M is for movies...

Got my copy of Metroid: Other M today, and it came with a set of art cards. I haven't opened the set yet sine I want to avoid the spoiler glimpse I had with the Persona 4 art book, with my luck the first card I look at would be a robotic Mother-Brain or an evil Samus clone... One thing that suprised me was the size of the set, I was expecting normal playing card size but they are actually almost as big as the DVD case.

The game itself is an odd mixed-bag... it lays very much like a 3rd person version of Metroid Prime but with more frantic fighting. Also the odd choice of having it not only 3rd and 1st person interchangeable but also not using the nun-chuck makes for some rather odd game play. But the game is pure Metroid, with all the power ups (staking like in Prime Trilogy), huge levels that you have to back track as you get new abilities to unlock places, and a lot of the clasic style monsters (like shriekers).

One thing that's oddly missing is that the visor dosen't analyze things like in Prime, so you don't get that in-depth information on the monsters, environments, or history. But it sort of makes up for it in really intresting cut-scnes and monlogues from Samus about her past at the end of each key section of the game, not sure where it's goign though or if it has much relevance to the plot. Samus' new voice is kinda flat (Jennifer Hale would have been much better) but it has sort of a Yuki Nagato quality so it's ok.

The plot so far is that Samus responds to a distress signal and when she get to the location she meets some people she knew from her time as a space marine ( which actually fits the original back story of Samus). The space station appears to be abandoned and something had killed all the crew, also it looks like it was some kind of artificial reserve for alien animals (with holo-deck environments). What caused the distress signal and what the military really is doing there is still unexplained, but I'm only half way through the second at of I don't know how many.