What’s your favorite Metroid game? Why?
i think it has to be Super, for the reason i trot out every time i feel like singing its praises - “super metroid tells more of a story in a single 4×4 set of environment tiles than most video games manage over 8 hours.” what i mean by that is, so much of the environment perfectly conveys a sense of decay. you get a sense that parts of upper norfair were some kind of artificial construction long taken over by flora and fauna. there is a version of this feeling for every room in the game and few games come close to that.
What’s your favorite Metroid? Why?
samus returns does an excellent job of raising the difficulty whilst making you fight the same metroid variants over and over, and some of those fights are incredibly satisfying. but my actual favourite is probably the first one that escapes from the Aliens glass tank in Prime 1. like Resi’s first zombie, the first is the most memorable.
What is the point of making a Prime 4?
i have long held that much of the first Prime is the team falling ass-backwards over reused ideas from Super, miyamoto’s vicarious dreams of making a first-person adventure game*, and inimitable black magick. you could not pay me to replay prime 2 and 3, i think they really suck. so why make a 4th? well, i guess they can lift the Prime 1 template (just as it lifted from Super) and the gap is long enough that people won’t notice, or those that do won’t mind.
*i don’t know how accurate this is, but the story oft-repeated in nintendo magazines at the time was, retro started work on a third-person 3d metroid game but it was going badly. miyamoto had always wanted to do a first-person game and early ideas for an n64 zelda were from a first-person perspective. nintendo sends miyamoto to retro to crack whips or skulls or whatever, convinces them to switch to an FPS style game, and that’s what worked.
