The SuperDQP Weekly - November 18, 2024

I have a history of enjoying the Metroid series, particularly the Prime trilogy. I’ve been sitting on these thoughts for a little while now, so heck it, we’re talking about an old Wii game about bounty hunters going crazy.

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But Before That, A Game Recommendation

This week’s recommendation is weird, because it’s not really a game so much as it is a mod for many, many different games: the Archipelago randomizer mod.

If you’re not familiar with randomizers, they’re mods for games that randomize the locations of items in the game world. So, for example, in an unmodded game save of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, you’d find the slingshot in the Great Deku Tree. With a randomizer mod, that slingshot would be moved elsewhere randomly, and another random item would take its place in the tree, and so on for every item in the game.

Take that concept and apply it to multiple games played by multiple players, and you have Archipelago. It merges every item in multiple different games into a massive pool and randomizes the locations across every single game.

So, for example, you might find a friend’s Ocarina slingshot in your Doom playthrough in E4M2: Perfect Hatred. Or your vital Surf HM for Pokémon Emerald might be stuck in another player’s Deepnest in Hollow Knight.

As you can imagine, it gets entertainingly bonkers very quickly.

It is also, as is the case with many game mods, very janky, and your mileage may vary for any and every game. Setting it up requires a lot of patience, tinkering, scripts, and, yes, necessary emulation and ROMs for any game not readily available on PC.

If you and your friends can get it set up, though, it’s a magical time.

You can learn more at archipelago.gg. There is also an official — and helpful — Discord server full of people ready to lend a hand. New games are added regularly, and often creatively, though the primary subject of this week’s newsletter is not one of them.

Metroid Prime 3 has a really cool mechanic

A couple years ago, I appeared on a couple friends’ podcast called Smashterpieces to talk about Metroid Prime, one of my favorite games. I went to YouTube and wrote/recorded a video to coincide with the podcast (warning before you click on that, I hadn’t socially transitioned yet), and a year later I followed that video up with another on Metroid Prime 2: Echoes.

Those videos looked at the first two Prime games through a very politicized lens. I looked at the first Prime through the lens of fascism, ecology, and energy extraction, and I looked at Prime 2 through the lens of mid-00s militarism, xenophobia amidst the War on Terror, and my own queerness. Both very serious lenses from which to look at two Nintendo games featuring item names such as “Screw Attack” or “Boost Ball.”

I had intended to do one more video examining Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, but, well, you know. I transitioned to newsletters. It happens sometimes. But I didn’t want to leave that script hanging, so consider this the grand finale of my big, unintentional deep dive into the Metroid Prime trilogy.

Prime 3 is a more bombastic game than its two predecessors. You can tell that the single-player campaigns of the Halo series had an influence on its development, as Prime 3 is filled with explosive set-pieces, copious bloom lighting, and lots of hardened space marines.

So, you may be surprised to find that I’m not really going to look at this game from as much of a politicized lens as I did the previous two. If I did, I would probably spend even more time talking about the War on Terror, alienation of “the other,” and hypermasculine societal expectations on teenagers, the same way I did with Prime 2. And that’s not a reading I would disagree with but given that it’s the same reading I had of the last Prime game, I don’t think it would make for interesting reading if you’ve already seen my Prime 2 video.

So, hell with it. I’m going to keep this one silly and positive.

Prime 3 is, in my opinion, the weakest game in the trilogy. I think that it aggressively holds the player’s hand and relies too much on its set-pieces to really let its atmosphere shine as much as it could. But paradoxically, I’m going to make this my most upbeat analysis of the trilogy. I like a challenge. We’re going to be nice.

Prime 3 contains one of my favorite mechanics of the entire trilogy, which is Hyper Mode.

Hyper Mode significantly boosts your attack power for a short time, but at the cost of an energy tank. And playing at a higher difficulty, I was surprised at how much I used it.

Not because Prime 3 is a hard game, mind. It’s probably the easiest Metroid game in the entire franchise. It was an early Wii title and Nintendo and/or developer Retro Studios likely wanted to ease people into the weird motion controls with a gentler and more directed difficulty curve.

But I found myself leaning on Hyper Mode because it’s quick. Some enemies are real bullet sponges, and it would be so much easier to pop an energy tank and let loose, right? Wouldn’t that be nice? Think of how much time you would save if you just gave in to the Phazon’s power. Just for a bit! Just a little hit of it.

Replaying Prime 3 with the benefit of having grown up and experienced other video games of the era was interesting, because around the time of Prime 3’s release, there was an industry-wide fixation with moral choices. Fallout 3, Mass Effect, inFamous, and BioShock were all games from the late aughts that leaned on binary, often cartoonish moral choices that dictated if you would gravitate towards good or evil.

Metroid Prime 3 doesn’t have those kinds of narrative moral choices, but I feel that it explores those ideas of evil and temptation more effectively because it frames it not as a question of morality, but as a question of power.

Phazon is undeniably a force of evil. It eats planets and their ecosystems alive, assimilating them to its will. Anyone who uses it is driven mad and dies because their bodies cannot handle the sheer energy of it. Three of Prime 3’s bosses, after all, are fellow bounty hunters who got infected and, despite the Federation’s best efforts, went crazy.

But plenty of people in the Prime trilogy think they can control it. The space pirates in the first Prime, and the Federation in Prime 3, and to an extent, yes, the player. That power is so tempting. It would be a shame to waste it.

The decision to use it so often was a double-edged sword, because there were many moments where I would overuse Hyper Mode and find myself dying because it ate up all my health. Again, the game wasn’t hard, I just relied on Hyper Mode too much and the temptation literally consumed me.

What an effective way for a game to explore the nature of power! And (for better and worse) it’s not a narrative device. This is just a game mechanic, and a pretty basic one at that. The game doesn’t give you a bad ending for using it too much, nor do NPCs comment on your usage of it.

And I don’t think it needed narrative weight because the threat of a game over acts as enough to give the player a moment to meditate on how their actions led them to that point. Prime 3 did not need the threat of a bad ending to wag in the players’ face for being a bad person. Its mechanics were enough.

Prime 3 is far from the best or even most interesting game in the Prime trilogy, but I do think there’s a lot to learn from it. I just hope more developers feel the temptation to tap into this power someday.

A Wishlist Recommendation

Speaking of learning from games from the mid-2000s, Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is a Game Boy Advance game.

Well, okay, that’s not true. It’s not a cartridge you can go out and buy on eBay, slot into an old GBA, and play. It’s an indie game on PC that borrows from the aesthetics and designs of many of the GBA’s greatest hits. But damn, it does it so well that it wouldn’t take much convincing for someone to believe it’s an old GBA game.

Everything is faithfully, uncannily replicated. The soundfont for the music. The structure and level design. The way objects bounce when you hit them with your yoyo. The optional screen filter. It’s scarily convincing, like playing an E3 demo that Nintendo Power neglected to mention two decades ago.

If you’ve had an itch for weird GBA games like The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap or Drill Dozer, you’ve gotta play the demo for Pipistrello. It’s unnerving. It a good way.

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is currently planned for release on Windows PC via Steam and Epic Games Store. A release date has not yet been announced.

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