This is the best part around Metroid Prime Remastered for me, a noob and a weenie who never plays FPSes: The genre’s ability, at its best, to be expansive within restriction is incredible to me. Because they lean in so hard on exploration, with big-yet-limited maps, I often think of Metroidvanias as having “closed open worlds.” I, personally, am a sucker for Castlevania: Symphony of the Knight, which holds up excellently for modern gameplay. Metroidvania is a sub-genre of action genres where you can freely wander around a setting and unlock new sections of the map with power-ups. In 2002, Metroid Prime burst open the possibilities for Metroidvania games, so-called in homage to Metroid and Castlevania, the games that defined it. If I missed, I ended up in lava which eagerly drained Samus’s health. In one particular instance, I had to double-jump onto two relatively narrow platforms. Jumping shenanigans were how I started realizing that I was having trouble getting into Metroid Prime Remastered. It feels like trying to walk in 10-inch heels after a lifetime of opting for flats. But as a third-person action player, this feels deeply disorienting to me, like a kind of gravity that operates on different rules than I’m used to. It’s a muscle that people who grew up playing FPSes probably don’t think about, because it’s become intuitive to them. You have no clue where you are on a platform unless you look down. Jumping, in every first person shooter I’ve played, feels like a mysterious, ungrounded, anti-gravitational phenomenon to me. There’s a weirdly specific skill to first-person shooter gameplay that Metroid Prime Remastered has helped me discover I just don’t have: the jump style. Even more than my attempts at The Last of Us ( like the show, that game is designed to make you feel sad), playing Metroid Prime Remastered made it clear to me that I probably never will-which is a bizarrely melancholic realization to come to, because if I were ever going to develop that taste, given where my childhood lay on the gaming timeline, Metroid Prime in 2002 would’ve been the game to kick things off. Or I’d at least be able to play beyond the first couple hours of The Last of Us before shooting actual people makes me feel too guilty and sad.īeyond playing Golden Eye multiplayer in a bid to seem cool to my godbrother and his six-years-old cool friends, I never developed the taste for first-person shooters. I wondered what kind of gamer I would be today if I had played this game in 2002 or 2003-probably the kind who truly and deeply understands the allure of Fortnite or feels curious about games like the Half-Life series or Destiny 2. It’s the kind of game that would obviously shape a preteen’s gaming tastes for life. All of this is to say that, in playing Metroid Prime Remastered, I’m having a weirdly existential experience.
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