Metroid: Other M

[soccerant]

I played the E3 demo and walked away disappointed, but not to the point where I'm not interested. I'm cautiously optimistic.

My qualms:

Controls are awkward. When the game took a side-scrolling approach, I had assumed that movement would simply have you moving left and right. You actually still move in 3D space. This requires the use of a control stick. With a D-Pad you aren't just stuck with 8-direction movement, but you're also stuck at two speeds: stand still, and Usain Bolt.

Didn't feel like Prime. Yeah, I realize that it's not supposed to, and that's why this is more of a personal qualm than an objective problem, but there are problems that I foresee with this change. Where Prime may have been lacking in the story aspect (if you didn't read the scan logs), Other M compensates, and that's what thing I'm really excited about. However, who can forget the first time they walked out into Phendrana Drifts? It was incredible then, and it's still remarkable now. Other M's demo didn't have any areas that engrossed the player in such a way. However, neither did Super Metroid or Fusion. So this is more of an observation than a complaint.

When I say that it doesn't feel like Prime, I mean for you to remember what I said about the control. Samus has one speed: lightning. This goes against the calm exploration of the Prime trilogy, and again, some might like that better. This is just a personal issue.

Last, there weren't many Metroid-esque puzzles in the demo. I know there's not much you can place in a demo, but there weren't really many morph ball puzzles, backtracking rewards for new weapons, and such.

Other M's demo makes the game look like it's shaping up to an action space-opera than a standard Metroid game. But hey, I'm all for the dramatic story---that's why I'm still excited for the game. And I'm putting faith in Nintendo in that they'll make sure that the title oozes quality. One thing that everyone will have to get used to (because it won't be changed), is D-Pad control.