Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (Hands-on)

[Titanio]

Gamespot has the story, must have got a preview before the conference:

http://www.gamespot.com/e3/e3story.html?sid=6149677&pid=928517

While all of the above is pretty much how you'd expect the control to map out, the grapple beam is a cool use of the controller's unique attributes. In the demo we came across objects that featured the beam icon above them, handy tip off to use the beam. The mechanic for the beam was pretty cool. We had to lock on to the object then fling the nunchuk which caused Samus to fire a beam out at it. Once we had it on our line we used the analog stick to pull it back towards us. Once the debris was cleared we had our chance to engage in some morph ball puzzle solving that was initiated with another use of the controller, simulating Samus' hand manipulating a switch. We "grabbed" a handle, pulled it back, twisted it and pushed it back into a socket with a fair amount of precision.

 

[Hardknock]

That sounds incredible. Simple tasks that only take a button press on a regular gamepad can be a lot more initutive with the Wiimote.

Can't wait to see what they'll implement with Zelda.

 

[darkblu]

hardnock, you sure you're in the right thread?

 

[Rur0ni]

This was the most underwhelming of titles I'd say. Looks exactly like MP on GC. Ubisoft came up with Red Steel from scratch and it looks great. Yet MP after all this dev time, fails to improve graphically. Not to say the game wont be good though.

 

[Hardknock]

hardnock, you sure you're in the right thread?

Nintendo is my number 1 gaming company case you didn't know

I favor innovation over graphics anyday.

 

[NANOTEC]

I'm not sure anybody can say MP looks exactly like the older games. The video feed was very low rez. Anyway the implementations for MP3 sounds very cool and functional.

 

[Fox5]

This was the most underwhelming of titles I'd say. Looks exactly like MP on GC. Ubisoft came up with Red Steel from scratch and it looks great. Yet MP after all this dev time, fails to improve graphically. Not to say the game wont be good though.

It appeared to have better animation and a marginal increase in particles from the old Metroid Primes. Still, on the whole I felt the Wii games looked on par with the capabilities of gamecube, just perhaps with more stuff on screen or faster framerate. So far it seems like we'll see the peak of gamecube's graphics, but at 60fps instead of 30, combined with better animation. Disappointing, but at least nintendo is making good on their plan to keep GameCube around till 2008. If a dev is making a game that barely makes use of the innovative features (such as many DS games) why not make the game for gamecube as well? (like how many DS games could be on cell phones....you know we're actually getting to a point where PDAs are close to the power of gamecube, perhaps we'd see PDA ports if the market wasn't dead)
Also, since the PS3 had tilt sensors now, I could see some cross platform games between Wii and PS3 that barely make use of the Wii's abilities.

Zelda looked better than some of the Wii games.
And it seems like many of the functions in the wii games are still just emulating traditional control methods, like how early DS games emulated the control stick, control in wii games should greatly improve as time goes on.
And I'm not sure the Wiimote will be the best control method for all games....the Wiimote is like a mouse, and outside of strategy and fps games, most games play better on a standard controller. I was watching the zelda game and thinking how unwieldy everything might be, minus the actual aiming of the bow. Most of the video focused on the bow, but the sword and fancy footwork have always been the primary methods of fighting in zelda games.

Oh, this is kind of interesting.
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6149763.html?q=wii classic controller
Wonder if it will fully support the Wii's features, or if it's just meant as a replacement for the cube controller?

Another comment, the new Mario game doesn't hold a candle to say... Kameo, but Nintendo's platformers never did, even on n64. It's a might bit disappoting to see Wii not even reaching the best of xbox 1 quality though, right now most 360 games are still stuck at xbox in hd graphics, so wii wouldn't have looked so bad in comparision if it could at least make xbox 1 graphics. (I'm sure it's more powerful in many ways, but still seems to fall short in shader ability)

 

[fearsomepirate]

It appeared to have better animation and a marginal increase in particles from the old Metroid Primes. Still, on the whole I felt the Wii games looked on par with the capabilities of gamecube, just perhaps with more stuff on screen or faster framerate.

So in other words, beyond the capabilities of the Gamecube. Lighting looked a bit better, I saw some decent bump-mapping in Mario, and Excite Truck looked pretty danged good. According to previews, the environments in Prime 3 are much larger with more baddies than MP1 or MP2 had. Environment size, framerate, and enemy count certainly aren't negligible! I'd certainly prefer more of Metroid Prime quality at larger scales and greater detail than severely hobbling framerates and detail so that I can see some more dot-product-y stuff on the floors.

Another comment, the new Mario game doesn't hold a candle to say... Kameo, but Nintendo's platformers never did, even on n64.

Yes, Mario 64 has way worse graphics than Kameo...? The Wii is less powerful than X360. A lot less powerful. How you expect it to have anything on par with Kameo is beyond me.

 

[Fox5]

So in other words, beyond the capabilities of the Gamecube. Lighting looked a bit better, I saw some decent bump-mapping in Mario, and Excite Truck looked pretty danged good. According to previews, the environments in Prime 3 are much larger with more baddies than MP1 or MP2 had. Environment size, framerate, and enemy count certainly aren't negligible! I'd certainly prefer more of Metroid Prime quality at larger scales and greater detail than severely hobbling framerates and detail so that I can see some more dot-product-y stuff on the floors.

Yes, Mario 64 has way worse graphics than Kameo...? The Wii is less powerful than X360. A lot less powerful. How you expect it to have anything on par with Kameo is beyond me.

I meant that Mario looked worse than Kameo, but that the difference actually isn't that big if you compare Mario 64 to say Banjo Kazooie or Sunshine to Starfox Adventures. I mean, Mario Universe to Kameo is a bigger difference, but Rare's games have always had a substantial lead on Nintendo's in graphics.

 

[StefanS]

You have two immediate control options. One is designed for people unfamiliar with traditional mouse-and-keyboard first-person shooters and the other, advanced, is for the rest of us. It works exactly as you're probably imagining it might: you move the heroine around with the nunchuck attachment's analog stick and you aim with the Wii-mote, as I'll be dubbing the pointer often in future articles. On paper, this sounds amazingly intuitive, but for now you're just going to have to trust me when I write that you'll very likely need to practice and become familiar with the new setup.

The Wii-mote offers up the potential for a new degree of precision aim, but it's not as though you pick it up and the sun shines down from the clouds as a chorus of angels sing. The sensitivity on the Wii-mote is so pixel perfect and so completely sensitive that it can be jarring. A very minimal flick of the wrist can send your on-screen reticule whizzing from the bottom-right corner of your screen to the top-left and so you have to be careful and conscious of the way you play and move.

More impressions
http://revolution.ign.com/articles/706/706030p1.html

 

[Almasy]

Looks about on par with what I imagined. Wii having similar to GCN hardware, always meant slightly higher framerates or slightly bigger environments, but that´s about it.

 

[Fox5]

Looks about on par with what I imagined. Wii having similar to GCN hardware, always meant slightly higher framerates or slightly bigger environments, but that´s about it.

Hmm, too bad they couldn't have an HD capable system. Wii would have been a better candidate for a premium versus standard system than xbox 360 or ps3, base model could be the wii as shown, while the high end version could have two slightly higher clocked gpus and a bigger case, solely for the purpose of high def gaming.

Actually, it's kind of good that wii's graphics won't be significantly improved over gamecube, gamecube was already at about the limit of what 480p could display without significant detail loss. Many gamecube games wouldn't benefit significantly from higher resolutions, yet even the original halo saw large increases from upping res, and any current PC game looks rather horrible at 640x480. The no hd decision makes much more sense when the graphics aren't detailed enough to benefit from it.

 

[StefanS]

More impressions from PGC. Apparently the Remote freezed during the game

http://www.planetgamecube.com/impressionsArt.cfm?artid=11483

Graphically, Metroid Prime 3 is not a shocking improvement over the last game in the series. There are some new effects for beam blasts, missiles, grapple beam, etc., but the environments look about the same, at least in the demo. Character models are more detailed, particularly the Space Pirates, who have more detailed bodies and are more colorful than before.

But what is shocking about Corruption is the control, which is of course radically different with the Wii controller. You move with the nunchuk control stick and aim with the remote as a pointer. Within the central area of the screen, you can aim the blaster without turning. To rotate the view or look up or down, you point towards the edge of the screen. It’s pretty easy to keep track of, thanks to the targeting symbol. But actually moving with the joystick and aiming/turning with the remote, at the same time, takes a lot of coordination. I did feel more comfortable with it after several minutes, eventually getting into some shootouts with the Space Pirates in which I no longer had to think about the controller as much.

Unfortunately, my comfort level with the remote was irrelevant during the times when the pointing feature would simply stop working altogether. Several times during the demo, my view would freeze up, no longer responding to my pointing gestures. The natural inclination is to wave the remote all over the place to find the cursor, as you might do with a computer mouse, but that doesn’t work at all. The Nintendo employee at the demo station suggested that I hold the remote in a central position to give it time to re-calibrate, which the game apparently does on the fly, and this method worked much better. At this point, I’m still not sure how to prevent the pointer freezes, but at least they can be fixed quickly.