Monday, February 22, 2010

Metroid Prime 3 and its legacy

I have to admit, I had low expectations for this game. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, the third and final game in the Metroid Prime saga, was released for the Nintendo wii in August of 2007. The Prime saga of the Metroid series has been lauded for its immersive, beautiful environments, perfect controls and engrossing Metroid style gameplay, where one fights enemies, get new abilities. solves puzzles and gets more abilities. Yet for some reason, I thought that the game was linear, a graphical down grade and short. I was wrong.

Really wrong. The game is great. Amazing. An instant classic. Everything is better. The graphics combine amazing art direction with the better processing power the wii, giving already immersive environments even more weight. The art-deco floating city must be called out for its incredible draw distance, giving one the feeling of being on the gigantic city that floats above a storm swept gas giant.

The game play is actually improved, thanks to the new controls and a slight reworking the classic "get item, unlock new area" style of game play. The levels new are broken up a lot more and have numerous points which one can land their ship on, making each area feel more like individual zones of a larger world. Because each area is its own zone, the amount of back tracking, a standard of the Metroid game, does not feel as tedious as in Prime 1 or 2.

The controls, though, are a thing a beauty. Lock on, and then aim your remote around the screen, poppin' shots off with a level of finesse only known to PC gamers. It's much better then the standard dual-analog controls. The down side is the the lock on system can fail when things get really chaotic and after an hour or sore, my wrist got sore.

I am glad my expectations low, because it is nice to have them blown away. The game is also long and has the standard 100 collectibles, giving incentive to back track at some point. In the end, there is little wonder that Nintendo can get away with a handful of major releases each year, because when the games are this good, it don't matter.

Monday, February 1, 2010

Tough Week

In between having bad arguments with both family and close friends, I ended up losing my iPod Touch on Tuesday. I felt really disappointed in myself for being so careless with such a device, a 200 dollar miniature computer.

That is just the thing, it is my only computer like device. The major problem is that it is synced with my girlfriends computer. When it comes time to change synced computers that will be a kerfuffle that I do not want to deal with. Really at that point I'll have to get a real computer of my own. Probably that will be half-way decent windows computer that I can play games on. Speaking of computer, I also hope to get something along the lines of a mac mini that we can make as a server for our wireless network. That way we can have a music dump so when we have parties, we just put it on random play, or make playlists.

Tagents go on tagents. Last Friday was a very long day as well. I attended several meetings, some useful, some boring, but most importantly was the last meeting. A lot of major issues came up that lead to an emotional overload for some of us. While that sucked, we were able to calm down and work hard to come up with ways we can push forward our work in positive and progressive ways.

The whole affair left my quite miserable. I had stomach craps that evening, which made me unable to attend some volunteer work I had signed up for. I hate being unable to do work I had wanted too, even if it was just fill-in. Makes me feel like I am failing those who I promised my time. I was also very, very tired, tired enough to the point of going to sleep before midnight, which is not normal in my current reality.

Finally, when sleeping, I woke up at one point in the night. That is quite normal for me, but this time was one of the occasions in which I felt more exhausted than ever. Moving, breathing felt impossible. I had no energy. Fortunately, to resolve this, one must turn over and go back to bed, something achieved in a few short seconds.