You know what I meant.

And while Prime was good, a lot of things like the Screw Attack, Speed Boost, Wall Jump, and such didn't make it into Metroid Prime.

Metroid 1 laid the foundation.  Metroid 2 introduced the infinite Space Jump, Spider Ball, and Metroid evolution species.  Super Metroid brought the Map, Speed Boost, Grapple Beam, Super Missles, etc.  Metroid Prime put it all into 3D.  Fusion was underated, but amazing too. Prime 2 was more of the same (with the Dark and Light world and subordinate characters).  Prime 3 brought the controls and the Corruption.  Hunters....well it had decent mult-player until the cheaters took over.  All of the Prime games had intense firefights, but the enemy AI wasn't too realistic. 

The Metroid franchise always brought more to the franchise.  The franchise NEVER sat on it's laurels.  And there's never been a bad Metroid game.  Nintendo/Retro/ whomever they put on the project WILL deliver, but they have to add and not be afraid to take risks.  Exploration plus innovation. 

So it all boils down to whos developing the next one, and what approach they take.

It's interesting that so many people here are on pretty much the same page. I for one don't care if Metroid's popularity grows, as long as Nintendo/Retro are happy enough with the sales to keep making the games. Not every cyclist starts the Tour de France to win, some start just to finish. In much the same way i don't think all developers make a game expecting it to have GTA-like sales.

Metroid isn't really a mainstream game and i'm against any change that is made purely for the purpose of making it so (some might argue this was done to some extent in Prime 3). I'm all for innovation or trying to bring the series in a new direction as long as it doesn't interfere too much with what makes Metroid a great franchise. If changes made happen to make it more popular too, then that's fine by me.

@ksv: As i said, it's pretty random what you see on the screen.
Practically there's only two differences, which are the lower resolution, and higher framerate. Either of these can cause problems. Also the 100Hz TV:s should be able to support PAL 60.

Playing the game in widescreen on a 4:3 TV must have been an experience.

@D21: The idea of the enemies being very few and stupid is for the game being an adventure game. Usually they have been only the fauna of the planet that just try to protect their territory from the adventurer who poses a potential threat. The enemies have been there only to make your quest a little harder instead of the games purpose being to fight them.

I never said anything about widescreen :) But yeah, if the game has a widescreen option, I always play the game in widescreen, even on a 4:3 tv (with borders above and below in that case, of course). But now I have a 40" LCD

anyway, I'd like to go back to the questions I posed about the sales. I do not want the game to be "FPS'ified" or "FMV'ified" to change to sell better, if you take away what makes Metroid Metroid, it is no longer the franchise that I love, and so I wouldn't want it anyway.

Metroid is not that different from Zelda; throughout the game you get upgrades that improve/add to your character's abilities and let's you access new areas, the world is pretty open ended so you can go around exploring; and the core of the game is environmental based puzzles that need to be solved to proceed. But for some reason Zelda is much more appealing.

Could it partly be that everyone has a dream of being a hero with a sword? A female bounty hunter in a space suit with badass weapons is maybe more sexy, but harder for people to identify with?

If it's about perception more than the games themselves (the games don't need to change) could Nintendo simply make the franchise grow to new heights by improving their marketing for it?

@ksv: You didn't. But the GC games used the 60Hz mode for widescreen. Some games had 60Hz locked to widescreen and in some games you still could switch between the modes. Although, i can't recall how it was with WW.
So, your old TV was advanced enough to have a scaler to downscale the image to letterbox.

Plain and simple: It requires too much thinking of "hardcore" gamers.

It's the truth. I watch my friends try to play Metroid Prime, and within an hour they're usually stuck and give up. (Usually not even an hour.) The games require a certain persistance, and perception, that many gamers do not want to give. They'd rather run down linear corridors and blast shit to pieces without much more puzzling than inserting a found color key, or a gear to progress to the next stage.

It's a kind of game that's difficult to recommend to others.

 I am sorry, but you are just plain wrong. Very few Gamecube games had a widescreen mode (the only ones I can recall right now are Monkey Ball 2, Eternal Darkness, Soul Calibur 2 and F-Zero GX) but a lot of quality games had 60 Hz option. Off the top of my head a few 60 Hz games that were 4:3 only:

Super Smash Bros Melee, Zelda Windwaker, Super Mario Sunshine, Super Monkey Ball 1, Rogue Squadron 2, Crazy Taxi, Metroid Prime 1, Metroid Prime 2 (60 Hz only), Zelda Collector's Edition (60 Hz only), Resident Evil 4 (the widescreen on RE4 was letterboxed on Gamecube).

60 Hz option has nothing to with widescreen, although I know some (bad) PAL widescreen tvs forces the tv into 16:9 mode when it gets a 60 Hz signal.

Only thing you are right about is that you need a scaler on a 4:3 TV to get the games with 16:9 mode to display correctly when they are set to 16:9.

@ksv: No. The 60Hz itself doesn't have anything to do widescreen. Only that stretching the image to 576i widescreen caused the image quality to go worse, due to having frickering pixels around the screen and the 60Hz refreshment rate lessen the flicker (the widescreen wasn't actual widescreen in the sense of adding resolution, but to fit horizontally more stuff into the same image so it fits the 16:9 screen).
So yes, most of the games could be viewed in widescreen, but it wasn't "real" widescreen by resolution.