My Top 100: #39 – Metroid Prime

 

Even though Metroid was one of those Nintendo franchises that had been around for a long time, I never really got into any of them.

I thought the first game was kinda cool, although I never really had enough of an attention span at a young age to do some serious exploration, or to even attempt to finish the game.  Return of Samus was a game I got after buying into months of hype in Nintendo Power, only to be greeted by bland environments and repetitive gameplay (although I did recently discover that it’s a fairly decent game, after all).

Super Metroid was an absolutely phenomenal game.  It got rave reviews, lived up to an incredible amount of hype, and was the pinnacle of the Action\Adventure genre for quite a while.  Many people believe it still is!  And, with all that praise and excitement, I didn’t play a single minute of it.

In about 2001 or so, I finally downloaded a rom of it to see what I had been missing, and was quite obviously blown away by it.  Unfortunately, I had been jaded enough by Metroid II to ignore Super Metroid altogether when it was released, which was a damn shame.

Samus Aran was going to be making the jump to 3D soon, and I wasn’t going to miss out on the action this time around.

 

 

*Watching this video instantly made me feel better about my own gaming abilities!*

There was, of course, the little question of actually owning a GameCube.  To do that, I’d have to get a job first…  damn, this gaming stuff was hard.

I eventually did get a job, and though I fully expected to screw up and get fired within the first few weeks, I managed to stick around.  Living at home made it easy to save money, but it also made it easy to spend it.  Working at a store adjacent to the mall was dangerous for a guy trying to save a buck or two, especially since it had the best DVD store in town.  Remember Music World??  That place was awesome!  In any case, I eventually ran out of little things I wanted to buy.

The last three consoles I had gotten were either bought with money earned from a person’s will, or, as was the case with my PlayStation 2, a high school graduation present.  I set my sights on the first big purchase with the money I had rightfully earned on my own – a Nintendo GameCube.  The Nintendo 64 and PS1 I had were fun, but whenever I played them, they reminded me of the people who died for me to be able to buy them.  Kinda strange, but oh well.

On one of my lunch breaks, I went to Zellers to check out some GameCube deals.  If I bought the game here, I’d get to choose two games to go along with it.  Naturally, I chose Star Wars: Rogue Leader, and Metroid Prime.  The rest of my work day was slow as molasses.  There was a brand new console in my locker, just sitting there, not being enjoyed.  My brain was quite obviously elsewhere for the rest of the shift.

When I finally got home, I was on Cloud Nine.  The atmosphere, the music, the lock-on targeting, the fast-paced action, the great puzzles…  absolutely everything in Prime had me enthralled from the get-go.  There were little things, like how the the world’s wildlife really felt alive, and Samus’ visor reacting to the environments she was in, that really had me feeling like I was truly a part of the experience.

Can’t wait to play through it again to see what I might have missed the first time around!