What made the original Metroid Prime games so good? Which game do you think did it the best?

I played through the first Prime on my gamecube a few months ago. It wasn't that great.
Areas are tiny, doors take forever to open, exploration and scanning is tedious, combat is dull, the visors are all useless and the ending was dumb.
I have to say that I really enjoyed the 2D metroid games, even the GBA ones, so it's just prime that I didn't like.
Still, it wasn't a complete waste, the atmosphere was good and I liked that the world was filled with neat little details, like that weird parasitic grass that slows you down and hides in the ground when you shoot at it. And getting your visor covered in water or steam was cool too.
I'm still think I'll play Prime 2 & 3 one day - do the sequels make any significant improvements over the original?

user ambience without music is like The Big Ban Theory without a laugh Track. The game-play compared to other contemporary FPS's was not very good. It was partly the aesthetic and largely the sound track that "sold" Prime.

I enjoyed 2 and 3, although I couldn't go into specific reasons because it's been a while, obviously id say just emulate it. GameCube games aren't too much of a memory hog, same with wii if you go that route

Fuck, I guess I really just did a verbose version of what you were saying. I thought the gameplay was decent but maybe it was just absorbing the sights and sounds of everything.

I have wii softmodded, so that's generally how I do it. Gamecube controller is comfy as fuck.

What was other contemporary fps games from around that time? I remember halo, but it certainly didn't reinvent the wheel. Doom 3 maybe? Cod 3, Medal of Honor, maybe? Can't think of any around that time that really wow'd me tbh. Maybe that's a genre issue more than anything else.

Nintendo games go well when they're developed by Western developers but overseen by the Japanese.

Some examples of this:
- Rare which went from making Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Banjo Kazzooie and Conker's Bad Fur Day under Nintendo's guidance to making Grabbed by the Ghoulies and Viva Pinata under Microsoft.
- Silicon Knights went from making Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem under Nintendo's guidance to making Too Human under Microsoft
- Factor 5 went from making the Star Wars Rogue Squadron games for Nintendo to making Lair for Sony

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NIGGER we are talking about Metroid Prime which like it or not was originally on a console. And like I was saying most fps around this time weren't revolutionary. Buying Halo for the PC isn't going to make it all of a sudden a completely different game (custom edition's slew of middling notwithstanding). You're still shooting ayys with either human guns or theirs, with an energy shield and health packs. Hell, the only genre even more stagnant than the FPS genre at that point in time (barring the genre 5 years from then) is MMOs at this point. Was Halo decent for the time? Sure. It sure as hell saved the Xbox from flopping (console gaymers taste aside) . But revolutionary? I'd have to see the argument for that. Do you have any fps games on the pc that rewrote the genre to not shit? Because I'd like to play them

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Has anyone noticed how each franchise gets praised and shit on in waves? Off the top of my head, every few months there'd be a thread on Metroid Prime and the mass of the replies would either be "Metroid (Prime) has always been shit, how do people love it" etc. or alternatively on the other end of the spectrum. In recent memory, Nier: Automata and Persona 5 also had similar things happen to them. Pre-release and shortly after release the vast majority loved them, now it seems trendy to hate them.

Sage for shit thread.

Samus has weight and handles like a tank, which is satisfying given her suit's design. Weapons are appropriately powerful, though this does make the game fairly easy on repeat playthroughs once you know what you're doing. When the player jumps the camera automatically tilts down just enough to make 1st person platforming a breeze, rarely do you miss jumps due to camera shenanigans. Bosses are obviously the highlight, much like Zelda, when Metroid went to 3D it opted for more puzzle-style bosses akin to Crocomire from Super Metroid. The solution can be gotten by scanning the boss, but it's often a step or two removed from outright telling the player with hints like "subject is susceptible to concussive blasts," which translates to "use bombs," but the player needs to either go through their logbook to find this out or remember which alloys and properties pertain to each weapon. Each game stays at a locked 60fps the entire time, I can't remember a single time the framerate dropped.

Instead of focusing on particle effects, normal mapping, or dynamic lighting like many of its contemporaries, all 3 Prime games actually had very few effects going on. To achieve the same level of fidelity they put in an obscene amount of polygons into each room and character, far more than any other AAA console games. To make up for this the lighting is very basic, with most of the lighting being baked in to each room. This is why the rooms are so small, since they didn't want the game to be marred by low frame-rate, pop-in or intense fog to compensate for their high poly count. I think it was worth it, Metroid Prime holds up far better than either of the Xbox fat Halo games or the original release of HL2 visually.

Each room is meticulously detailed, even hallways are visually distinct from one another. Each area and room feels like it has a function, and every room is named on the map, lending a sense of realism to the game. Enemy designs are varied with easy to read silhouettes. Most people already know about the atmosphere the game has so I won't go into that.

Music is dank, Kenji Yamamoto is an excellent composer and both the remixes and original tracks are worthy inclusions. I can't think of a single bad song in the series.

The story for each game is pretty basic and serves the story. The lore for each game is actually excellent, unfortunately this led to the further popularization of adding logs to every game under the sun whether they were good or not. Make Science and Tubes are memes for a reason. The more serious stuff is well written as well, with very little pretension to be found.

The first two games were made before the standardization of the dual-stick control scheme, but the combat is less focused on aiming your shots and more focused on avoiding them. Ideally you'd have to do both, but consoleslmao. The controls work for the kind of games they are. The Wii controls are actually really good, but they break the balance of the first two games and make them extremely easy. Play the original NTSC releases of the first two games, effects had to be removed for the trilogy, and the PAL versions have worse logbooks for the purpose of easy translation.

Personally I like Prime 2 the most but I've already typed enough.

user I am not a PC exclusive fag but you are delutional if you think 6th gen FPS on console where not garbage. For fuck sake the only reason Mustard race fags even had any credibility was due to PC Graphics cards in the era making technological leaps and bounds. I like Metriod Prime, but it wasn't the groundbreaking game play that tying the room together.

tied*

no one thinks controllers are better, but if you're competent you'll play just fine.

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are you mentally retarded? Re-read the spoiler in my very first post.

I think that they were good translations of what made Super Metroid so good in 3D. Not nearly as fast, but I think that's a problem with any series going from 2D to 3D. The best one is the first, second one is close though. Third game is still pretty good, but it's where things started to falter. The main detail that people always compare each Prime game on is the world, so I'd go with that being the most important part of a Metroid game. 1's biggest world complaint is that the biomes are generic. 2 feels like backtracking due to the light/dark mechanic at times, but Retro did the best they could with their constraints. 3 was too spread out. Above all else, it's the environment you explore that makes or breaks a Prime title. I like the time traveling mechanic other anons have brought up, but I'd be worried that it would cause another Prime 2 issue with backtracking to specific points. Instead of the same old grass/water/desert/ice/fire/cave areas, the new team should do something really unique like more Sanctuary Fortress or Skytown. Very unique, memorable areas that can intermix and make a memorable alien world to visit.

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It was just different to everything else at the time.
Here's a 3D FPS revival of a old series but it's not an FPS it's a First Person Adventure and it's all about looking through the world and telling a story partially through the use of the Scan Visor.

The time travel mechanic was proposed by Tanabe and I think even he was concerned about it seeming like Prime 2. What I hope for is maybe they will look at Metroid Samus Returns teleport warp system and put that in Prime 4.

This is the biggest concern I have about the game not being made by Retro, there must be some rejected world ideas they had and I would hope they can provide some sort of world design assistance to the new Tanabe led Japanese based dev team.

Except big bang is still shit
Oh good, you're one of those movieblob fuckwads who thinks Prime is an FPS as opposed to what it really is: a first person adventure game. For fucks sake it utilizes almost the same controls as the 3D Zelda games. Thanks for your easily disposable disregarded opinion.

Hey man how's the devil eggs going?

No seriously, I think we can all agree that whenever any faggot refers to the Prime games as FPSes, they've blown their cover as to never having played the games.

If you have played Prime and still hold this belief, you're just a dumb full on retard nigger who doesn't understand how game mechanics work.

Prime is a first person shooter.

Nintendildos, everyone.

System Shock achieved everything Metroid Prime does except 100x better.

Niggers, everyone. This can't help but tell bad lies to your face.

System Shock is an fps.

I can do it too.

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Halo is dog shit and is just another example of why I am objectively correct.

How the fuck should I know? That would imply that I ever owned a Gamecube/Wii'

Thats the problem, you treat the game as a fps with moderate platforming rather than a platformer with moderate fps elements

the only major problem I have with the trilogy is in hard mode where some bosses become spongey as fuck. and the wii remote is still better than dual stick, but does come in second to the mouse.

bump

It had fantastic atmosphere, music, and satisfying weapons.

One of the things that made prime so good was the low expectations. When people first heard that the first metroid game since super was being made by some nobody studio from texas and was going to be a first persons shooter around when they were just starting to get stale, people thought it was going to be shit. When they got an atmospheric as fuck 3d adaption of metroid that does tons of new shit to set itself apart but still feels exactly like metroid, people were amazed. It's the same as when a game gets hyped up and it ends up being mediocre, but in reverse, except even without any expectations prime is still an amazing game by all accounts.

Prime 2 and 3 felt more formulaic and weren't as good imo. Compare how natural the map layouts were in prime 1 to prime 2 were everything is arranged in a triangle with links to everything, or prime 3 how everything is it's own separate area.

Had they come out on pc, they would have been ridiculed as babby's first fps.

Atmosphere

Josh pls

This place is awful. Holla Forums was never good or at best, just ok.

Being a great adventure in an alien planet. The areas, design, puzzles, exploring, atmosphere, and music certainly helped. It's only downsides is it's slightly dated core shooting/combat, as it only consists of simple sidestepping. I would equate it with Zelda, another series that I think that really lacks in the combat department but is still loved by many for it's other aesthetics. For this reason Prime 4 is likely going to have to revamp the core shooting and when that happens there's going to be major drama.

Nothing, they were shit.

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Ironically, the Metroid Prime games are the only first-person shooters to have good FPS boss fights. Prove me wrong.

Atmosphere. Nothing else about them is all that incredible. The combat is nothing to write home about. Level design was nothing we hadn't seen before. But they nailed the art direction, sound direction, the feeling of being Samus Aran exploring hostile alien worlds.

the boss fights in metroid prime aren't good. the genre is just not good for boss fights and it doesn't help that the majority of them are designed by westerners who are bad at game design.

There have always been people on Holla Forums who get off on being the biggest contrarians in a room full of contrarians, either for trolling reasons, or just because they never grew out of that teenage non-conformist attitude. You should all know this by now.

its usually the people who do play the games vs the people who don't.

Prime 2 is best.

Definitely the atmosphere, they had that real alien planet feel about them. I think they're pretty good, taking into account when they came out. I'm sure by now they'd have aged quite a bit.

Yeah that is so true. It's an echo chamber in here so much of the time. It's particularly stupid that games that were very well liked on release get called shit over 10 years later because they don't hold up as well.

No
Yes
They slow movement not only makes moving in first person using a controller easier, but allows the devs to pack more detail into the environment since the player won't be blasting by it. If you do want to go faster there are a number of ways to do it using the lock on or just use the morph ball.
Way to ignore the rest of the post too, autismo

Holla Forums is shit. Big surprise.

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Cool fact about Prime 2's OST. If you listen to it long enough without sleep you will actually start to hear ringing noises constantly. It doesn't go away for a few days either.

Source? I could actually see that being true

Samura1man plz

I already have constant ringing in my ears, thanks.

Cure for tinnitus some day, maybe
t. someone with tinnitus for 10 fucking years

Yea I played to long without sleep and got a constant ringing in my ear for 2 days.

Sequence breaking in Metroid Prime was the shit and it was very disappointing that every new version of the game past the original fixed more and more of the exploits that let you do things out of order.
The fondest memory I have of Metroid Prime is the time I got the Plasma Beam before fighting Thardus. It took me a solid half-hour of retrying that room because I kept flubbing one of the jumps. Once I pulled it off, I felt amazing. I tried for over an hour to get into Flaaghra's room from the back entrance without the Spider Ball, too, but couldn't pull it off. I did know that it could actually be done, though.
But the devs didn't want you doing that shit, so they kept fixing all the exploits with every iteration of the game. Meanwhile, I've played through the game enough times that not sequence breaking is just going through the motions.

Same. I was doing a pretty good job of ignoring it, too, until reading these posts for some reason.

I'm sorry user.
I have to sleep with constant white noise or ambience in the background

Now that's someone I haven't heard of in a while.
But I said game time, not real time so it ain't me.

I think I found the actual source of the problem there

Nah. Listen to the soundtrack to Prime 2 and tell me you wouldn't hear ringing noises after a while.

Actually it was the opposite. Fusion came out at the same time as Metroid Prime, and when people heard that the gamecube metroid game was going to be a First Person Shooter they IMMEDIATELY got their hopes down.

The were expecting the game to clumsily add metroid style platforming to an FPS game and for it to be awkward and uncomfortable to play.

What we actually ended up getting was all the best stuff of Turok 64 with the atmosphere and gameplay quirks of metroid. (and a really fucking good first boss fight, even if the rest of them aren't terribly memorable)

Prime 2's bosses are some of the best the franchise has to offer. At least design wise. Gameplay wise 2 of them are fucking terrible. Rest are solid though.

I was talking specifically about Prime one.
(I liked the electric rock guy and all, but nothing in the game had the same setup and bizarre nature as plantboss.)

Prime two had some great bosses all around

It's just a really shitty and cumbersome-yet-piss-easy FPS that Nintoddlers think is cool because they're Nintoddlers and don't know any better, so nothing. Pic related takes the idea of hub based first person exploration and does it better than Metroid Prime did, and it wasn't even fucking trying to be Metroid.

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Sauce me, user.

Nothing made them particularly good. Some people are just so obsessed with atmosphere that they're willing to overlook snail-like action and pacing and bad controls.

Expanse Jin

I recently confronted Meta Ridley from Prime 1.
Couldn't land the Electric combo on him, he closed his chest after 3 seconds.
I remember the electric combo was enough to completely defeat him once his wings were gone, asuming you had enough missiles.
Did they changed anything on the Wii Trilogy version?

The Meta Ridley fight does have differences between NTSC and PAL/Wii versions since you can exploit the fight in NTSC.