Metroid Fusion

Do you remember Super Metroid on the SNES? Of course you do. If you don't, you should probably go find a copy of it to play instead of reading this. Orginally titled Metroid IV, Metroid Fusion promises to take what it's classic predecessors did in 2D and build on it.

Features

  • Developed by the original Metroid team.
  • New moves, new suit upgrades, new look.
  • Animated cut-scenes.
  • Only for GBA.

After the events of Super Metroid, Samus is on her way back to Planet SR388 with her exploration team. During the mission, the spaceship is attacked by an unidentified life form that lives inside dead creatures of Planet SR388. The attack leaves Samus injured and infected with the unidentified life form, a parasitic creature known only as "X". With the X parasite living inside her, Samus acquires a new suit and must discover how this parasite came to be. That's basically what the story is going to involve, according to Nintendo PR. The biggest plot element came shockingly into play at the end of the E3 2002 demo. Samus appears to have an evil twin. Oddly enough, it looks like herself in her old suit. Whether this "twin" is actually evil or not is a complete mystery at the moment. Actually, pretty much everything about the story is a complete mystery at the moment as Nintendo is remaining pretty tight lipped on the subject. Then again, we don't want to know the entire story before playing it, now do we?

So, now that Samus has a completely new suit, she has to run around collecting upgrades to improve it and move on (sound familiar?). The new suit gives her a flashy, streamlined look while offering her new abilities. Samus can now hold on to certain ceilings and climb along them with her hands. One of the best new moves is the ability to grab onto ledges. I'm sure many of us had wished for that in earlier installments of the series. Of course, you can still use the charge beam, roller ball and other standard abilities you've grown accustomed to. The controls are fairly simple. A button jumps, B button fires your power beam. By holding down R and pressing A, you can fire missiles and the L button lets you aim upwards.

Back in May of 2002 when I was playing the demo at E3, I was a little confused at first. Every time I killed a creature, a little ball of energy would escape it and start floating around all over the place. Then it would go back to the dead creature, which would return to life. After a couple seconds, I realized that if I grabbed the floating ball of energy, it would heal me or fill up my missiles, depending on colour. I'm assuming that down the road, it may replenish other things as well, but it's a really great idea as it adds another level to the gameplay.

It was recently announced that connectivity would exist between Metroid Fusion and it's GCN counterpart Metroid Prime. This really isn't a huge shocker as they're two high-profile games of the same series being released on the same day. While being released on the same day added potential adverstising goodies, it seemed like too good of an idea to pass up. Especially with Nintendo's constant push of "connectivity". At E3, the N-Sider crew spent time asking questions and speculating, but all we could get was that Nintendo and Retro we're "toying with the idea". Guess they finally made the decision (to let everyone know about it).

Brenden Petracek