Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we continue our series on 2002's Metroid Prime. We talk a bit about some favorite moments, the suit design, the visors, a bit of a grab bag of topics. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary.
Issues covered: wondering which creatures were in which games, wondering if the music is your canonical music, crab hands with chords, a non-ergonomic system, using the dog-ears, kibbitzing about controllers, being pulled ahead by inherent mystery, camera direction and half pipes, Tim brings up Artorias again, the moment of fiero, charging up the half-pipe, building up momentum, seeing some things with the thermal visor vs the x-ray visor, testing the player's abilities, serving the purpose of reinforcing play modes, the primordial morph ball, retuning game play for versions, the stress of bosses, relative challenge of bosses in Zelda games vs Metroid, lack of grinding, the variety of progression blockers, the stages of water, thinking you'll drain the water, changing water into not water, not keeping track of where there's water, the first person obscuring that water will be traversable, finding a good energy tank, a bit of a bug, peeling the onion as you have additional tools, seeing the grapple points, wanting better map information, map annoyances, a well set-up "puzzle," framing the camera well in the morph ball, opening up Metroid to the Breath of the Wild, desaturated colors, not missing the dual-stick feel, being able to lock on and pay attention to other things, lock-on facilitating guns as tools.
Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Metal Gear Solid (series), Brainy Gamer podcast, Switch, Castlevania, Hollow Knight, Super Metroid, Dark Souls, Dead Cells, David Wolinsky, Pippin Barr, GameThing, Nintendo, Legend of Zelda (series), Link to the Past, Super Mario World, Alex Neuse, LucasArts, Metroid Fusion, Ernst Lubitsch ("Let the audience add up two plus two. They'll love you forever."), Breath of the Wild, Nintendo Wii, Dungeons & Dragons, The Dungeon Run, Steve Martin, Billy/The2ndQuest, Halo, Jonny Quest, Flight of the Conchords, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers, Mark Garcia.
Next time:
More Metroid Prime!
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