Revisiting Metroid Prime

[Dark Jaguar]

Prime 1 is still really great, it's one of the best GameCube games in my opinion, and I've never liked/been very good at first person games. It is easy, which is why I play on hard mode usually, and I got to become so good at sequence breaking that it's hard to not give in to the urge every time. After all, why shouldn't I have the Plasma Beam the moment I am capable of doing all the bullshit jumps necessary to get to it? 

Where it has aged worst, in my opinion, is that we all know how FPS games are supposed to control, using modern controllers, and going back to using shoulder buttons to aim is just not it anymore. It's weird to me that it took developers so many years to figure out what to do with those extra analog sticks!

That's where the modern remake or remaster or whatever on Switch comes in.  It's got those modern controls, but sadly the sequence breaks are all but gone, which as I mentioned is the kind of bug that should be left in games.  Larian recently endorsed a bug that allowed someone to rescue and recruit a character one normally has to be "evil" aligned to get, much to fan's enjoyment.  Not all bugs are bad, Nintendo!

As for how awkward FPS controls were back then...  yes it's amazing how long it took, but I traced the history of analog controls, and it makes sense in that context.  It all stems from "flight stick" controls on early PC DOS games, and the assumption that inverted "up down" looking and side to side "yaw" adjustment would come naturally to players.  Which, well, it kind of did.  Some of us had played those old DOS flight stick games.  But, it meant imagination was rather limited and very few developed something new.  Turok, however, solved the controls issue RIGHT from the jump.  That "Turok" control style was also in Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, and it's that which later games like Halo would use (while flipping left and right stick functions... if you treat the C buttons of the N64 as a second stick as developers more or less were doing at the time).  So much suffering was only resolved in the next gen, and here's the embarrassing part.  Halo existed with it's superior controls when Prime came out!  They had a direct example, but they intentionally opted not to use it in favor of a scheme that allowed much faster weapon and scanner switching.  That's fair, in some ways, but modern controls even improved on that with "quick menus" (which Perfect Dark actually invented themselves).  That plus having additional buttons to play with compared to Gamecube meant they now had a solution.