Bald-faced News 7/2/17: Prime Time

More old Homeworld emerges, EVO 2017 isn’t as popular as last year, and a LOT of Metroid Prime.

This was a heavy nostalgia week for me. To close the loop on the tease from last week, I got both Metroid Prime 1&2 for the GameCube, even though I own the trilogy on disc and digitally. I don’t have an especially powerful PC so Dolphin emulation is out of the question for me right now, and while I love and appreciate the MP trilogy for packaging three incredible games, I miss the original GC controls and the fantastic main menus from the GameCube games.

The Metroid Prime games have aged superbly, just like Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion. The scanning mechanic is a great way to give the player that feeling of discovery from the earlier games, but if you find it annoying you can always just scan enemies or bosses to get the minimum info you need to beat the game. Prime is such a vivid and creative game that it is still a joy to visit Tallon IV all these years later. The bosses are distinct and memorable with varied mechanics to give each major encounter a unique feel. With how fun, memorable, and inventive the first Metroid Prime was, it’s no wonder that its sequel: Echoes, is intensely underwhelming.

It speaks to the quality of the Prime series that its worst game is still a solid 4/5. Echoes borrows a LOT from the original Prime: enemy designs, enemy gimmicks/behaviors, and environmental ideas. The first non-hub zone is a desert area: Chozo Ruins in MP and Agon Wastes in MP2. You only get two suits, one fairly early on and one right before the tedious endgame scavenger hunt. And the whole “light/dark” worlds mechanic was played out in video games well before this release. But even with all of those caveats, Metroid Prime 2 Echoes is a fun game with some unique and exciting ideas strewn around. It brought the screw attack to 3D space, the Dark Aether temple guardian boss fights are spectacles that no other Metroid game has come close to touching (I still think the Quadraxis fight is a level of daunting on par with some Shadow of the Colossus fights), and even though you get it only a couple hours from the finish line, the Light Suit is the best looking Metroid suit. Bar. None.

Regardless of any flaws the Prime games have, they’re incredible video games and I’m looking forward to what the new team does for Prime 4. The three original Prime games are some of the best games I’ve had the fortune to play, and shame on anyone for writing them off as “first-person shooters”. I’m looking at you, Moviebob.

Tieing news to my week, Homeworld Cataclysm has been re-branded as Homeworld Emergence and re-released!

The Homeworld games remain unique strategy experiences over 17 years since the first game came out. The mechanics are fairly standard RTS fare: gather your resources, research your tech, and build your fleet. Homeworld’s main gimmick lies in its 3D nature; since the game is all about space combat, the map is three dimensional. When you tell your ships to move, you can move them in full 3D, up, down, left, right, to any degree you want. The simplified nature of Homeworld’s systems is a nice contrast to other, economy heavy RTSs like Age of Empires. If you’ve got a hankering for some space commanding, give all the Homeworld games a shot. They’re available on Steam and gog.com.

Fooly Cooly is one of the best anime ever produced, and a large part of its appeal is its self-contained and short six episodes. While I think these two new seasons have potential to be great, as does every piece of media, the odds are stacked against it. Its visuals and OST will not doubt be outstanding (hearing The Pillows again did get me excited), but I have to faith that the new characters will be as interesting or deep as the original main cast. Of course I’d be more than happy to eat crow on this, but this has all the stench of a bunch of businessmen declaring that “FLCL is a recognizable brand with a cult following, and thus will make us money!!”. The series will be coming to Toonami in 2018.

The registration numbers for Evo 2017 are in and boy have they dropped from 2016.

As mentioned in the article that’s the source of the image, SFV has more entrants than Street Fighter IV ever had, but SFv is seeing an almost 50% reduction in entrants from last year.

With year over year changes pic.twitter.com/xg3tt2S9C3

— Practical TAS