As I understand it, there's a fair amount of backtracking in Metroid Prime, and it's less of the 'oh, I can go back here and use this on that now', and more of the 'oh, I have to go all the way back there because there is no other option'.
With maps physically linked together, there aren't many ways to skip or speed through that backtracking, save for actually jumping and speeding through each room and corridor as best you can.
Does that impact on anyone's enjoyment of the title? Apparently, yes. I've yet to see it myself, but I know it's there. Will that knowledge get in the way of my time with the game? I don't know. I guess I'll have to go through it and find out.
And I want to go through it. Despite the weird controls, I want to explore these places. I can't be bothered with the scanning, and it's annoying that you've got to scan things to activate them, like lifts and so on, but that's not the end of the world, is it?
But if scanning objects is how Prime delivers its story, will I miss out on it all? Samus is mute. Everything I know is from what I've seen and can piece together. There's nobody here to spell it out to me. Will I get the full Metroid Prime experience if I don't hunt down every little tidbit of information for my logs?
I was genuinely expecting to find fault with Metroid Prime, but so far I haven't. It's not perfect, but I'm lapping it up. I want more. I had to find a save room to give me a reason to stop playing - and I'm an idiot because I was emulating. Just save the state.
This is the reaction to new titles that I want to have more often. It's like I'm a kid again, everything is cool. Why? I don't know why. I'm just going with it. It's great.
Fun Facts
There was no Metroid on the Nintendo 64 because nobody could work out how the controller could be used to move Samus in 3D. But there was a first-person shooter or two, notably Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, whose producer would go on to form Retro Studios, who would go on to develop Metroid Prime.
Metroid Prime, developed by Retro Studios, Nintendo, first released in 2002.
Version played: GameCube, 2002, via emulation.