The Thermal and X-ray Visors can be used to find hidden items, solve puzzles, and tackle enemies in new ways. There are new power-ups, too, steering the game away from the pitfall of being " Super Metroid with new enemies" that Metroid Fusion ran into. The latter category includes the Morph Ball, which condenses Samus into a ball to explore small corridors (especially satisfying since it lets you see the graphical details up close), the Space Jump Boots (a double jump), and the magnetic rail-traversing Spider Ball. Most of the power-ups are old favourites: beams, missiles, and alternate methods of movement. The story isn't the only thing that's been borrowed from Super Metroid and then fleshed out. It gets especially interesting as the Space Pirates are confronted more and more, and their lore begins to vent about how much they hate Samus and what operations she's disrupted. With it, you can find special "lore" entries from both the Space Pirates and the Chozo (an ancient race that built Samus' power suit and colonised Tallon IV), which detail life on the planet and the Phazon experiments, and foreshadow future combat encounters. Basically Super Metroid on a different planet and with mutants - nothing groundbreaking. Without it, the extent of the plot is that Samus has tracked her long-time enemies, the Space Pirates, to the planet Tallon IV, where she finds them working with a highly radioactive/mutagenic element called Phazon. The Scan Visor is essentially how Metroid Prime tells its backstory. Where a lesser game would simply hand out a glossary and say, "Learn everything," this one gives the tools to construct your own glossary and says, "Learn as much as you want! Be as immersed as you want!" Useful entries are stored in a logbook for future reading, as well. When the developers are really on the ball, though, you can walk into a room, scan a few things, and know exactly what happened in there prior to entering. At a little more advanced stage, it's used to dig up information on enemies and determine their weak points. At its most basic, it's just used to activate switches and identify things. The inspired function lets the player scan their surroundings - enemies, objects, surfaces, anything - and accrue a mountain of information on it all. More importantly, power-ups are hidden in inventive ways that use all of Samus' abilities in turn.Īll of this detail is assisted by the third advancement Metroid Prime makes: the Scan Visor, which is one of the best ideas adventure games were ever introduced to. Players can see individual pieces of machinery while navigating through rubble, schools of small fish react to weapons fire while underwater, and fog steams up Samus' visor as she moves through it. The extra dimension also allows for an unbelievable amount of detail - in visuals and in gameplay. It's also the series' first outing in 3D, which, in addition to making it very pretty, adds a little more realism to the exploration no more doors stuck in walls fifty feet above any form of floor. If Metroid Prime is an FPS, it's one of the most intricate, mature FPSs ever made. Thankfully, those fears turned out to be unfounded. The instinctive reaction to that by Metroid fans around the time of the announcement was usually disgust at being lumped in with the stereotypes of general stupidity and hyper-masculinity that are often associated with the FPS genre.