I finally beat Metroid Prime 3: Corruption the other night (17:46 with 79% of items on Veteran difficulty, if you must know). The developers, Austin-based Retro Studios, are incredibly smart and polished with their work, and just like the previous two games, MP3 inspired me as a designer. And I mean designer in a very broad sense; everything that they’ve put into this game - the level design, the sound, the font, the Hypermode concept, the interface system and so on - contains interesting design ideas not just exclusive to video games.
★ Controller Immersion.
In MP3, you use the Wii nunchuck analog stick to move your character around, and the Wii remote to look around and shoot things on the screen. It takes a little getting used to, but once you familiarize yourself, it works. It works freakin’ great, in fact. But even better are the instances where you use motion controls to perform certain in-game tasks. So opening a door might require you to push the controller forward, turn the handle clockwise, and pull it back. Your hand on-screen mimics your controller actions, and the experience is more engaging because of it. I’m not just pressing a button to open a door; I’m actually going through the manual labor of pulling a handle or twisting a knob.
basic motions (pushing, pulling, twisting, grabbing, throwing) make the game more active and engaging
The best use of this is in the grappling beam, which shoots out a virtual tether to swing across ledges Spiderman-style, or attach to objects and pull at them. For this mechanic, you motion throwing the nunchuck towards the screen, and if it grabs onto something, you jerk it back to see what happens when you pull. So if there’s debris blocking your path, you might grab pieces and throw them out of the way. Or if an enemy has armor or a shield, you might be able to rip that off too. So in heated battles, the mix of shooting and ripping stuff away can get pretty intense.
They’re little touches. The game would have still been good without them. But when all these motions are added up, it makes you feel more like an active participant in the world and less of a button-mashing couch potato. It’s not quite full-on virtual reality, but it’s a significant step forward.
★ Visor Interface.
Instead of disconnected menu screens or windows, the majority of the game’s interface is seemingly projected onto your visor. So your energy tanks, map, and enemy radar are not just floating in space; they’re integrated into the visor design. There’s even a subtle detail at the top of the visor: the four blue lights indicate how much battery life your controller has. Like the other games, you can switch to new visors to scan objects or see through walls via x-ray, but when you pause to read a logbook entry or check out your map, the world in front of you blurs and darkens and the information blips directly onto your visor. The side edges always look curved inwards, while the top and bottom visor elements remain as a constant reference point.
the curved visor design extends to most of the game’s interface
So you’re never taken out of the game. True, you switch into a third-person view when using techniques like the morph ball or screw attack, but the transitions are often mixed with a flicker of light or hiss of static, giving subtle visual and aural indications that you’re being pulled out from the visor. The only time this formula breaks is for triggered cutscenes, which seem to be used for specific letterboxed cinematic storytelling instances. Other first-person POV games have done away with cutscenes entirely, but for MP3 it’s probably an artistic choice (these sequences often highlight enemy weak spots, zoom in on secret passageways, or mask loading times).
Whatever the case, the visor is an effective way to integrate the game interface realistically into the play experience. When I don’t even have to look away at my controller to check the battery level, that’s a pretty compelling level of immersion.
★ Connecting Multiple Single Players.
My brother Andrew, who lives back east in DC, was playing through MP3 at the same time as me. For a while we were at roughly the same pace, reaching the same cool parts and big battles. But solitude plays a big role in the Metroid universe, so there’s no multiplayer or co-op gameplay modes. It’s a solid single player experience. To preserve that, but still add incentive if friends are playing simultaneously, there’s this achievement system in the game that gives you little credit medals for completing certain tasks, like killing 500 enemies or completing an objective. This in-game currency can then be used to unlock stuff, like concept art and background music. A lot of games use this technique, and it’s a good way to extend the product life and replay factor.
friend vouchers are an interesting way to connect multiple single player experiences
In this game, you also earn friend vouchers, which can only be redeemed into usable credits by sending them to someone else via the Wii’s online capabilities. So if I have 5 friend vouchers, I can’t use them - I have to send them over to Andrew, who is then exclusively able to purchase stuff with them. And most of the fun unlockables in the game require these special friend credits. This might have been frustrating if I didn’t have any other friends playing the game, but since it did work, it was actually a lot of fun. I’d sit down on west-coast time to start playing, and see that Andrew had sent me 3 credits - enough to buy something new. Now I felt guilty, and had to play through to collect enough vouchers to reciprocate the favor.
It was a creative way for us to play a single-player game together without ruining that critical sense of feeling alone in a foreign world. Now thanks to Andrew, I have bumper stickers, a Bobblehead character sitting on my ship cockpit, and a camera tool that lets you take in-game photos. These secret unlockables are pretty ridiculous, but I’ll admit that they did give me incentive to try and keep up with Andrew. Just because a game is meant to be played by one person doesn’t mean that multiplayer cooperation can’t happen on some level.
