I’m still alive! Still playing shooters on the 3DS! Still mad!

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Metroid Prime Hunters (DS)

Note: This covers only the single-player campaign, not bot matches.

Everyone and their pet, and their pet’s pet, and their pet’s pet’s flea, is telling me to play this…

I’ve never played a Metroid Prime game, but the 2D Metroids leave me conflicted. I appreciate the sci-fi setting and love the spooky atmosphere, so I always start one with a good feeling. Then I get hit by the difficulty, getting lost and stuck, needing to find upgrades, backtracking, the vague story, basically I dislike the combination of stuff that makes Metroid Metroid.

And so it starts with MPH as well. The game handles amazingly well. While a couple other shooters feel pretty good for the DS, Metroid offers precision and speed on the level of a full gaming system. I’m especially a fan of the high field of view, which gives the game an alien vibe, but more importantly just feels so fine. Indeed there are full console FPSs that can make me ill after 10 minutes due to narrow FOV, and yet this little DS game can manage such a wide view. Nice.

One issue is that there’s a good amount of buttons in addition to camera control and double-tap jump, all on the touchscreen. So it’s easy to make a mistake and switch weapons instead of jumping during first person platforming over a death pit while on a timer.

The are a couple different environments to visit - frozen space stations, lava fields, the occasional psychedelic path or flesh interfaces… It all looks fantastic and especially impressive in 3D and on a DS. It’s such a shame that the DS doesn’t support linear texture filtering. This game especially could benefit from not being so blocky.

I can’t praise the music and sound design enough either; and again not just “for the DS”, but in general. I don’t know why so many games nowadays refuse to use punchy sounds. Metroid, even with its laser guns and other sci-fi elements, sounds more believable than real-life shooters.

Although it’s also quite eerie to hear the same musical themes on the same kinds of levels across Metroid games for decades. I’m not saying the throat chorus doesn’t fit with lava pits, I just don’t quite follow such a deep association.

There’s a story of some sort, I guess? You need to collect some things that other people also want, and there’s this and that about an extinct civilisation or other in purposely obtuse logs, and you kill everything and win. Like any other Metroid or every Nintendo game for that matter, it runs with the porn movie analogy when it comes to stories.

The level design is a bit of a double-edged sword, I think. It flows well, and levels tend to loop into themselves and offer shortcuts, so they aren’t too obtuse to navigate… At least at first. But they’re also quite contrived and videogame-y - doors opening after you kill all enemies, suspiciously morphball-sized paths, and layouts making less logical sense than 2D Mario levels. I hear they’re mostly just repurposed multiplayer arenas - and yep, that tracks.

You need to revisit each station again after you have the right tools/weapons to open the doors. It’s not just a simple rehash though, entire new sections open up. Here the levels become more complex, making it easier to get stuck, and overall the level of bullshit sorry, cHaLLeNGe, ramps up quite a bit.

The enemies are mostly fairly standard alien critters, but surprisingly, a few types move ridiculously fast. Even more surprisingly, I was mostly able to keep up with them. I couldn’t imagine fighting something so quick on anything but a PC with a mouse, and yet here on the DS, it works.

Where the game really strains its controls, are the bosses and countdown challenges. I hate the whole concept of videogame bosses that are eventually dropping a whole barrage of nukes on you while you’re stuck in a tiny room with them, chipping on their oddly specific armor weak points until they pop out of their shell for 3 seconds so you can chip away on them directly 1 hp at a time or missing all the shots with a railgun and having to do it again and again and again and again and again. Those bosses.

So at some point I resorted to cheats, because I was getting a cramp in my hand from doing the same motions over and over and over and over and over and over. And the bosses aren’t even fun - just lame automatic defences copypasted over and over (and over and over). The hunters and mini-bosses you encounter all over the game are much more creative. At least the final one ends on a high note, although it’s just a JRPG type monster with all the bullshit boss mechanics.

And of course every station goes on to auto destruct after the boss, and that’s more cases where the game turns fugly. First off, it’s just contrived as hell. If the thing is about to blow up, how come that I can come back later? And how come the timer is also set to just about the right time for that particular instance of that station?

So you need to backtrack all the way through the whole damn map - teleports stop working because fuck you, except of the necessary ones because shut up. First person platforming may be involved and that just becomes irritating on a timer. Enemies respawn and you need to kill them again to open the damn doors, sometimes a hunter shows up, all the while you might be low on health and having sweaty hands after the boss fight - and - again to stress that part - on a pointless timer.

I guess it’s just as true here as with the 2D titles: the game is cool except of the Metroid tropes. Most of the time, it tends to be pretty helpful, usually it’s fairly clear where to go, there’s a groovy 3D map, and even checkpoints. You don’t even need to find suit upgrades, so at first it’s easy to just vibe with the flow of the game without too much friction.

But, after the first third of the game, the honeymoon is over and it switches into some sort of a hardcore mode. A lot of the time you get locked in a room with more enemies, or you need to do “puzzles” which just involve running around in a couple rooms, pixel-hunting for buttons, navigating contrived labyrinths, more pixel-hunting for stuff to scan, beating pointless timers, first person platforming or everything together.

It’s rarely much fun anymore, and usually not even a decent ChaLlEnGe - or when it is, it gets absolutely fucking console-snapping-rage murderous. Most of the time, it’s just the same handful of boring or annoying tasks to do over and over. The game always shows you what it wants in a cutscene anyway (which you need to view every time you inevitably fail some of these), so it’s not even a surprise. Just busywork to finally get over with.

I was reading my notes from when I started the game, phrases like “Overall, It’s hard to not be impressed with this whole thing,” “Even if it came out today on a non-handheld system, it would be a decent game; so on a DS in 2006?” and “Damn, what an achievement.”

And I just wonder if someone switched the game on me for a much lesser version. It still has a solid basis and looks great, but really leans into repetition and stupid challenges rather than new ideas and atmosphere. Nearing the end, I felt more motivation to finish the trashy Modern Warfare Mobilized, while Metroid seemed like obligation, if that makes sense.

Just like the previous Metroids I’ve played, the damn game lured me in with the atmosphere, and then dropped a bunch of nails on my path, and a few hammers on my head. Even more sneakily this time, with all that friendly 3D and fun shooting. I feel cheated.

At the end it has left the same weird taste in my mouth as the 2D Metroids, especially the modern ones. It’s too concerned about keeping alive the SNES era tropes to feel right, and it doesn’t even do those tropes all that well.

I shouldn’t be too harsh on it as it’s still quite a feat, but I can’t stand games which start really well and turn into exactly this.

Rating: Well 10/10 duh, it’s a Nintendo title and I’d get exiled to the Sun if I gave it anything less. So I would never give it something like 7/10, not like it gets boring and annoying after a while, of course not!

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Dead’n’Furious (DS)

With a lot of these DS shooters, especially the likes of CoD, I kept thinking - why won’t they just make a rail shooter? Most don’t have much more gameplay anyway, the turret sections tend to be the best, and the genre seem well fitted for the DS.

So here’s something to test this theory: The railest-gunnest-shooterest rail shooter of 'em all, because this is a zombie game. A match made in heaven, really. You’re some semi-anonymous convict who has to get through hordes of zombies when the prison (and everything around it) gets overrun by zombies. A couple cinematics flesh out the…ehm, “story”.

It’s as basic as it gets, but we really don’t expect much from this genre, I think. You have 3 firearms and a crowbar, with which you tap and slash the screen, and you reload by sliding the magazine to the ammo slot. Makes sense. Other than that, it’s about some cool environments as a setting, and then just about blasting zombies.

The environments are… Fine. I was somewhat worried it will all be only the prison, but you’ll get through a bunch of different areas, so there’s even some alluded background story to it. Some exteriors are particularly nice and substantially creepy. The world isn’t all that vast though, so you’ll spend a lot of time just turning around a lot in every room.

And zombies are just fine as well. They shuffle and ruffle towards you, and as you shoot them, they stumble and rumble and their bits fall off, like good zombies do. Some other critters like bats and rats are there as targets as well, and a few cool bosses show up too.

I’ve not played a lot of lightgun games so I don’t know how this one fares in comparison. But I like how it flows. You’re railroaded on a path, but you keep looking about, turning around, and occasionally can choose between two ways. It’s funny - while with CoD I was wishing to just have my character put on a rail, here I sorta want to grab the controls and move my character myself. So I’d say that makes it pretty good.

If you’re mad enough to read my past reviews, you may know I’m quite a filthy casual who runs away from most gaming challenges. And so I can’t begin to try to imagine to fathom the concept of thinking about finishing this game without cheats. I couldn’t get past the first couple levels. After enabling infinite health and eventually no reloading (because I couldn’t even finish a time sensitive mission without that), I can only conclude the game is made for superhumans, or teenagers.

Well, I suppose you can spend dozens of hours trying to polish your moves and timing to millisecond perfection, or two hours playing through with cheats. Anyway, blasting zombies like this is pretty fun, and I don’t even like zombie media otherwise.

Rating: 5/10 I guess? More fun and more competent than most of these shooter things, but doesn’t offer all that much.

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GoldenEye 007 (DS)

(The 2010 remake, not to be confused with the 2005 game GoldenEye Rogue Agent.)

I’ve tried the N64 GoldenEye a few months ago, and well, it’s so quaint, it’s adorable. It’s very obvious the team was just learning the ropes of first person shooters - that’s understandable since these were still fairly early days, for consoles at least. Still, GoldenEye feels more like a Bond mod for Quake than a real game to me.

Then 8 years later, Rogue Agent for the DS was a very oddball throwback that, in return, felt like a Bond mod for Duke Nukem 3D. But due to all the maddening hype surrounding the OG GE, a remake of the original was inevitable… So here it is. The DS version.

The game seems to loosely follow the main beats of the N64 game. In practice, that means it looks roughly like an N64 game, runs like shit and the levels are bland, boring and not making any logical sense. Where the N64 maps were large, empty but rather free-roam-ish, here they’re small, paper-thin linear affairs, where you follow a marker all the way and can’t stray more than a centimetre off the path. Well, I guess that’s what a modern recreation means today.

But no worries, the remake introduces more modern features. Such as sprinting, without which Bond walks at the pace of morning traffic. And also ironsight aiming, without which he can’t hit the wide side of a barn. There are the annoying little animations for things like takedowns or using the phone, forced scripted movement, and simply every other trope of a subpar 2010’s COD-wannabe. Except, this is the DS, so instead of at least offering some spectacle, it just feels sad.

Just like COD:MWM, the devs were trying to imitate the full console versions of the Bond games. And again this failed miserably. It’s the most on rails, dumbed down and lifeless FPS I’ve ever played and again I have to wonder why not just make a lightgun/QTE game instead. Heck, even the usual “minigames” to open doors and such are replaced with the blandest gestures. At one point you need to close the DS to do a thing, but the game takes about 6 screens of text to explain it. That’s how dumb it thinks the player is.

If you ask me what does work in the game, I honestly draw a blank. I guess so many shitty stealth levels can better accommodate the shitty framerate than shitty shooter sections? How’s that for a positive. I guess the music is kinda decent? But I’m not giving it credit, as it’s just basic Bond themes probably taken from the full console games anyway.

So it’s combining the outdated simplicity of the N64 original with the annoying mechanics of COD, without the excitement of either, and finishing it off with the worst framerate I’ve seen yet. Oh, let’s not forget other details like horrible voice acting or stupid animations. It has everything a proper shovelware should.

I wish this game was only an hour long like Rogue Agent, because I somehow had to continue watching this train wreck. It kept surprising me with new lows, and I just half-expected the game to spontaneously combust at some stage.

But even I have my limits. I can’t go on with this one. Maybe it’s not the worst kind of a lifeless, nostalgia trip, shitty corporate cash grab tie-in ever, but never mind it totally is. What a colossal waste of good bytes. They really should’ve just ported the N64 game.

Rating: 1/10 - it’s close to being The Room of DS games, except it’s not funny.

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Older reviews:

I. Moon, COD4, C.O.R.E., Ironfall: 3DS community - Patient gamers

II. Chibi Robo, MechAssault, Bionicle: 3DS community - Patient gamers

III. Brothers in Arms, GoldenEye Rogue Agent, COD:MWM: 3DS community - Patient gamers