Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Metroid: Other M - A Quick Look

Behold the most generic title screen ever! Actually, everything about this game screams "generic".

Played this via Dolphin, and the emulator didn't let me get very far. I decided I'd post what little I got like I did with 50 Cent: Bulletproof and Alien 3, even though a Metroid game deserves better than a half-baked "first five minutes of the game" post. Thing is, this is the worst Metroid game. As a huge Metroid fan who felt super let-down by this game, even the first five minutes give me a massive amount to talk about. Everything I hate about this game shows up in some form in the first five minutes...well, almost.



Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of...

 ...a SPACE FETUS? 

The first cutscene of the game is supremely well-done, at least. Though this game has a creepy emphasis on moms and babies. The initials are MOM, the title makes no sense other than that, and they constantly make references to these things. The very first shot of the game is Samus as a fetus...for no reason. In the first cutscene she refers to the Metroid Hatchling as "the baby", then calls Mother Brain "MOTHER!" as she fights.

I don't know why all of this was necessary, because the story of the game is abysmal and it never actually makes any kind of real statement on motherhood. At least the Mother (or Earthbound if you prefer) series always stars a kid who has to grow up early and misses his mother.

This game just makes constant references to mothers and babies for no reason. It reminds me of that insipid Big Bang Theory show where they constantly make "nerd" references and are thus "the nerdiest show on TV!" No, you're not nerdy just because characters sometimes wear Star Trek shirts or mention how something is just like fighting elves in "Warcraft". Fuck off.

And Metroid: Other M can also fuck off with constant mother references for no reason. Does Samus wish she could have a child, but she's infertile? That would be something to explore (though I'd prefer they didn't). The closest this game gets to anything real is when she regrets the loss of the metroid hatchling that saw her as its mother. That was indeed a sad moment when you think about it, but it's such a small part of this game and the overall story.

 Wow, I've said a lot already. In any case, the intro cutscene continues to be awesome, as we see Samus barely hanging on during the final battle of Super Metroid.

The first time I saw the final battle of Super Metroid, I was in awe.

This game probably makes a mistake showing you the scene from this point, though. It assumes that the player has played Super Metroid and knows what happened at the end. Otherwise, it just looks like she's being attacked by a giant Metroid while the ugliest cyclops ever shoots at them.

 We do get some sweet first-person shots as Mother Brain charges up to finish them off. THIS is cool, and just makes me wish Nintendo would devote some resources to remaking Super Metroid in the Metroid Prime style. Well, we never even got a 2D color remake of Metroid 2 in any form, so a 3D remake of any of them is about as likely as Bush being elected president again.

 Mother Brain KILLS THE HATCHLING! NOOOOO!

...yep. I really wish this game were a Super Metroid remake instead. And had left the story at the door, since the creators of this game didn't know how to tell a story that doesn't suck.

 Samus falls in slow-mo with her hand outstretched. I could have done without this shot, actually. It reeks of Hollywoodization. Maybe just lose the slow-mo.

 Metroid dust rains down on Samus, giving her Hyper Beam powers. Is this like a Namekian fusion deus ex machina thing, or is it actually a scientific development? If a metroid gets atomized when it's at full power, its dust gives you super-radioactive powers? Does this work with regular metroids, or just super-radioactive ones like the giant metroid? Does freezing and shattering them not work as atomization, since Samus does that all the time? What about grown metroid forms like Omega Metroids? And speaking of which, why don't we ever see any of those metroids in games besides Metroid 2 and Metroid Fusion? They're awesome, but for some reason we're almost always stuck with the facehugger baby form. Seeing some evolved metroids in 3D in the Prime series could have been sick.

HYPER BEAM POWA! Samus dishes out hella punishment as we fade to black. That cutscene was great.

She wakes up in an infirmary to the sexy face of Otacon.

 Speaking of sexy, she has on the tightest outfit possible and lifts her knee up to give us some more shapes and angles. Do the creep! Ahhhh! Do the creep!

 Not so great when it pans up since she looks super-angry. And like an androgynous Japanese game girlboy.

And now, time for action! The crowd chants "THIS IS AWESOME" before anything even happens.

 The ingame graphics aren't really up to the standards set by the intro cutscene, but so it goes. PS4 is the first system that I've seen where the cutscene graphics and the ingame graphics are fairly close to one another. At least until they quietly stop making 1080p games altogether like they did with the PS3. Sucker everyone in with top-tier HD, then scale it back. Yeah. At least Nintendo doesn't do that, even though they're a generation behind.

 And the "THIS IS AWESOME" chants slowly die down, as the game gives me a slow, boring tutorial. Pressing 1 causes me to shoot? NO WAY! And pressing 2... what's this you say? It makes me jump? Fascinating! Remember in the old days of Mega Man X and Super Metroid, when games taught you things organically as you went?

Morph ball is still cool in 3D, at least. Then again, the Prime series gives you the same third-person morph ball as this game, and with slightly better physics. On one hand, the one reason I can see the tutorial being needed in this game is that you start with a lot of powers, since Samus still has her stuff from Super Metroid. ...except she isn't allowed to use most of it.

Look at Otacon telling me what to do. Get out of morph ball mode? Oh, okay. I was planning on staying in it all day, glad you told me not to.

 Wow, this is just insane. Right off the bat, you have a man telling you what to do in authoritarian, Simon Says fashion. This is something one might not even notice when playing for the first time, but having played the whole thing, I notice it right away. Because the whole game is like this. Men telling Samus what to do and her just doing it without question. The worst is that Adam douchebag, who she constantly talks about respecting and admiring. He treats her like total shit, orders her to go through lava-filled areas without turning on the gravity suit to teach her a lesson (and she compliantly does it like a complete tool), and fuckin' TASES her at one point.

How about I DON'T stand in the middle of the room, you stupid game!

The one good thing about this tedious, soul-less, boring, SUPER-INSULTING game is the combat. It's actually very good and a lot of fun to control. Everything is fast-moving. The only problem (you knew this was coming) is... Samus auto-aims at the enemies. So you never actually need to aim, or use any skill/judgment to take out the closest/most threatening enemies first, or even POINT HER IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION. Because she automatically turns towards and shoots the closest enemy every time you press fire.

You could literally stand in the middle of a room and just pummel the fire button and she'll take out everything on all sides of her in rapid succession. So even the combat sucks... even though it's fun, and the one good thing about the game. It's fun to look at and control but even it gets boring since everything is made so easy.

At this point, nothing happens. He's supposed to send out more enemies for me to fight, but...nada. The subtitles from his last statement never leave the screen. Playing on Dolphin, and this is odd to say the least. You'd think if there were an emulator problem, it'd be the game locking up at a certain point, or not loading at all, or glitching out. None of the above, it just isn't starting the next event. Weird.

So that does it for this game. Wish I could have shown more of it, but for the most part there isn't much to show. Most of it takes place on a super-sterile space station (try saying that really fast) rather than the borderline-mystical, organic, alien world environments of the other Metroid games.


Oh, and besides being a weak-willed character who follows orders blindly, Samus is suddenly afraid of Ridley now. In closing, this game sucks.

Check out my far-more extensive review of this game, written when it first came out, for more on WHY exactly it's so bad. That said, I went easier on it than I probably should have, since the hate had yet to settle in.



3 comments:

  1. One of my least favorite games ever.

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  2. This game is terrible and you're lucky it stopped working when it did. The Space Fetus can go straight to hell.

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  3. What a disaster. Great Ridley gif though.

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