NViRT

Despite my fierce love for most things Metroid, I was extremely disappointed with Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. Gathering all those keys made the whole game feel like a giant fetch-quest, and I hate fetch-quests. I also hated being in Dark Aether. I mean, I didn’t expect the Ing to dwell amongst cupcakes and rainbows, but spending half the game in a truly ugly dimension became a spiritually draining chore. And, most importantly, the game did little to actually improve on the basic Metroid formula. It was a fine game, but considering my expectations of Retro Studios, it was ultimately underwhelming. Hence my nervousness at the prospect of playing Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.

I was excited to see how the Wiimote would change gameplay, but I’d be damned if Samus lost her all of her abilities again and I had to pick up the pieces. Honestly, Samus? The minute trouble shows up, you lose your fuckin’ marbles and somehow forget how to double-jump, and then I have to wade through a twenty-hour journey just to make you remember. That’s not cool.

So I was initially hesitant when I visited my older brother’s apartment and he showed me the first level of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. “Dude, you have to play this game. It’s the shit,” he told me.

“No. If I start now, I won’t stop until I’ve beaten it. Even if it’s just me getting Samus back up to par, I won’t be able to stop. I have shit to do this weekend, things to accomplish. No way.”

“Here, I just set up your own file.” He handed me the Wiimote and the nunchuk.

“I hate you.”

That was at 7:00 PM. I played until 10:00 the next morning – I stopped only because sheer exhaustion was interfering with my aiming abilities. I slept for nine hours, woke up, choked down dinner, and sat down to beat the final levels of the game. And then I was so drained that I had to go to bed again. It took me three days to get my eating and sleeping rhythms back on track.

There’s a word for a man who spontaneously stops eating and sleeping – lunatic. What kind of game robs a man of his normal bodily urges, destroys his mental faculties, and transforms him into a bloodshot-eyed troll? A damn good game, that’s what.

Retro Studios does not disappoint with the latest and final installment in Samus Aran’s quest to purge the galaxy of Phazon. Corruption’s release is a video game benchmark, possibly marking a fundamental change in the way in which first-person games are played. It’s not a perfect game, but it’s a vital addition to any serious gamer’s library.

The new control scheme is Corruption’s primary selling point, and man, Retro Studios really nailed it here. After an hour-long learning curve, I couldn’t fathom playing a Metroid game any other way – pointing and shooting became effortless.

Still, Corruption is not a true FPS. I mean, yes, you are in fact in first-person, and you indeed shoot at things, but at no point does the game actually play like a FPS. Don’t bother trying to pull off headshots – enemies take the same number of shots whether you’re shooting them in the face or at their toes. And maybe it’s because I should have been playing on Veteran difficulty, but after a while, fighting enemies began to feel like work. You can’t fire a second missile until the first one has already exploded, and the charge shot is too weak to ever be useful. The net result of this is that the best way to kill enemies is to simply strafe around them while you mash the fire button as fast as humanly possible. Luckily, the you’ll meet a large variety of foes, many of whom will require unique strategies to defeat.

That’s where the nunchuk comes in. By flicking the nunchuk towards your TV screen, you’ll make Samus throw out her grapple beam, which plays a major role in both combat and exploration. Using it to swing from ledge to ledge and to pull obstructions out of the way is nice and makes the game more immersive, but where the grapple beam’s implementation really shines is its use in combat. Flinging the nunchuk towards the screen and yanking away clumps of debris to clear pathways is fun, but the using your new abilities in the thrilling boss battles – yanking your arm back as you desperately try to tug off a piece of armor to reveal his vitals - is an absolute joy; I don’t think I’ve ever gotten quite the same adrenaline rush – or the same sweat stains – from playing a video game.

Metroid classics like the Boost Ball and the Screw Attack are back, but Retro tries to keep things fresh by introducing some grapple beam modifications. Unfortunately, I felt that there was a little bit of lost potential here. I don’t want to spoil any specifics, but a few abilities are only used to open fancy doors - I was expecting some killer combat applications. The most significant ability, dubbed “Hyper Mode,” becomes the focal point of the game’s story; by holding down a button, you can sacrifice some health to enter an energized state in which your attacks become supercharged with Phazon energy. Stay in Hyper Mode too long, though, and the Phazon overcharge begins to corrupt Samus’ systems, and you’ll have to frantically expel your remaining Phazon charge before you lose too much health. All in all, it’s a neat ability, and it really helps the battles against the stronger Space Pirates go by quicker.

Retro Studios obviously worked painstakingly to create compelling, immersive worlds, and their efforts have paid off. The graphics in Corruption aren’t exactly groundbreaking, but the sheer artistry of the game will take your breath away.

Poor artistry will get you the Library from Halo, a level that elicits in me the emotional equivalent of explosive diarrhea. Great artistry will get you Corruption, where every hallway, every room has a feeling of purpose. They’re not just means to get from point A to point B. They’re generator rooms, they’re command centers ruined from battle, they’re the intricate guts of a flying city.

And everything’s pretty.

But as beautiful as it is, the level design isn’t perfect. Rooms are connected in complex and non-intuitive ways. Metroid veterans will be more than familiar with the map system, which is identical to that of the previous Metroid Prime games, and it does help that a small image of the map is projected onto the upper-right corner of your visor at all times. Unfortunately, the complex level design can make navigating to your next objective fairly difficult – sometimes horrifically so. In the later levels of the game I found myself pulling up the map screen again and again just to reorient myself. At one point I was stuck in the same room literally for twenty minutes, helplessly walking around in circles as I tried to find my way to the right door. Each time I pulled the map up, I was greeted by a veritable shitstorm of orange rooms and hallways clumped together. It was indecipherable. It was only one incident, but it really made me want to scream.

But the one thing that stopped me from just turning the game off altogether and resuming the life of a normal, socially functional human being was the story. Corruption’s story and its characters are incredible. The overwhelming sense of loneliness from the previous two Metroid Prime games is gone, as there’s plenty of NPCs to talk to and interact with in the game. You’ll be guided along in your quest by a network of giant bio-mechanical brains called Aurora Units. But these Aurora Units don’t just explain your mission objectives – they’re characters in themselves that help give the formerly amorphous Federation a personality. You’ll also meet some other bounty hunters employed by the Federation, and I’ll have to admit, their character designs are pretty damn cool. The voice acting is great, and aside from a few childish lines, the dialogue excels at propelling the story forward. Space pirate logs and records of alien lore are back, and once again they’re among my favorite storytelling mechanisms in gaming. The music in the game, like that of its prequels, comes alive primarily to highlight action scenes, but it does a good job of contributing to the distinctly alien feel of Corruption’s universe.

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption certainly isn’t perfect. But its use of the Wii-mote could be a gaming watershed that redefines how we play first-person adventure games. A simple, subtle twist at the end of the game brings the Metroid Prime series to a close, and brought a smile to my face.

Now, time to resume my responsibilities as a socially-functioning human being.