Crap, why do they all have to come out on the same friggin' day??!!

[A Black Falcon]

There is no "bullets" tile (there are no bullets in the game, ABF) because one hit on a certain "tile" will make it blow up. You don't need to shoot bomb tiles in order to destroy them, you just need to shoot them or do the smarter thing and use a super bomb to destroy everything in a room and reveal which tiles are which. And you don't need to do that most of the time unless you're looking for secrets. If you play the game straight through without looking for secrets or extra tanks, very little "blind shooting" is involved. Again, that is what us gamers like to call "exploration" and "secrets-finding". Metroid Prime's "tiles" are the exact same way. As you have shown very clearly, you hate it when you have to find things on your own. You would rather have someone guide your way through a game and not have to do any actual exploring for more than one second.

Lazers, not bullets. But you know what I meant. :)

Okay... I'll try again. Yes, for most tiles teh megabomb does reveal them, true. It does a good job of that once you get it... its still annoying to have to megabomb anywhere you think there might be a false wall, but it helps some... much better than before when you've got to actually use the small bombs. However! It does NOT reveal everything.

-Megabombs will not reveal anything on surfaces that you can break with the lasers

-Megabombs will not reveal anything on surfaces that are actually invisible pathways that you can walk through.

Now... for much of the game shooting all the walls solves both problems. However, once you get the bullets that travel through walls you can't find hidden paths by seeing which walls bullets pass through anymore... making that task significantly harder. Oh, sure, that's pretty late in the game, but it still adds a whole new layer of annoyance.

And I didn't just play straight through. Sure, I didn't spend lots of time looking for secrets, but I definitely tried to get every tank I could see, and tried to get every circle on the map... and still I am missing half the items? Ah well...

That's sad.

No, the game is pretty long.

Nightmare was crazy hard. It was impossible to beat that boss without losing a huge chunk of your life.

True. Well, the first two parts (where you shoot the center from below) aren't as hard (though its way too easy to loose huge amounts of health in the second phase...), but the third one where he chases you around the screen? Surviving for any time at all at that part is very challenging...

Come on, all of that hiding away from SA-X and all of those annoying bosses in Fusion didn't make it tougher for you? I lost lives several times more often in Fusion than I did in Prime. Prime was a good tough, while some of Fusion was just too difficult.

Hiding from the SA-X? There are just a couple of parts in the game where I ran into the SA-X... and they were all scripted parts where you did some specific thing and it stopped chasing you. That last one was really hard, though... where you've got to go through a bunch of screens before you reach a hiding place... but overall that wasn't super hard. Unless there are other places you can also run into the things?

As I said, Prime may not have bosses that are quite as hard as Fusion, but it makes up for it with much greater game length... and I at least find Prime's bosses a good challenge. No, not Nightmare hard... but a good challenge. That plant boss with the mirrors took quite some time...

That's the whole point of these types of games! Using the stupid hint system is almost as bad as using a strategy guide.

... I do use strategy guides in games sometimes...