Room 34

Whenever I get used carts the first thing I do is clean the contacts. Regular "rubbing alcohol" is 70% alcohol. Drug stores/Target/etc. usually also carry in the same department "isopropyl alcohol" which is 91% alcohol. I recommend the highest concentration you can find. But I've used rubbing alcohol plenty of times on carts and it hasn't been a problem.

I'm still getting my ass handed to me by Rundas. I haven't played much in the last week though. I think I only have 3 energy tanks at this point... I better track down another one!

Yeah yeah... and you guys know the only reason you haven't been hearing from me for the last few days is that I'm too busy playing! (You also know I'm a total Nintendo fanboy and I'll admit it. ) Actually I HAVEN'T been playing MP3 that much this week, but it has to do with having kids now. My son is 4 and he's all over what's going on with the Wii and the DS, so actually in the past few days I've mostly been playing Mario Party 8 and a bunch of VC games -- Super Mario World, Super Mario 64, Donkey Kong Country, and some Super Metroid too!

I looked for it at Target today and there wasn't even a space for it in the case. Is it a more limited release?

Well ColecoNation's the one who made the last comment but I just feel like I have to get my last piece in on this and then I can let it rest. The fact is, I live in the city (Minneapolis). My neighborhood is very safe and has very much of a "small town" feel. It's a great place to be, with easy walking access to just about everything I need. If the city's not for you, fine. But I feel like you're spitting on the place where I live, based on paranoia and/or misinformation, and I'm put off by that.

Wow, finished already? I haven't been able to devote nearly that much time to this. (Of course, I also fumble around a lot, so your 24 hours probably means it'll take me 50... not counting the time I spend dying multiple times on boss fights, since that time doesn't get saved in your game total.)

"Gay?" What is this, 1985?

I most likely will buy the Wii version of Twilight Princess when it's $20. But not now.

Wow, when I read the subject line, I expected the results to (more or less) suck, because I've seen a lot of really bad attempts at recreating Atari labels (done by people who have no ability to recognize differences in fonts or other fine visual details... no offense to anyone here); plus, usually online apps like this don't produce very good results. (And I build web applications for a living so I know the limitations.) But... I was BLOWN AWAY when I took a look at the images in here. Really nice work!

SPOILER It's probably not much of a spoiler, if you've read anything about the movie, that Steve Wiebe ultimately ends up victorious (at the VERY end). So it was a little disappointing (as the rooter-for-the-underdog that I am) when I checked Twin Galaxies last night to see that Billy Mitchell (arch-villain, at least as presented in the movie) reclaimed the top spot as of June, 3 months after Steve Wiebe set his record.

Other than bridges collapsing I don't really know what's so dangerous. I've never felt unsafe in Uptown. (I suppose maybe people with purple hair and body piercings are naturally scary to some people.) As far as art house theaters go... that argument just really makes no sense to me. Other than the kinds of movies it shows and the fact that there are only 5 screens instead of 30, I think you'd be hard pressed if dropped into the Lagoon to distinguish it from a suburban multiplex. But... to each their own. More seats for me.

Room 34: 2364 5251 3623 6403

Oof, I'm feeling in over my head, which means it's a great Metroid game! After logging about another hour on Super Metroid (at my son's request), I switched over to MP3 and tried to take things a bit further. I'm not all that far yet... I just got to the battle with the first corrupted bounty hunter. (Can't remember his name at the moment, but he's basically Frozone from The Incredibles.) He completely slaughtered me; I couldn't even figure out how to keep him in view. Anyway, some cool stuff along the way there. A very elaborate puzzle room that made nice use of morph ball and various other skills. In fact, I think that might have been one of my favorite puzzle rooms of all so far in the series, and it had a few nice throwbacks to the earlier games, including the absolute most frustrating part of Echoes -- the morph ball puzzle boss. (Anybody remember that one? I think I tried it 20 times before I beat it!) Plus there were lots of parts in this section that naturally reminded me of Magmoor Caverns. This game is really growing on me. Well done, Retro!

I agree about these negative reviews. I'm convinced that with this latest generation of consoles, GameSpot in particular is just being unduly harsh on the early games because they don't want towering superlative reviews to make them look like a joke when the games of 3 years from now make today's games seem ancient. (I'm thinking in particular of the 9.6 they gave Castlevania: Circle of the Moon and the much lower scores they gave the vastly superior Harmony of Dissonance and especially Aria of Sorrow, just because they were later games and the overall quality of GBA games had improved by then.) I was noticing this particularly on some of the rock formations on Bryyo. You get up close and they have detailed textures that literally look like fingerprints! Funny that you say that. It's been MONTHS since I've seen a Wii console for sale anywhere. On Tuesday I bought the game at 10 AM at Best Buy, but later that night I just happened to have to go to Target, so I wandered by the video game section. I noticed they had several copies of MP3 in stock... and they also had a full stock of Wii consoles! I've never seen so many in one place since the day I showed up at TRU an hour before they opened to stand in line to get my own (#20 out of 30). They (Target) must have had at least 15 or 20 of them just sitting there in the case. I assume they'd been sitting on them in the stock room waiting for the MP3 release date, figuring they'd push a lot of them out the door with the game. I wonder if it actually worked or not. Are the consoles really still in such short supply, or are stores just stupidly sitting on their inventory for promotions like big game releases or Sunday circulars?

What's wrong with that? I was just there to see it tonight. I enjoyed it immensely, and so did my wife (who is NOT into video games, aside from an occasional Galaga or Ms. Pac-Man). I highly recommend it for gamers and non-gamers alike.

So what happens when the cat eats your lit candles?

I thought it was given that we would be fighting a "Mother Brain" type again? Also that video isn't new. It was one of the selectable movies in the MP3 preview channel. In addition, there is another video titled "Valhala". At the end of this one we see that the space pirates appear to have taken the Valhala's Aurora unit. This would pretty much indicate that we will be fighting a fully corrupted and reprogramed Aurora at some point in the game. And if the reviews on the game are to be believed, this boss battle is the only one that disappoints as it was considered to be way easy compared to the rest encounted up to that point. I guess I've been out of the loop on the promotion materials. For some reason I was convinced that when new previews were coming out, they'd be separate downloads in the Wii Shopping Channel. It wasn't until I read your post just now that I realized (which should have been obvious) that the existing Metroid Preview Channel would just have more content added to it.

I would say, definitely YES! I own 8 games for the Wii, but these two have seen by far the most play time. Zelda's probably worth getting too. Unfortunately, I got it for the GameCube as a birthday present, back when I figured it would be months before I'd be able to get a Wii. (And naturally, I got mine 4 days later!) So I haven't played it as much as I otherwise would. It seems pretty good, but definitely a "release title" and not quite on par with SPM or MP3, in my opinion.

If you do not want to encounter spoilers... DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER! Now then, if you want to talk in detail about the things you've seen in the game, this is the place. I split it off from the main "official thread" so that one doesn't get... corrupted (sorry, I couldn't help it) with spoilers. First things I have to get off my chest... Holy crap, that Meta-Ridley battle took me completely by surprise and I LOVED it! Next... the Aurora Unit. I must have already been pretty tired when I had my first (and so far only) meeting with the Aurora Unit, because I didn't recognize its significance. But then I checked out this trailer... http://www.gametrailers.com/player/23490.html That final shot right at the end hits you like a ton of bricks... it's almost as mind-blowing as the end of Blair Witch Project the first time you see it!

Oh, one more thing before I call it a night... Am I wrong, or is there no multiplayer option in this game? Does that strike anyone as odd? Given the multiplayer (tacked-on as it was) feature in Echoes, and the even more integrated multiplayer in Hunters, AND the fact that there are other bounty hunters in Corruption as well, AND the fact that the Wii has (woefully underutilized, to date) online capability... AND the fact that this game is more blatantly FPS-style than any of the others, I can't BELIEVE they didn't include a multiplayer option. (And I'm not even really into multiplayer FPSes -- mostly because I suck at most of them.)

Good points. But you could probably say the same thing about Zelda, and yet they manage to keep making those games interesting. I'd like to see them take Metroid in multiple different stylistic directions like they've done with Zelda. I noticed some parts of Zero Mission, especially the cutscenes, had a comic book/graphic novel kind of style to them. I think you could do a great 2-D (or "2 1/2-D") Metroid adventure in that style. I guess maybe that would be better suited to the DS, although it's not really that different from Super Paper Mario, which I think worked out great. They could even do something with the 2D/3D "flipping" like in SPM... play up the "creatures from another dimension" kind of thing; make the Galactic Federation part of a 2-D universe but have it invaded by beings from a 3-D universe, and give Samus some kind of "corrupted" power that lets her flip into the 3-D world. Hey, why not...? OK, I'm coming off a "Metroid high" right now. I just finished the first objective on Bryyo and am back at my ship. I'm trying not to overdo it here; I want to savor this game as much as I can! Interesting how you can see that Retro brought some of the elements of Metroid Prime Hunters into this game. The dash back to the ship with a few surprises popping up along the way definitely reminded me of MPH (which isn't necessarily a good thing).

Super Metroid is definitely a cool addition to the VC. I played through about 1/3 of it last week while eagerly anticipating MP3. Having never owned a SNES, and having only ever played (a small part of) Super Metroid in emulation, getting to play it on a console is definitely a treat! I even went out and bought the Wii classic controller for it. (Previously I'd been playing SNES/N64 games on the VC using a GameCube controller.)

Not to get too far ahead of ourselves here, but Nintendo is promoting this game (as feebly as they've been promoting it, that is) as the end of the trilogy. So does this mean no more Samus? Or at least another extended hiatus? If so... Boo!

So far the two I've encountered are pretty straightforward. The first one does require some scanning and learning a special "trick" to beat the boss, but it's pretty easy to do. (The thing that got me the first two times I lost to that boss was a misreading of the scan text. I didn't realize that after I did what the scan said to do, the boss was actually stunned and that was my chance to start wailing on him with the charge beam.) The second boss -- and I'll save the details so I don't spoil it, but I thought it was one of the coolest boss battles I've seen -- is pretty much just non-stop blasting, but it has an unusual twist. By the way -- what do you guys think about starting a separate thread for spoilers? I'd like to talk in more specifics about certain things in the game, but I don't want to spoil it for anyone who's not that far yet.

Oh yeah, now I'm getting my Metroid groove back! I just finished the mission on the first planet. Even though it doesn't (yet) have the moody, desolate feeling of the previous MP games (and the original series), it definitely feels like a Metroid game. So far I think the changes (other people and hunters, dialogue, etc.) actually seem to work well. Plus there've already been two great boss fights (that second one... oh, man! way cool!!!) and at least one puzzle where I've called myself an idiot. Yep... Metroid is back!!!