Hello Sean
I’m linking you an article where someone got to play the Metroid Other M demo.
http://www.dagbladet.no/spill/blogg/2010/03/forhandstest-metroid-other-m/
The article is in norwegian but let me summarise what it says.
At first the article is talking about Team Ninja and Tecmo and the author shows some scepticism towards this.
He also says that he was sceptical about Retro and the Prime series but it turned out to be one of the best games last generation. He then mentions that there seems to be a big difference in how western and japanese developers picture Samus. In America she is like a walking tank destroying everything while in Japan she is a fast and flexible powerhouse.
Acording to the article it is a fast-paced game but the action doesn’t start until you have been through a 20minutes long intro sequence. Opposed to earlier Metroid games there is an overwhelming emphasis on story and cutscenes. Through the demo he is constantly being fed with cutscenes and flashbacks.
The story starts right after Super Metroid. Samus is suffering from a small depression because of the incident with the baby metroid. It continues with Samus picking up a distress signal from a space station where she meets some other bounty hunters and Adam. The bounty hunters are assigned to sectors where they have to fix something. Voice acting is bad.
He then continues to explain the controll setup where you have to hold the wiimote sideways in third person view and point it at the screen for a first person view. In first person view you can’t move but you have total control over what you want to scan and shoot. If you get attacked you can push the D-pad to dogde and do a cinematic counterattack. The author says that you never have to fight with the controller and that it works though there are some minor issues with the camera.
The authors biggest letdown was that Samus is fully equiped from the start but in order to use weapons they have to be authorized by Adam. Why not authorize everything from the start? He doesn’t care if all her weapons are taken from her at the beginning, he wants to find weapons not get them authorized.
In the last part he talks about the metroid feel and that it is present along with good music. there is some exploration and the cutscenes were of good quality.
After reading this article I am a very worried. It seems like everything is story and cutscenes. In this article there was one sentence about exploration, almost no mention about the action gameplay and I agree with the author about authorizing weapons. It is stupid. The game does sound like fusion where you are being led from one place to another because everything is locked.
I don’t care about the story and one thing that the Prime series did great, was that through the scan system I could choose if I wanted to learn the story.
One of the worst things was the part about cinematic counterattacks. It sounds like all you have to do is push one button and the game does the rest. I don’t care that the action is fast-paced if that is all you have to do. This is not good.
I can’t believe they are actually going with Samus having all abilities but must have them ‘authorized’ by Adam. Other M is surprising to me in that it is exploring new depths of lameness. The more I know about Other M is like driving closer and closer to the scene of a car accident. You can’t help but to look at it and go, “How the hell did this happen?”
Why do I keep getting the feeling that Other M was designed with the story first and the gameplay seems like an after-thought?
Another email:
Why is everyone’s manhood so threatened by 2D games right now?
Sakamoto broke off from his answer then to ask what I thought of the game. I told him that being a fan of the original series, I loved to see their return to some of those elements. But, I added, I don’t think a game like Metroid could be made now because people would expect more from the experience.
He seemed to agree.
“Remember, 2D Metroid, if you just shot at the right height lined up at the target the bullets were going to hit the enemies,” he said. “A lot of people played those games purely out of habit, because they were so immersed in that world at that time.
“As you said, some of those games you just couldn’t make now. They have a feeling that has been lost to some extent. But we wanted to bring a little bit of that old feeling back while melding that nostalgia with the evolution of the gameplay experience here.”
Complete and utter bull. Who are they to say what the audience wants or would not accept?
Pretend you are Sakamoto. Your handheld Metroid games are not doing much. There are either two possibilities for this.
1) People don’t like 2d Metroid.
2) You don’t know how to make the proper 2d Metroid experience.
Human nature being what it is, Sakamoto opts for possibility one. With 2d Mario selling, it is ridiculous to say any 2d type game cannot sell. This is why I keep going after Sakamoto.
The problem with Metroid is Sakamoto. HE is the one polluting the series with his stupid visions and all this garbage about developing ‘Samsus’s character’. Games like Fusion and Zero Mission would have been better without the Sakamoto baggage. I would rather replay Metroid I, II, or III yet again before touching Fusion and Zero Mission again. Yech.
How about a game with as rich environments as Super Metroid but with four to ten times the amount of content? How does that sound to you, gamers?
(Gamers overwhelmingly applaud such a notion.)
I thought so. If there wasn’t any demand for a classic style Metroid, then why do the Castlevania DS games keep selling? Why is there any interest in Cave Story? Why was their excitement over Shadow Complex?
2d Metroid did not fail Metroid. Rather, Sakamoto failed 2d Metroid. I would love to play a 2d Metroid without any Sakamoto garbage in it. No stupid ‘story’, no ‘character explorations of Samus’, no ‘cutscenes’, none of that nonsense.
In fact, after Other M I’d like the Metroid series forever removed from Sakamoto. When I look at this guy’s track record, he hasn’t been helping the Metroid series at all. It looks like the more he touches with the series, the more downhill it goes. If it wasn’t for Metroid Prime, where would the Metroid series be?
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