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malvarez1



Joined: 17 Nov 2008
Posts: 1628
PostPosted: Tue Sep 07, 2010 11:05 pm Reply with quote
Man, it would be neat if Viz could license the Metroid manga, like they did for Kirby and Zelda.
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Ghstmtrx



Joined: 06 Mar 2008
Posts: 178
PostPosted: Tue Sep 07, 2010 11:11 pm Reply with quote
Hey I bought the PS2 english release of Arcana Heart. I gotta say that I enjoyed it. Although to this day I can not beat the final boss. I keep hoping for the release of Arcana Heart 2. Guess I will just keep hoping.
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Ranma824



Joined: 17 Feb 2005
Posts: 456
PostPosted: Tue Sep 07, 2010 11:32 pm Reply with quote
Ghstmtrx wrote:
Hey I bought the PS2 english release of Arcana Heart. I gotta say that I enjoyed it. Although to this day I can not beat the final boss.


The final boss is actually broken; you can beat it by just using the sweep kick attack. She'll go down eventually.

Quote:
I keep hoping for the release of Arcana Heart 2. Guess I will just keep hoping.


The console port of AH2 was buggy as hell. I'd just give up hope and just be ready to import AH3 for the PS3. Smile
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bob_loblaw



Joined: 14 Oct 2005
Posts: 229
Location: Tanning in Hell
PostPosted: Wed Sep 08, 2010 12:13 am Reply with quote
Nintendo Power's run of the Metroid, Zelda and Mario manga are the only reason I still haven't dumped my copies or tried to sell them. Just have to figure out a way to preserve them. Too many fond memories there.
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ikillchicken



Joined: 12 Feb 2007
Posts: 7272
Location: Vancouver
PostPosted: Wed Sep 08, 2010 12:17 am Reply with quote
It's really lame that Nintendo is jumping on the story heavy bandwagon with Other M. If I want to watch a bunch of movies I'll watch an actual movie produced by people who actually have some degree of talent for/knowledge of making a good movie. Game designers are not these people. That's not even the root of the problem though. Games just are not well suited to telling stories this way. (Well...maybe JRPGs are. They're sort of their own weird little exception). Generally though, if I'm playing a game I want to play a game. That's not even to say that games can't contain elements of story. In fact, the best games do. It's just that they work more as a premise and general atmosphere than an overly detailed plot. This is where Metroid Prime worked.
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Mirri



Joined: 12 Aug 2007
Posts: 313
PostPosted: Wed Sep 08, 2010 12:42 am Reply with quote
Wasn't Adam Malkovich name-dropped in Metroid Fusion? He was the one who Samus compared the spaceship's computer to... I think that this heavy-story is relevant but I have yet to play the game. It is probably pretty forced but being a Metroid fan I always wanted to know went on story-wise with Metroid... Other than the always fun escapes and boss battles. I never cared too much for Metroid Prime's ilk though, too much scanning for my taste.
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teh*darkness



Joined: 16 Feb 2007
Posts: 901
PostPosted: Wed Sep 08, 2010 1:03 am Reply with quote
ikillchicken wrote:
It's really lame that Nintendo is jumping on the story heavy bandwagon with Other M. If I want to watch a bunch of movies I'll watch an actual movie produced by people who actually have some degree of talent for/knowledge of making a good movie. Game designers are not these people. That's not even the root of the problem though. Games just are not well suited to telling stories this way. (Well...maybe JRPGs are. They're sort of their own weird little exception). Generally though, if I'm playing a game I want to play a game. That's not even to say that games can't contain elements of story. In fact, the best games do. It's just that they work more as a premise and general atmosphere than an overly detailed plot. This is where Metroid Prime worked.


Speaking of JRPG movies, I remember buying Xenosaga 2 without playing the first one, but it came with a movie disc compilation from the first game, which I watched before playing the second one. So, I had the story mostly down, but not knowing the combat system from the first game, I was totally owned by the changes they made. So I had to track down and play the first one before again attempting the sequel. Suffice to say, the movie disc of the first game, which I recall being about 5 hours long, was about half of the cinematics from the first game. It seriously felt like watching a movie with a little bit of gameplay thrown in to keep up gamer interaction with the title. The second one downplayed that a little bit, and I never got very far in the third one, as I never properly finished the second. I'm glad there aren't too many games that have tried to do this. Thirty to forty-five minute video sequences in-between gameplay segments is not a good model to emulate.
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Emerje



Joined: 10 Aug 2002
Posts: 7328
Location: Maine
PostPosted: Wed Sep 08, 2010 3:49 am Reply with quote
I'm kinda surprised how "accurate" Samus looks in the Captain N comic. Considering the rest of the cast you'd kinda expect her to have green hair and a pink astronauts suit.

Emerje
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Penguin_Factory



Joined: 28 Oct 2007
Posts: 732
Location: Ireland
PostPosted: Wed Sep 08, 2010 3:57 am Reply with quote
I rented Other M and played it for a few days. It wasn't bad, but I couldn't stop thinking "I would much rather be playing a new Metroid Prime game". Samus' personality is mostly how I pictured her- Team Ninja didn't try to turn her into a hard-ass space marine or anything- with the glaring exception of her fawning attitude over Adam and the Federation soldiers in general, which just comes across as odd.

There were also a lot of niggling little gameplay flaws, such as the fact that you can only use missiles in first-person. In fast paced battles it means you're basically taking a huge risk in trying to use them since it makes you a sitting duck.

I will give it this though, the story actually managed to pique my interest before I brought the game back. I would be interested in seeing where it where it was going.
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Dagon123



Joined: 01 Jul 2010
Posts: 194
PostPosted: Wed Sep 08, 2010 6:03 am Reply with quote
Had Team Ninja gotten rid of First Person altogether (Was I the only person who just couldn't get into first person Metroid?) I would have ranked this as high as Fusion or Super Metroid, that and the story feels very, idk "Shoved down your throat" I think gamemakers (Especially Japanese ones) are making visual novels and not games anymore, its always good to have story, great stories make them even better, but you don't need to make movies to make games, a cut scene here and there would have been fine

all in all, Metroid other M rated higher then the prime series did for me, but its nowehere close to being on the pedestal that Fusion and Super Metroid are
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Tu101uk



Joined: 05 Mar 2008
Posts: 31
Location: London, UK
PostPosted: Wed Sep 08, 2010 7:10 am Reply with quote
Now now, Todd. No need to troll them R.Mika/Rolento/Karin/Ingrid/Alex/Elena/Q/Urien fans just because your boy Yang (and Yun, consequently) made it in the latest cut of new characters. :P

Nah, I'm just kidding. I'm loving the fact that more characters, regardless of who they are from the Street Fighter universe, are being added to Super Street Fighter IV. It's extending the life of a current fighting game without having to make endless disc-based revisions, something the genre has been, for far too long, bogged down with.

Oh, and I'm very hyped for Arcana Heart 3, especially after the disappointment of THAT poor port of Suggoi! Arcana Heart 2. =_= And EXAMU did the right thing by giving it to Arc System Works instead of Ecole - we can at least expect a great port with decent netcode (not like it matters for me - I live in niche fighting game backwaters here in the UK T.T).

Certainly cannot wait for TGS to drop more info on these two games... ^_^

O-O~
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gatotsu911



Joined: 18 Jul 2006
Posts: 457
Location: US of East Coast
PostPosted: Wed Sep 08, 2010 8:40 am Reply with quote
I am completely torn about Other M. For every person I've read saying the game is good, I've read at least one other saying it's a terrible disappointment. For every person saying the story is dumb and melodramatic, I've found another insisting that it's Actually Not That Bad. The only thing I've consistently heard from every review and player is that the combat is good - of course, I'd expect nothing else from Team Ninja. I guess I really am going to have to check it out myself at some point, but I don't think I'm going to have leftover money to buy it once I get Vanquish and Super Scribblenauts (the only two games I'm really interested in this fall).

Also, the best writing (and approach to story) in a Metroid game I've seen so far has to be the original Prime. The lore scans were enthralling in their detail, and the story was exactly as deep as the player chose to read into it. The minimalism of past games, in my opinion, represented the future of interactive storytelling, and to make a new game that tells its story through constant five-minute cutscenes - an approach that would have been considered novel last generation, but that the medium is wisely growing out of, thanks at least in part to the influence of Prime and games that have copied it - seems like a step backward for a series that has traditionally been ahead of its time.
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PetrifiedJello



Joined: 11 Mar 2009
Posts: 3782
PostPosted: Wed Sep 08, 2010 8:56 am Reply with quote
This makes the 8th review to which the word "sexist" appears, though I wasn't surprised. After the 4th, it just seemed it were a necessity. Once Team Ninja was announced as the co-producers, I had a bad feeling on how Samus would be portrayed, especially visually.
Called this one.

This game will never enter my gaming library. I can't help but laugh at the portrayal of Samus as she's about to fight foes she has already seen before, some more dangerous than the current threat.

I see Todd points this out as well as other issues of the game, including the ridiculous use of the Wii remote. Retro Studios' attempts programming at utilizing the Wii's functions to their limits is too difficult for other game studios.

It seems this game has set the bar of what to expect from now on and that's a shame. The Metroid series was the niche franchise of Nintendo and to see it trashed like this leaves me little hope for Nintendo's future of catering to anyone whose gaming skills can press "A" and "B" together without complaining how complicated it is.

There is a silver lining to this game, however. Its coverage had me aching to replay the Metroid Prime series again, so I threw in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.

It's such a shame the nuke in MP3:C couldn't be used on the greatest threat Samus will ever face: Metroid: Other M.
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Wyvern



Joined: 01 Sep 2004
Posts: 1545
PostPosted: Wed Sep 08, 2010 11:03 am Reply with quote
I find it interesting that the biggest issue people across the internet seem to have with the story is Samus freaking out over having to fight Ridley yet again. I feel like we've been trained by TV and movies to expect people to only be able to panic at things they've never seen before. I'm not quite sure that's how it works in real life.

A lot of people have moments of panic not from a single traumatic event, but from the accumulation of many similar ones. There's a "straw that breaks the camel's back" moment where the person has just gone through the trauma one time too many, and even though there's nothing particularly new or different about this instance, it just all becomes too much.

Considering that A) Ridley killed Samus' family, B) she's fought him many times already, and C) each time, she thought it was finally over, only to have him resurface yet again, it seems reasonable to me that she would finally hit the wall, and reach the point where it was just one time too many.

This could have been presented a little better in the story, but the basic idea of her losing it over Ridley makes more sense to me than if it had happened over some new alien threat. With any other creature, Samus could think to herself "well, I'll just kill it." With Ridley, killing never seems to work. She's trapped in a cycle. That would be enough to make anyone freak out.

The writing in the game was mediocre at best, but it felt like a problem of execution more than intent to me. If it had been explained better, the Ridley scene could have been great. The idea was sound, but they messed it up.

This is also why I don't buy the "sexism" argument. Showing a moment of weakness doesn't diminish Samus as a strong female lead; being strong isn't about lacking weakness, it's about overcoming weakness. It would be more sexist to continue to portray her as perfect, without flaws or failings of any kind. I've never met a woman like that, have you?
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AiddonValentine



Joined: 07 Aug 2006
Posts: 2201
PostPosted: Wed Sep 08, 2010 11:20 am Reply with quote
I have spent the better part of a WEEK defending this game over accusations of sexism and "destroying Samus' character" to which I have this to say: what a load of TRIPE. Sure, the writing could have been better, the plot was essentially Aliens, and the cut scenes dragged on at times (clocked it at ~100 minutes total) but overall I was pleased. Maybe it's because I've gotten bored out of my mind with these utterly contrived estrogen-allergic "badass action girls" but I found Samus in this to be more interesting and relatable than 90% of "heroines" in gaming. Sure, she has one freak out over her worst nightmare (especially after essentially losing a child and stressed out over the thought of an assassin) but then she sends the punk packing. The relationship and conflict between her and Adam also doesn't bug me too much. At the very least Sakamoto didn't forget that Samus is a woman unlike a lot of people who write women in games. I'll take this over the robotic Mary Sue she used to be.

As for the gameplay...IT'S FRIGGIN' METROID! Do I NEED to say anything else????
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