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Forums - Nintendo - Dr.Grass reviews Metroid Prime (Dolphin)

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Metroid Prime is worth (in today's terms):

10/10 48 46.15%
 
9.5/10 28 26.92%
 
9/10 11 10.58%
 
8/10 2 1.92%
 
7/10 3 2.88%
 
6/10 5 4.81%
 
Never played it 7 6.73%
 
Total:104
Dr.Grass on 19 September 2013
UncleScrooge said:
I hated that fetch quest in the end (there you go )

Did the game run smoothly on dolphin? I played it once and it ran fine on my notebook but the sound wouldn't play properly. When I looked it up it appeared to be a common bug due to the sound processor of the Gamecube being hard to emulate or something. Did it work fine for you?


I mentioned it in my 2nd post. It runs like an absolute dream. The sound is just like it was, and it looks cutting edge most of the time. Breathtaking. The music that plays when you're at the landing site sends chills down my spine.



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Dr.Grass on 19 September 2013
RolStoppable said:
Never had an issue with the fetch quest, because it didn't interfere with my playstyle of searching the world for upgrades once I got all the key items. It was just a thing I had to do on top of what I was going to do voluntary anyway.

My biggest gripe has always been the fact that Retro sent you back and forth a few times in their first Prime game. Get item A right before point X, return to point Y to get item B and immediately go all the way back to point X. I don't mind backtracking per se, but this kind is a straight path back and forth instead of a loop where you pick up other stuff along the way.


Didn't have an issue back in the day. And I agree that it wasn't thaaaat bad, because (as you say) you have new abilities when you revisit old areas and then you find all those epic power-ups etc.

"My biggest gripe has always been the fact that Retro sent you back and forth a few times in their first Prime game"

That actually bothered me more - sorry that it wasn't so pertinent in the OP. I agree completely; it felt as though I was doing shuttles at one point and it was a little bit in bad taste I felt. But it's minor to me anyway.

The backtracking done amazingly most of the time.

May I ask, what did you think of Prime 2? I went to Uni when I got it and stopped about half-way through (I'm so lame) and shit got in the way. Worth it? It felt a little artificial, i.e. they took the exact same elements from Prime and just reskinned them. It felt like an excuse to do the same things again. The dark aether thing was ok-ish. (being super critical here go easy)



Dr.Grass on 19 September 2013
irstupid said:
Waypoints? Waypoints ruined gaming.

I hate waypoints. Your basically just staring at the map in the corner of the screen to make sure your aimed in the correct direction that the dot is pointing.

Games hold peoples hands too damn much these days. Thankfully a few games allow you to turn off waypoints.

I'm not complaining about your score. 9.5 is very great score, just not sure how someone can want waypoints. Especially a metroid game. The exploration and not knowing is the whole point of the game. If you change that you get Metroid Prime 3.

If you're going into the frigate crash site for the umpteenth time and all you're thinking is "God  I wish I don't have to do it again", then that hampers the enjoyment a lot. There are a myriad of ways to implement fast travel without ruining anything. Of course you MUST still run around most of the time, but in Prime (go and play through it again and tell me I'm wrong) you feel like the devs forced you to go over certain areas several times.

It breaks the immersion because you can actually feel the human element in the game artificially stretching it out.



Dr.Grass on 19 September 2013
darkknightkryta said:
How is the emulation of the title? I've tried running the Prime Trilogy on Dolphin but the emulation was bad. Poor framerate, the lighting was hard coded so it doesn't scale with the image. Did they fix any of it?


Have you tried dolphin 3.0? I had very few issues. I have a beast of a PC though, so I was testing ridiculous resolutions and aliasing the shit out of it.

I did run it on my mid-range (or even lower!) laptop through a windows emulator on ubuntu and it also ran ok. You should be fine. get 3.0.



Dr.Grass on 19 September 2013
MTZehvor said:
irstupid said:
morenoingrato said:
I could never try the original Prime. Does it have more exploration than Prime 3?

Metroid Prime 3 has zero exploration.

It is widely critisized by fans of the series due to that.

So if you thought Prime 3 had any exploration you woudl be in for a huge suprise.

Prime as said in OP has what some would call a lot of backtracking.  You get an upgraded weapon or feature to your suit in a dungeon and realize, "omg, I needed this to open up this one area in this other dungeon"  So you run back to there to see what in there.  There are hundreds of instances like that.  I loosely use the term dungeon, cause really it never feels like your ever in a dungeon, the whole game feels like one huge dungeon.  It's not so seperate like Zelda.  

I disagree. Metroid Prime 3 does not have zero exploration. It's roughly about as linear as Metroid Fusion, which is still filled with plenty of powerups and hidden passages to find. In terms of the main narrative, Corruption generally runs on a "we'll tell you where you should eventually get to, but figuring out how to get there is up to you" policy, also similar to Fusion. It's certainly not Super Metroid non-linearity, but it isn't much worse than Metroid Prime, which had the same sort of hint system, albeit with your suit simply detecting things instead of an AU contacting you.

Like Fusion, the areas in Prime 3 are much more segregated...and I guess ice missiles is a similarity as well...

Corruption takes the Prime experience and essentially streamlines it, in a similar method to Fusion, sacrificing some atmosphere for a bigger stage to tell its story on and some more convenience to players. It's a great game, probably my favorite console release in 2007, and an excellent example of how well the Metroid formula can work in varying settings.

...it's also the only original game for the Wii that was actually better off for having a Wii remote, in my opinion.


good post.

I agree mostly. Good to see some hardened Prime fans here :)



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darkknightkryta on 19 September 2013
Dr.Grass said:
darkknightkryta said:
How is the emulation of the title? I've tried running the Prime Trilogy on Dolphin but the emulation was bad. Poor framerate, the lighting was hard coded so it doesn't scale with the image. Did they fix any of it?


Have you tried dolphin 3.0? I had very few issues. I have a beast of a PC though, so I was testing ridiculous resolutions and aliasing the shit out of it.

I did run it on my mid-range (or even lower!) laptop through a windows emulator on ubuntu and it also ran ok. You should be fine. get 3.0.

Well I was hearing the Wii version has more issues than the stock Gamecube version.  I think the lighting got changed for instance, so the lighting issue might just be for the Wii version.  Framerate I heard was not as bad in Gamecube, but had issues so they might have gotten fixed.  Not sure which Dolphin I'm running.



Veknoid_Outcast on 19 September 2013

Good review! I'm not sure I agree about the deductions due to the passage of time and evolution of games since 2002, but I understand where you're coming from.



Dr.Grass on 19 September 2013
RolStoppable said:
Dr.Grass said:

Didn't have an issue back in the day. And I agree that it wasn't thaaaat bad, because (as you say) you have new abilities when you revisit old areas and then you find all those epic power-ups etc.

"My biggest gripe has always been the fact that Retro sent you back and forth a few times in their first Prime game"

That actually bothered me more - sorry that it wasn't so pertinent in the OP. I agree completely; it felt as though I was doing shuttles at one point and it was a little bit in bad taste I felt. But it's minor to me anyway.

The backtracking done amazingly most of the time.

May I ask, what did you think of Prime 2? I went to Uni when I got it and stopped about half-way through (I'm so lame) and shit got in the way. Worth it? It felt a little artificial, i.e. they took the exact same elements from Prime and just reskinned them. It felt like an excuse to do the same things again. The dark aether thing was ok-ish. (being super critical here go easy)

Echoes is worth it, yes. And of course it's similar to Prime, because it is a sequel. The main differences in upgrades are the addition of the Screw Attack (up to five jumps with invincibility before you fall back down) and the ammo system for the "new" beams. The dual world direction works and it makes the game considerably longer without falling back on the cheap backtracking in Prime. Overall, I like the boss fights a lot more. There's a fetch quest at the end again, just like in Prime.

Prime garnered a high status by doing things first, so Echoes doesn't get the same love despite being an all-around good continuation. I think Echoes is the better game when you can get over the fact that it is just an evolution of an already established concept. And it was hard for Echoes to really outshine Prime, because that game wasn't rough around the edges. Marginal improvements was all that was left to do; there was no room for a big jump in quality anymore.

What I needed to hear to go at it seriously. I'll go give it another shot. Funny I never finished it even though I'd finished Prime 3 times at that stage (4 now). tx



Dr.Grass on 19 September 2013
Veknoid_Outcast said:
Good review! I'm not sure I agree about the deductions due to the passage of time and evolution of games since 2002, but I understand where you're coming from.


Haha, me neither. A score is just a score. I doubt you'd see many games receive such praise as I lavished on it in the OP.



Dr.Grass on 19 September 2013

I'm also surprised no-one has gone at me for playing pirated games.