This may not be the most objective play summary, as I am a die hard Super Metroid fan. It is, without a doubt, the game that has had the biggest impact on me and I consider it one of my favorite titles. Most of why I adore Super Metroid is the amount of time I spent with the original Metroid title. I played it so much as a child that every element is permanently embedded within me; at a moments notice I can provide you with any password or weapon location you desire. And I mean that in an absolute literal sense. That shit is in my brain for good and it’s not coming out.

Super Metroid is not a remake of the original game, it’s a new title that happens to take place in the same environment. This, to me, is absolutely thrilling. Bounty hunter Samus Aran revisits a planet she’s conquered in the past, armed with new abilities, ready to fully re-explore . After spending so long memorizing passages and drawing my own maps in the first title, Super Metroid comes along and says “there are secrets here you could never imagine!” I mean… there was a missile expansion right under Mother Brain’s tank that whole time? That’s mind blowing! That’s like finding a frickin’ hidden block in World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros twenty years after you’ve mastered it. It was there but you never knew to look.

I am speaking, of course, in the sense of the game’s world. The hidden secrets of Super Metroid do not actually exist in the original Metroid. That’s because they’re the secrets of Super Metroid alone, imagined for the purpose of making a well explored environment fresh again. For you fancy college boys, this is probably the best example of ostranenie, or defamiliarization, that you’ll see in a self-contained game world. Approaching this game as a veteran Metroid player will only heighten the feelings of alienation, as everything familiar in the environment has been repurposed with different intentions.

The actual story for the Metoid series — as in the thing printed at the beginning of the manual, the motivation that’s supposed to propel you through the game — is the chink in Samus’ armor. There’s a Galactic Federation, some Space Pirates, a giant brain in a jar and everyone takes their moon vitamins using a cosmic calendar. It’s uninspired science fiction at best. Can’t win them all, I suppose.

I didn’t pick up Metroid Prime 3: Corruption during it’s initial release because I wanted to finish the prior two titles first. I gave up that goal rather quickly due to numerous occurences of endgame bullshit (seriously… twelve artifacts?). I grabbed Corruption a few months after launch for twenty five dollars at Gamestop. I was originally going to hang onto it for a bit, but after a weekend spent replaying Metroid Fusion I suddenly got the fever and had to try it.

I’ll say this: Corruption, like all previous Metroid games, totally nails the atmosphere. The introductory audio and motion graphics conjure a sense of alienation and dread. Very nice presentation. The game begins with some sort of… incident? I’m not sure, something about a shadow version of Samus breaking out of a space egg. Like I said, I never finished the other Metroid Prime titles. After that, the player is docking a space ship on a much bigger space ship, then doing the various warmup exercises that are expected from the first hour of a single-player adventure.

It could be possible that I enjoyed this game more than previous entries just because it’s a Wii title. I’m not a fan of first person shooters due to their reliance on twitch reflexes, but I felt very comfortable using a Wiimote to aim and strafing with the nunchuka. Maybe it’s just a carryover from my PC gaming past, but it felt wonderful to explore this world without being confined to two analog sticks… to the point where I wondered “why doesn’t every console have IR pointing built in?”

I kept on, taking extended breaks. Sometimes I’d play for six hours on a Saturday, then not touch it for six weeks. It’s remarkably easy to get back into due to the objective briefings that pop up every time the player loads a saved game. More games really need to have such a feature (I’m lookin’ at you, RPGs). Nothing is more infuriating than having to spend hours trying to figure what’s going on in a game after a lengthy hiatus.

The game only began to get frustrating when I neared completion. There were a few energy tanks or ship missile expansions (do those even do anything?) that I wasn’t sure where to find. Trying to track them down was getting tedious, something the game was fully prepared for. While exploring the sky world I inadvertently launched a bunch of surveillance satellites, which returned… the locations of the missing pickups I was seeking! Smart move, game. Open world experiences such as Grand Theft Auto or Crackdown would really benefit from a similar system; maybe when the player has collected 90% of the hidden packages or glowing orbs the game could offer a bump in the right direction. Nothing pisses me off more than having to follow a map I got off of GameFAQs that was drawn by some eight year old just to find one last piece of loot. Maybe I should blame my completionist nature more than the game developers.

<B>Sidenote</B>: is the term <I>completionist</I> exclusive to gaming? Because I hear it used constantly even though the word itself seems to defy the rules of the english language. Maybe it’s some sort of psychological label? There was a period of time in the 80s when psychotherapy buzzwords outnumbered the citizens of Earth, despite the fact that most of them were nonsensical Luntzspeak. Seriously, “co-dependant self-actualization?” That’s, like, twelve different things in four words. As an aside, please consult this guide to being a gamer completionist from the always hilarious eHow if you seek further information.

That defamiliarization effect I mentioned above for Super Metroid… that partially carries over to Metroid Prime 3. Except whereas Super Metroid utilized the environment of Metroid, Metroid Prime 3 borrows the central conflict. I have to admit that I was more than a few hours into the game when I realized that the “organic processing unit” the characters were constantly referring to was indeed the primary antagonist from my beloved Super Metroid. It’s refreshing that the writers made an effort to fit in all the uninspired story elements from the earlier games. Mother Brain, a giant brain in a jar, is explained away as something called an Aurora Unit, basically a giant networked CPU for each planet in the Galactic Federation. Rather than just existing as a mandatory narration, all this stuff is told through ‘lore‘ that the player can access if they throughly explore the various areas.

It was approximately five months ago that our systems detected a meteor-like
object collide with a planet in a nearby galaxy. The impact was followed by
a spreading corruption, identical to the one we saw devour our creators’
planet. More so than ever, we were determined to aid the Aurora and discover
the source of these objects. Months passed before we could uncover its
origin–it had come through a wormhole from an incredibly distant planet. We
studied this link between the tear in space and the location it was connected
to. As we delved deeper it became clear to us that this was the mysterious
planet the Chozo Searcher had been seeking. The living planet was
aggressively attacking other worlds, hurtling parts of itself across the
cosmos like missiles. We had finally discovered the source of these corrupted
meteors.

It was about one month ago that we made our revelation, but all attempts at
transmitting the critical data to the Federation were unsuccessful. It
appeared that the Aurora Unit had become disabled. We tried desperately to
restore the Aurora, but it had been corrupted by an unknown virus. Our only
means of communication with the Federation were severed.

That, to me, is interesting. Maybe only because it takes the elements of Metroid I adored as a geeky child and turns it into something that’s modestly engaging to a geeky adult.

It took me almost six months, but I did finish the game. To sum things up: the mechanics work well, the story is effective and everything about it is consistently engaging. Even with my Metroid fanboyism removed, I enjoyed it and still reflect on it as a positive experience a full year later.