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Something interesting I should note about the free strafe in this game and in Prime 2 (when you hold L without locking on) is that it's not quite a free strafe like you'd see in more standard FPS games. Instead, the game just locks you onto a point that's rather far away and rotates you around that. It's still close enough that you can notice the distinction, but regardless it's interesting to consider the technical limitation that Retro was unable to write up a true free strafe in the Metroid Prime engine. Prime 3 may or may not have had a true free strafe, but in any case the Wii's changes to the FPS controls from the tank controls of Prime 1 and 2 made a true free strafe less meaningful.
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Dec 9, 2015 17:18
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The funny thing about that tube hallway made of Bendezium is that it's just one of many references to a setpiece back in Super Metroid. See, in that game you could get access to Maridia either by entering from the top (which was probably the best way considering that you also got an upgrade that mattered a lot for that zone) or from the bottom. But to enter from the bottom, you had to enter a similar tube hallway and blow it up from the inside with a different upgrade that we don't have yet. Since then, the Metroid games (Prime 1/2 and Fusion at least, not sure about Prime 3 or Hunters, doubtful about Other M considering how late you got that loving upgrade  ) have found a way to shoehorn in a similar setpiece as part of one of the older callbacks in video game history.Also, another way to take out those turrets with relative impunity (especially if you don't have a version with Missile Cancelling) is to stunlock them with half-charged shots. (You can figure out your charge level by watching the meter on the side of the targeting reticle.)
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Dec 22, 2015 20:22
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Rabbi Raccoon posted:I wouldn't say it's the best way since short of a small bug, you can't get where you need to coming in from the top. That tube has to be destroyed at one point or another. (It's been a while since I last played Super Metroid, though I'm confident I could still get everything and beat it within a few hours if I tried.)
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Dec 22, 2015 20:49
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gnome7 posted:In Prime 1, yes. It doesn't do that in Prime 3, which is where the motion controls were introduced, and you need the motion controls for those boss fights. They very explicitly have parts you need to shoot at that you do not lock on to.
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Dec 23, 2015 21:59
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Rabbi Raccoon posted:So if the beams don't stack, is the Power Beam pretty much useless now? Prime 2's weapon selection was definitely the best of the series, because it constantly gave you reasons to use each different beam rather than just the current one. The Power Beam is still the weakest of the bunch, but when the enemies start ramping up in difficulty that same combo upgrade gains significant use. Weapon ammunition was a bit wonky but scavenging for more was never difficult, so I didn't mind it. As for Prime 3, well, let's just say that combat had a different focus than choosing which beam to use.
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Dec 25, 2015 21:18
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The Prime games have some pretty memorable bosses. Thardus and the next two bosses are likely the best from Prime 1, but regardless there's a lot in store from 2 and 3. Thardus himself is one of the bigger roadblocks on Hard Mode, because you've got fourteen different pieces to destroy in sequence and each takes two Super Missile shots to bring down assuming they're not blocked. At this point, barring glitch abuse you'll only have enough capacity for ~70 missiles/seven sections down without destroying his projectiles. That's something of a chancy proposition considering that you have to divert your attention from the boss himself, and of course because it's Hard Mode his attacks deal double damage. (Charged beam shots still hurt him, but do so more slowly.)
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Jan 9, 2016 01:04
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Yorkshire Tea posted:Honestly the boss fights is where 3 absolutely excels. Specifically a certain shapeshifting subboss provided me with probably the most satisfying and intense fight I've ever had in a Metroid game.
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Jan 13, 2016 19:29
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That map is a horrendous mess. Even Other M for all its faults (which are myriad) didn't have nearly the bullshit and lack of connectivity this thing does.
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Jan 24, 2016 05:38
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FPZero is also somewhat underestimating this game's length. You two are still somewhere between halfway and two-thirds of the way through the game, considering that -the Phazon Mines are decently large, -there are a bunch of things still left to be found outside the Phazon Mines, and -there is still the endgame sequence connected to the various Chozo artifacts.
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Jan 31, 2016 06:46
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I would not call Wave Troopers "scary" at all. First, their weakness is the Wave Beam, which can be used (as FPZero and I had noted on separate occasions) to stunlock them with half-charged shots. Second, their damage actually isn't that great in Normal difficulty. Somewhere in the most recent video, FPZero was surrounded by Wave Troopers and yet he still only took perhaps one energy tank's worth of damage. Really, most enemies in this game aren't that powerful or tough unless you play on Hard mode. This is the big reason why (contrary to what FPZero said) the balance between beams is out of whack. In theory the Power/Wave/Ice Beams are all balanced with each other in a tradeoff between power-per-shot and rate-of-fire. But in practice, the majority of enemies have so little health that your most powerful beam will just take them down in one or two shots anyway - Metroid Prime isn't a terribly difficult game until the final few bosses.
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Feb 21, 2016 20:02
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After the panda discussion I decided to look things up to see how weird their physiology has become, and wow are they really a bunch of living fossils.  Many of their issues stem from them being former carnivores who transitioned to eating mostly plants, and nutritionally poor bamboo in particular. (Bamboo doesn't have much protein in it, and thus pandas will oftentimes go for supplements in the wild or captivity.) Because pandas used to (as a population) be carnivorous, their guts are comparatively short for things of their size. This has to do with cellulose (from plants) taking a significant amount of effort to break down compared to muscle and fat (from animals), such that many herbivores larger than a few inches have dedicated adaptations for artificially lengthening their GI tracts in some way. And this is in addition to using symbiotic microbes to tear apart ingested cellulose in the first place. (Pandas use these but aren't born with them, such that cubs generally get them from...other sources.)Anyway, one adaptation for artificially lengthening the GI tract is rumination, to increase the stomach's capacity and to periodically regurgitate larger particles of food in order to break them down (for increased surface area) through chewing. (Hence cows chewing their cud.) Another digestive cheat is for rabbits to pass things through their GI tract twice, by excreting cecotropes from the usual spot and then consuming them for a second pass. (I am not a pet person but in particular I would be weirded out by owning a rabbit.) But pandas don't really have these sorts of tricks...so instead they just consume tens of pounds of bamboo per day and poo poo out whatever material that isn't immediately digestible. For them it's just quantity over quality, but even then the quality is sufficiently bad that pandas tend to be pretty sedentary. Which, of course, is part of why they're such a popular animal in zoos. Despite all this, keeping them around may not be such a bad thing. Don't get me wrong, they've still overspecialized themselves into a corner, but some folks have suggested that panda conservation in the wild would also indirectly protect other native but vulnerable species in China. In other news, how long until you guys pick up the Plasma Beam? I recall that trick being particularly easy to pull off on the NTSC version.
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Apr 5, 2016 19:23
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Carbon dioxide posted:How the hell did pandas survive this long, anyway?
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Apr 5, 2016 22:06
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That Pirate Trooper encounter in the portal room is vicious on Hard Mode/Trilogy [spoilered]. (Enemies take half damage against most attacks, excepting certain scripted events, and deal double damage.) You've still got the collection of four enemies to deal with, but since the swap to dark Troopers is timed you're likely to have three or ( ) four Dark Pirate Troopers on your rear end. And they hit like trucks, because of course they do; on Normal/Trilogy Veteran they still knocked off a full energy tank from FPZero's health bar.Echoes on Hard Mode/Trilogy [spoilered] can be balls-to-the-wall  at times, but I encourage folks to try it because it's so rewarding to eventually destroy everything that's previously been smacking you against a wall.Edit: Added notes for the Trilogy difficulty names. NGDBSS fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Jun 16, 2016 |
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Jun 15, 2016 23:51
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ikanreed posted:He wasn't playing on normal. He said (paraphrased) normal was for chumps. He's on Veteran.  But to clarify, Prime 1 and 2 (both GC releases) had Normal Mode and Hard Mode, where the latter functioned in the manner I noted above. Prime 3 instead had Normal/Veteran/Hypermode difficulties with the implication that the "Normal" difficulty was actually an easy mode. Veteran was then the game's normal difficulty, while [spoilered] was the game's hard difficulty. (Yes, the difficulty name is itself a small spoiler. No need to worry, we'll get there soon enough.)
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Jun 16, 2016 01:20
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If they hadn't barred him, Inafune likely would have made something that wasn't so unrefined as MN9. The man seems to be one of those folks who really needs editorial oversight to critique and channel his vision, not unlike George Lucas in that respect. (And of course this seems to be an endemic issue in Japanese corporate culture, that when someone gets enough authority no one else connected to a project is really willing to say no.)
NGDBSS fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Jul 19, 2016 |
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Jul 19, 2016 02:47
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Did they change the Grenchler hitbox for the Trilogy rerelease, or do they just require some precise aim that wasn't necessary on the original release? I found them to be tough but fair, considering that unlike most enemies in Prime 1 they actually have an appreciable amount of health. (In general Prime 1 enemies were undertuned.) In particular, their health values are about 5 missiles on GC Normal/Veteran or 10 missiles on GC Hard/[Secret Difficulty], or 1 -> 2 Super Missiles.Gear Router posted:That's kinda slow though, the quickest way to deal with dark pirate commandos is the charged dark beam and missile combo.  I used to have issues with them until I tried this, and it's so efficient that now I can't imagine doing anything else.I never noticed before, but now that I've listened to it the theme for the Dark Pirate Commandos sounds a fair bit like the boss theme for the Torvus guardian.
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Jul 25, 2016 21:40
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C-Euro posted:I seem to recall that they actually toned this guy down in the Trilogy version compared to the original release, but I couldn't tell you what they changed. Luckily, he doesn't have much health (about six charged Light Beam shots on GC Normal) and his arena will drop 100-health items whenever he destroys a pillar, so as long as you're prepared to get in his face and blast him he's not terribly crazy on GC Normal. On GC Hard he's a different story, but mostly because you've got more issues trying to outrace his amped-up damage. In fact, you can kill him in less than thirty seconds if you use free aiming to shove the Arm Cannon right in the Boost Guardian's black puddle form.
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Jul 26, 2016 21:46
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Bruceski posted:The good news is that almost all the bad things about Prime 2 are confined to the Bog.
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Aug 10, 2016 05:27
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KieranWalker posted:You're correct. Starting a new game from a finished file keeps the scan data, so you can get any you missed the first time.  Prime 2, like I've said before, is my favorite in the trilogy. In particular I'm the sort of person who won't play many games but will get deeply into a limited selection, which is why at a guess I probably have a month or few of playtime in World of Warcraft. Anyway, because I will get deeply into one game or another my preferences for replay tend towards things like combat and other gameplay for which the charm doesn't wear off all that quickly. And Prime 2's combat is probably the best in the series; you have a variety of toys to play with, most are available very early, and none of them really end up eclipsing each other.
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Aug 17, 2016 05:00
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Y-Hat posted:Naturally, there are no multi-scan bosses in Prime 3.
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Aug 17, 2016 05:51
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I wouldn't quite say "inhuman monsters", but regardless PotO's female parts are for obvious reasons written for operatic sopranos. The musical is basically an exemplar of a wider issue that the majority of songs are written for the highest vocal ranges within a given sex (soprano or tenor), so even heroic characters who sing at a lower range like Sarastro from The Magic Flute (bass) are relegated to being supporting characters. Regardless, an alto range is nothing to be scoffed at and can still be used so long as you determine how to tweak the relevant song. If Amanda Palmer or Chhom Nimol can still be perfectly competent despite the fact that they clearly sing alto, then that should not on its own stop anyone else. (Disclaimer: I have zero singing ability or formal training in music. Mostly I just listen to weird poo poo and pay a bunch of attention to opera.) Edit: Somehow I forgot about Figaro as a bass protagonist in opera, but I maintain that he is an exception to the rule. On the topic of the LP, the Alpha Blogg is basically the bane of my existence on GC Hard mode, since much of the time if you want to deal damage then you have to trade hits. And if you die then you have to fully proceed through one of the underwater areas again. At least the next boss is really quick so long as you pay attention. NGDBSS fucked around with this message at 01:55 on Sep 1, 2016 |
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Sep 1, 2016 01:51
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Bruceski posted:Wasn't Sarah Brightman one of only a handful of people who could hit those notes? I recall hearing it was a case where the music was written for the singer, rather than vice-versa.
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Sep 1, 2016 02:32
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Super Missiles are normally a good source of damage against Dark Samus, as she doesn't have any inherent ability to block them as with regular missiles. (This likely wasn't apparent due to FP using free aim and keeping his distance at the same time, which messes up just about everything unless one is a really good shot.) Indeed they're what I used to take her down on my first GC Hard Mode clear, as just about any other option (I hadn't tried Dark Beam shots then) wasn't fast enough to keep up with her own sources of hard-to-dodge damage.
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Nov 25, 2016 04:32
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Tofu Survivor posted:Slowbeef_wrestles_with_the_grapple_lasso.avi
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Dec 31, 2016 05:22
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On the topic of pressure cookers and other cooking explosions waiting to happen in the wrong hands, my father engineered his own hilarious disaster years ago. His usual morning routine, back when he was still getting paid to work*, was to heat up his morning oatmeal in the microwave while he got a shower. This wouldn't be necessary for the sorts of instant oatmeal you'd dispense out of a package, but my parents are nothing if not latter-day hippies and thus my father's breakfast was the real stuff which took ten whole minutes to cook. Of course, cooking anything that's not a turkey** in a microwave tends to heat things very quickly at full power, so he'd have to set the power level to 4 out of 10 to prevent any comparisons to Ghostbusters 2. One day, he forgot to turn the power setting down. So when my mother and I entered the kitchen to grab breakfast an hour or two later, after my father had left for work, we found the microwave...open. The inside was smeared with various shades of brown or black, with a collection of small glass shards where you'd expect the glass turntable to be. And the quart-sized Pyrex container commonly used to make my father's oatmeal was similarly, well, no longer a Pyrex container. Honestly, I still would like to have been there for what was in all certainty a steam explosion, but I can settle for never letting the man live it down. *The running joke about my parents retiring is that they didn't actually stop working, but just stopped getting paychecks to do so. These days they spend a lot of time gardening and/or farming. **One Thanksgiving, my parents' oven refused to work. They then proceeded to the next best option and cooked everything in the microwave, which ended up fine after translating various times and power settings.
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Feb 11, 2017 09:24
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