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[Doom]

Metroid Other M : Ridley Cutscene

So the new Metroid game is out. It looks kinda sweet but apparently the internet is mad(again) that Samus is anything but a stoic mute. I will admit that crying girly girl, or the opposite end of the spectrum, is not a desirable direction.

Metroid Other M : Ridley Battle

Actual gameplay looks pretty sweet.

[LaserBeing]

I love how Samus became an icon of female empowerment by having no personality and hiding inside a robot.

I haven't seen the boo hoo daddy's little angel scenes in question so I can't judge them, but I don't think showing emotion or vulnerability automatically makes a character weak. If anything it's most male protagonists that are lacking character. Game developers will go on and on about how their rugged male lead is "fallible" and "human" but that really just means "angry" and/or "douchebag".

I will say this though. The voice acting and narration in Other M is fucking abysmal.

[Frocto]

christ, that ridley cutscene was the dumbest shit

<--- my face

[Smiler]

Metroid Other M OST - Ridley

Ridley looks sort of retarded, but at least his song is still awesome.

[Classic]

Hey! It was better than the stuff we had 15 years ago parish! It's at least as good as the crap we had... 11 years ago...
...
You know, that wasn't ICO.

[Kayin]

Despite being burned by Fusion, I don't mind new story elements and........ talking. But man they seem to have it all wrong, characterization wise. Samus has killed Ridley twice, not counting the prime games. She is not going to buckle upon seeing him. In fact, the whole cutscene seems to be reversed. Samus should not be cowering in fear while her temporary commander orders her to use a better weapon. Samus should be using a better weapon and ATTACKING RIDLEY DESPITE ORDERS NOT TO. Now, since she doesn't talk in other games her personality IS up to interpretation, but I think this would line up with Samus's character a lot more.

I'm still waiting for the opinion of other metroid fans to hear if this is a game I'd enjoy. I didn't like the Primes very much despite them being good games (note: I don't like them because I don't like them, not because they're not standard metroid. Too slow for my taste, but still obviously well made), and this seemed more my speed but... eh, a lot of linearity and stuff seems to exist. This may be more illusional than factual though and the game might open up more as you go on. Since I don't go around buying games much anymore, I think I'll give this a few weeks. The gameplay does look good and definitely seems to take one of Primes big strengths -- boss battles. 2d Metroids, while having some impactful bosses, generally had ones that are very boring to fight. Sure, Crocomire and Kraid come off as awesome, but I'm mostly just plowing super missiles down their throats. Still, the..... surrounding gameplay (exploration/map design/possible sequence breaking) seems nebulous right now.

[Classic]

Isn't other M a prequel?

[Kayin]

Other M is between Super Metroid and Fusion. I think it covers a lot of earlier material though, but I don't think any of it is gameplay related.

[LaserBeing]

Ridley is a personal nightmare that keeps coming back no matter how many times Samus thinks she's finally put an end to him. He killed her parents right in front of her when she was two years old. I think a certain amount of trauma is pretty understandable regardless of how many boss battles they have technically had.

[Kayin]

I think a certain amount of trauma is absolutely reasonable and now is a good time to go into it with Other M. What I'm saying is I feel the trauma is absolutely misrepresented. Samus is a warrior and an experienced bounty hunter. She shouldn't collapse into a stupor. She should fight. She should get angry. Perhaps seeing him against does mess her up, but that is better represented after (or even in the middle of) the boss battle. She can cry and have emotions, but she shouldn't CHOKE. If this WAS a prequel I'd buy it, but we're well passed that.

[James Edward Smith]

Yeah, you'd have thought that Samus would be the sort of character that had a chip on her shoulder about Ridley. Her character failing would be that she has an urge to act overly aggressive when faced with him in an attempt to deny her fear of him. Whenever she fails to control this urge she often risks putting important things in harms way, etc.

I guess what I expected was more of a Vasquez eventually losing her cool and letting her smart gun rip in Aliens when they get ambushed despite the fact they were told not to fire because they might hit the fusion reactor and blow the whole installation sort of situation there instead of Samus being too scared to act. Oh well, after I didn't love prime that much and it got too many sequels, I pretty much gave up on Metroid games anyway. It turns out what I like about metroid is not the character of Samus Aran, it was actually just the atmosphere and the general game mechanics. almost 20 years now and I still don't care about the character of Samus Aran, go figure.

I think an other thing I don't like about this game is that it's basically a metroid game only more cinematic, whoah! Games don't need to be fucking cinematic, I wish they'd leave that to cinema more. Games should usually to be gameamatic.

[LaserBeing]

I think part of the problem could be that our collective idea of a strong female character is still Vasquez after almost 25 years.

[Bleck]

I'm kind of having trouble getting over how dumb everything looks, or at least when it comes to character models. I don't understand why Samus' armour and Ridley suddenly look ridiculous (why does Ridley suddenly have a duckbill with an underbite) when they looked so great in MP3.

I guess you have to sacrifice a lot of polygons to cram in all of those cutscenes?

[Bongo Bill]

The only thing I feel justified in complaining about before I play it is that Samus' voice actor wasn't Jennifer Hale.

[Friday]

I think part of the problem could be that our collective idea of a strong female character is still Vasquez after almost 25 years.

Vasquez is identical to a man in every single way. She has zero femininity besides her interest in that one guy who gets melted (which could easily just be brotherly love) and her tits.

This doesn't mean she's a dumb character or anything, it just means she's an extremely extreme example of a tomboy. Which makes sense because she's a fucking heavy gunner frontline space marine. Does it make sense for Samus, too, because she's a heavy gunner frontline space bounty hunter? Sure. But that's not really the issue.

I understand why people hate it if Samus locks up. People hate anyone, anywhere, male or female, who locks up. People hate a coward. I remember at the end of Saving Private Ryan with the guy who freezes on the stairs, everyone fucking HATED him. And he had a million billion reasons why him doing that made sense. He was a complete newb, a semi-pacifist, never been in combat, etc etc. You can't pull an easier "make the audience hate a character/villain" than showing him to be cowardly. Americans despise cowards.

So people want Samus to be a robot, and if they can't get that, a boy with tits and maybe some brotherly love that can be interpreted as motherly love instead because she has tits and a vagina. Who never fucks up or chickens out, period. Because chickening out is for losers and chickens.

This isn't because they want Samus to be like that, this is because they want every single fucking character in fiction to be like that. Get in the fucking Robot, Shinji.

[LaserBeing]

Bottom line: Nerds just want to be able to masturbate to Boba Fett without worrying about it making them gay.

[François]

I'd be okay if Samus was Alys Brangwin in a tin suit.

[Doom]

Now, since she doesn't talk in other games her personality IS up to interpretation,

I always just thought of her as a stoic badass. Can infiltrate and destroy a planetary super structure single-handed, render an entire super-hostile species extinct, and take on honest-to-God Ghosts and Godzilla Monsters. Not a robot, but definitely experienced.

Me and Nor were talking about it and I think the ideal personality would be a Paragon Femshep. Samus really is sort of a Federation kid who goes by the book. But then again it's not fair since Femshep is probably the best current-gen gaming example of a woman who is a badass but you don't need to be reminded that they are a woman every five seconds.

[Friday]

The only thing I feel justified in complaining about before I play it is that Samus' voice actor wasn't Jennifer Hale.

Femshep

I think I see a pattern here

yeah i can't really argue with either of these

[Nerd]

(EDIT:  Guess I shouldn't worry about spoiler tagging everything anymore for people who actually care, but I'll do it anyway for the parts people haven't already mentioned.)

I'm more bothered by the fact that Samus should probably have been killed by now if she froze up against Ridley like that every time she faced him.  It was really only [spoiler]the pointlessly heroic sacrifice of faceless NPC #125b[/spoiler] that seemed to snap her out of her funk, and before she was always going it alone. That's the kind of thing that would make more sense at the beginning of her career, not the tail end of it (maybe it could take place during some sort of...Negative Mission?!).

On the other hand, I DO remember always being disappointed by the fact that Ridley was supposed to be her parent-murdering arch-nemesis according to canon, but it was never really mentioned except indirectly in one of the endings of Fusion (though I don't know how or where they would have mentioned that in any of the non-Prime or Fusion games without it being awkward). So, uh, yay? 

In summation:  In breaking news, dork community shocked, outraged when mostly personality-less armored babe doesn't perform according to their expectations.  Next up, after the break...CLOWNS!


(Also P.S. I still think the game looks kinda sweet, painful narration and all.)