Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

The on-off-on-off saga of Metroid Prime 3 is most definitely back on track now, with a release date set for August 20 and the game is fixing up to be something quite special - the lucky people who have been testing the game at Nintendo's localization department have given a big thumbs up to the all-important control system, which they claim will set a new standard for first-person games on Wii.

So what's the big deal regarding the control system? We've played an earlier version, from before the game was taken back to Retro Studios for reworking, and it seemed to work pretty well even then - it used much of the same technique as Red Steel, with a floating cursor that was free to move around within the central "dead zone" of the screen and shifted the camera viewpoint progressively faster as it was moved towards the edges. Exactly what you might expect, despite the fact that the previous GameCube versions limited the first-person freedom in favor of a tighter camera that allowed precision jumping - normally a frustrating task in this sort of game.

Given that the release date hasn't actually slipped all that far from the June timeframe originally projected, it's safe to say that the controls won't have been altered as radically as we thought they might be. So the current hype from Nintendo is either because they've now tuned it to perfection or there really wasn't anything much wrong with it in the first place.

Sensitivity can be altered to cater for expert players, who'd like to be able to turn faster and target objects manually, or for novices who might prefer something slower, more stable and with more automatic aiming assistance.