Makes me wish I didn't have to wait till my birthday. :)

The updates to the models are great, but there are some odd things like the lack of the asteroids in the opening cutscene. I also notice Samus doesn't move her arm around nearly as much as she used to (unless that's related to the chosen control style) and her walk movement on the arm is much, much more subtle. Not complaints, mind you. Just observations. I look forward to playing this for sure.

Thank you.

I'm honestly surprised and amazed at how good this looks for being just a remaster. It looks like a straight up remake by how much they improved it. This wasn't just some lazy upscaling job that alot of other remasters do. The textures, lighting, geometry is so much better and its a night and day difference when comparing it to the original. I was also surprised this was priced at 40 when SSHD was price at 60$ with imo way less graphical improvements compared to this prime remaster.

Ngl, the prime remaster looks so good it almost looks to good for a game to be running on Switch, it legitimately looks like a higher end PS4 game. Great remaster

I feel like Nintendo themselves have done the game a disservice by naming it "remastered", its definitely closer to a full on remake, with practically every asset and the entire rendering pipeline rebuilt to Switch spec.

Definitely one of the best looking games on Switch. 

Indeed, I never played Metroid Prime so I was like "for a remaster, I guess the original game cube game was astonishingly good" but at the end, it's a clear remake, they even did the cutscenes and use Unreal Engine 4 this time.

I guess Retro Studio's job on this helped Nintendo to hire them for Metroid Prime 4

Switch games don't look good.
Graphically they are behind the curve... Massively.

The Gamecube game already had fairly strong and relatively "simple" Art with decent lighting and shading, so rendering at a higher resolution just cleans the image up and makes it look more refined... Adding extra flourishes like additional geometry and improved texturing just makes it pop that much more.

It's definitely the definitive version of the game.

6th gen games were in that "transition" period of trying to adopt 7th/8th gen-like shader effects, but focused more on geometry... While pushing fixed function lighting. - And typically employed things like Stencil shadows.

7th Gen is when games started to adopt Motion capture as well, so animations from the 6th gen look stupidly janky. - You can see that in effect with Samus's ships thrusters, how they were just linear actions.

The Switch also relies heavily on lower-precision (I.E. Rapid packed math/FP16) rendering in general to increase performance and reduce power consumption.

No one is arguing that the Gamecube version technically looks better than the Switch.

I tend to attribute remakes with an entire engine swap.

But there is a significant increase in texture detail and new geometric complexity in many scenes.

Which is the case here

It could be an engine swap; can't find any word on that yet, but at the very least, even if its still using the same in-house engine, said engine has most likely undergone massive changes since 2002.

Honestly, its the lighting  and materials that stands out more than the textures and geometry to me, they've been completely overhauled to Switch standards which is a massive step up from the much older fixed function model on Gamecube.

Having played the frigate prologue, here are my early thoughts.

The graphical upgrade over the original game is quite substantial. The polygon count, textures, and additions of things like shaders are a generational leap. The improvement and overall graphical quality fall in line with the Halo 1 remake for the 360. It doesn't measure up to the best of the Switch;s graphics like say the Crysis remastered trilogy, but it doesn't have to with the original's art direction and while running at 1080P/60fps. I really couldn't ask for more for a remaster of a Gamecube game. I know there's a fan remake on PC that makes this version look like an N64 game in comparison, but those visuals were never going to work on the Switch without losing the 1080P/60 aspect, assuming they were even possible to begin with. I do want Prime 4 to look substantially better than this remaster, but for what it is these visuals are more than enough.

FINALLY: Someone put in the effort to recreate Wii FPS pointer controls on the Switch. The Wii controls still have the edge because without a sensor bar the joycons can need to be resynced in a way the Prime games on Wii never needed to be, like how it was with Mario Galaxy. Still, THANK YOU Retro Studios for doing that. It couldn't have been easy to replicate the point functionality with just the gyro. And there's also the standard gyro+ right stick aiming option if you want to control it like other Switch FPS games, the original Gamecube-style controls, and the option to play like like a standard XBox shooter. Combined with the upgraded graphics this is the best official way to play the game.