#primehack

I've just realized that I don't really want to unpack more of the story, but the developers had high narrative ambitions for this game and I'd say they did a really satisfactory job. The universe is expanded without being obtrusive or sabotaging Samus' character which I appreciated.

What I do want to talk about is the weird-but-amazing way in which I played this! I have a Steam Deck now and it turns out that there's a PrimeHack port (this is the emulator that maps the Wii controls to a mouse-and-keyboard setup, along with resolution enhancements and other improvements). PrimeHack expertly turns the Wii controls into something suitable for the Deck's twin sticks, and I played through the game as if it'd been officially ported to the Switch like Prime 1. It's fluid and fun and loses almost nothing by not having the Wii motions for interacting with buttons and switches.

Also, the game's a technical marvel! I don't think I've played it since it came out... [checks notes] seventeen gal-durn years ago [I am a skeleton crumbling to dust]. I recognize that the increased resolution over the Wii is doing some visual heavy lifting, but I was constantly impressed at how detailed the environments were. The developers really must have known how to capitalize on the hardware.

This time, I played with a fork of the Dolphin emulator called PrimeHack, which is specifically built for running the Wii Metroid Prime Trilogy with mouse & keyboard. It also enables other tweaks like enhanced resolutions and save states. The control scheme feels like a natural fit, aside from the effort of remembering where some of the lesser-used Wii buttons are mapped to on the keyboard.

I remember being deeply skeptical of the game before its release nearly twenty years ago, and I'm so pleased to say that then, and now, it's great. Time hasn't diminished this game at all.

Two things surprised me when going back to it this time. One, the game is actually pretty conservative with the Metroid "formula"; most of the expected suit and weapon upgrades are here, area themes are more or less what you'd expect, it's got Chozo in it, etc. And that's fine! 3D was a big enough departure for the series that I'm sure the developers didn't want to overplay their hand. Leave the weirder suits and ideas for future sequels.

The other thing is that Samus is incredibly tanky here. (Note, that's tanky with a Y, not an IE). My last three Metroids were Dread, Samus Returns and Fusion, in which Samus is a lot more vulnerable and squishy. But Prime lets you absorb damage like nobody's business, and it's actually kind of nice to have a lot of lesser enemies rendered optional as the game goes on and you're just trying to get across areas you've already been. Probably this choice has something to do with the move to 3D as well. And there's harder difficulties for those who like a little more risk involved.