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.