Platform	GameCube
Available	Nov. 18 (U.S.)
Price	$49.99
Genre	First-Person Adventure
Developer	Retro Studios
Publisher	Nintendo

I recently finished playing through Metroid Prime. It's probably one of the most perfect games I've played in a long time. It's hard for me to think of how I should describe what makes it so good.

Metroid Prime may well be the most immersive game made to date. Almost every little detail fits inside the game. There are no long, boring cut-scenes; the longest one is the opening scene at about 60 seconds, and the second longest is after the first boss at maybe 40 seconds. The point is that this is a game you experience by playing, not by watching. You are the action. You are the story.

I'm not sure it would work for every game (in fact I'm sure it wouldn't) but the design of Metroid (not just Metroid Prime but the entire Metroid series) - the story of a lone person exploring a distant, alien world - makes it all fit together in ways that other games can't, because their settings are impossible to simulate. Metroid's cold, quiet world is possible to simulate, and thus it's possible to get really immersed in the game.

And yet, at the same time it's still a game. I can't quite put my finger on why it works... why it's excusable or believable. The most obvious issues are some of the Morph Ball sequences. Many of them come right out of a pinball or a pachinko game, yet for some reason they're still fun. At least for me, anyway.

Metroid Prime sets new standards in all kinds of areas. For example: Very few (if any) shooting games have had interesting bosses. Take Quake or Doom or Half Life. Sure, the first time I saw the brain boss in Doom, I screamed, but as far as gameplay, it might as well just have been any other monster in the game, only with stronger firepower and more health. Metroid Prime, on the other hand sets a new standard for bosses in 3D, or at least it's on par with the 3D Zelda games. Bosses that are in 3D and yet each one manages to play differently. To be honest, the first boss, although visually cool, had me a little concerned. There's not much to it and with the auto-targeting I was worried that if all the bosses were as simple as this one, I was going to feel pretty let down. Suffice it to say, however, I was not. Each boss gets more and more interesting and more and more varied as you go.

As far as auto-targeting goes, it's really not a problem. In fact, for the most part I think if they didn't have the auto-targeting, the game would have been impossible to play. People who complain about it probably haven't played the game that far yet. Sure, you can do without it in games like Quake or Unreal, but that's because the bosses and other monsters just aren't that complex.

Another example: In those kinds of shooters, it's acceptable to die at any time since you can save anywhere with relative ease. I've always argued that a game that pretty much requires you to be able to save at any time is a poorly-designed game. Metroid, with its limited saves and auto-targeting, makes for a much better experience than saving after every five seconds.

Another issue that many people bring up is the controls. I'll admit, they are complex. At first I was a little worried, but at about the time I made it through the first area, I had pretty much gotten used to them. The controls are complex because Samus has so much equipment: four visors, four weapons, four combo weapons, the Morph Ball and its various power-ups, and the Grapple Beam all on one controller, all instantly accessible. No going to some inventory screen to switch weapons. That's probably another one of this reasons the game feels so immersive.

Like I mentioned before, there are little to no cut-scenes. There are some very short intro scenes (maybe 10-15 seconds) before major events, but that's about it. You are the movie, creating each scene through your actions. There's also a story imbedded within the game which you can follow if you like. As you go through the game you have the ability to scan various ruins, computer terminals and other things that give you pieces of the story as you go. There are two main narratives: The narrative of the Chozo, the ancient race that used to exist on the planet you're exploring, and also the narrative of the Space Pirates, who you're trying to save the universe from. Personally, I found reading these bits made the game even more interesting, since it puts your character into perspective in a larger story than just 'kill all the bad guys.'

One thing about this game, especially for a first-person shooter-styled affair: The graphics are some of the best I've seen, if not the best. I know next year several new titles will come out that may have better graphics technically, but Metroid Prime still has a couple of things going for it. For one, the art design is some of the best to come along in a long, long time. More often than not, the planet is just eye-popping gorgeous. Also, the style of Metroid's world fits the story. As a programmer, I noticed this even on the Super NES' Super Metroid. The world is basically divided into rooms or confined areas. Each one is relatively small. You can't turn a level based on Chicago into a series of small rooms, but in the world of Metroid, it just works. The technical advantage is that each room can use a ton more detail than any game that needs to have large, open levels. On top of that, the game can appear to have no loading, since only the room you're in and the room you're about to enter need to be in memory. This makes for some of the most detailed environments yet in a 3D game.

The music and sound effects are superb, too. For the first half of the game I played with headphones on in a dark room. It actually got too scary, so I had to turn on the lights as I was getting too tense. It's fine to be tense for 40 minutes of a 90-minute scary movie, but being tense for four to six hours at a time is a bit much.

It took me about 28 hours to finish the game. I think it took maybe 22 hours to get to the final boss, and then when he kicked my ass I decided I'd better go find some more power-ups before I tried to take him on again. I want to point out here that unlike an RPG, powering up your character still involves 'playing' the actual game. It guess it's just a pet peeve of mine, but in many RPGs you're expected to just waste hours of your time powering up your characters through experience points gained from fighting. It's so bad that some of my friends will run an RPG in the picture-in-picture window on their TV while they're watching something else. They go attack random monsters for a few hours while they power up their character. Why people find that fun I have no idea. In Metroid, powering up requires actively searching for power upgrades. In that sense, you're still playing the actual game.

I'd have to put down Metroid Prime as one of the few games I've ever played that's almost perfect. I can't think of anything that I would really change. I can think of one very minor issue: It was never clear to me from the map where one elevator connected to another. The elevators are labeled by where they go, for example, "To Chozo Ruins North," but there's no mark on the map for North, so unless you want to study the heck out of the maps or fully memorize them, there's no good way to know where an elevator will take you. I'm curious if that was by design or if it was just an oversight from a team that probably new from building the maps which way is North.

One other sad issue is that it appears the game is somewhat buggy. I had it crash on me once at the first elevator I rode. It crashed in the same place for a friend of mine. I also heard from another friend that it stopped loading his saved game after he was 23% complete and that later, he got stuck somewhere in Morph Ball mode. I was a little worried after my one crash. Metroid is not the type of game where crashes are acceptable. You might be able to get away with a crash in Mario Sunshine; since it saves after each Shine, the worst you could lose is just a little bit of progress. With Metroid though, you could lose hours of gameplay, which would be enough for a lot of people to just stop playing altogether, not wanting to have to redo an entire section again.

You can tell the guys at Retro clearly did their homework. I've made it a point of studying what I feel makes a good game and what I feel makes many games bad. The guys at Nintendo, particularly Shigeru Miyamoto, seem to set the standard and if you really study their games you can see what makes them different from the rest. One simple example is the purposeful inclusion of expectation and taunting. In Zelda and Metroid, you see places you know you should be able to go, but you can't because you don't yet have the right equipment. That kind of thing makes you want to keep playing and also gives you a clear idea of where you need to go. You see a place with a hole too small to go through, so you keep playing, trying to find a power-up to let you through (in this case, the Morph Ball upgrade). As soon as you find it, you have three or four places you immediately want to go check out, and then, as you're checking those places out, you discover yet another three or four places that you can't yet access.

Another example is transportation. At first, the world seems pretty large (and it is), but after you've explored a little bit, they start providing other ways to travel, whether it's faster ways to get around, stronger weapons so you don't need to worry about certain enemies anymore, or even just providing new connections that were not previously accessible because you lacked the powers to utilize them. So, as you progress in the game, even though the world gets bigger, it never really gets tedious to travel through.

One other major example is how there's such a variety of enemies, weapons and obstacles, each of which have their own solutions. In many games of less...inspired design, any enemy can be taken down by any weapon. The only difference between weapons is strength. That may or may not be more like the real world, but it's arguably less fun in my opinion. I prefer the variety of having some weapons that have no effect on certain kinds of monsters and obstacles, whereas other weapons are extremely well-suited to certain situations. The issue here is to make it very clear which ones have an effect on what, and which ones don't, and Metroid Prime does this well.

I'm sure Metroid Prime is not for everybody; to some degree it probably depends on what expectations you bring to the game. If you're expecting a first-person shooter like Quake or Unreal, you might be disappointed. Hopefully you'll get past that though and give Metroid Prime a try on its own terms. Put on some headphones, turn the lights down and immerse yourself in its world, and I think you'll have quite an amazing experience.

- Gregg Tavares