Metroid Prime 3: Corruption and Red Steel
Now let’s get serious and see if Nintendo have managed to sort out first person shooters on consoles with the Wii and its remote… Thinking that I’d love to be able to play an FPS on a console without looking a berk and, with a bunch of Nintendo people looking on, I was under pressure as we loaded up Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. As I said in our Wii hands-on, you use the Nunchuk for movement and the remote for aiming and firing.
Phear my POWAH!This system is intuitive, simple to understand and very easy to get results with right from the start. Unlike a light gun game, you can see where you’re aiming as the crosshair moves as you move the remote. To look up or down or to the sides, you just move the crosshair to the side of the screen, just as if you were swinging a gun around looking for targets. The Nunchuk, which also features motion detection, is also used when you want to operate your grapple beam on objects in the environment.
Click for larger imageBut looking at Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, you wouldn’t actually know that the Wii isn’t really next-gen, if you regard next gen as being defined by uber-powerful graphics and processors. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption looks great and plays brilliantly. Target and shooting multiple enemies is easy and effortless, especially if you take the time to tune the Wii and remote to the way you hold it. Much like tuning your mouse in Windows, the Wii remote can be tuned for the more cack-handed gamer (ie, me.) making it feel even more natural and vastly increasing accuracy.
Click for larger imageNow if you were thinking that nothing you’ve seen here grabs your fancy, just brace yourself as Red Steel, from Ubisoft might be right up your street. We were very impressed with Ubisoft’s first person shooter/slasher. Control is very similar to Metroid Prime 3: Corruption but Red Steel has a full-on ‘Kill Bill’ style twist with simply loads of sword fights with various nefarious characters.
Click for larger imageYou use the remote as if you’re holding the hilt of your Samurai sword and can block, hack and slash at your opponents who tend to be the bosses of each level. David had a go at this one after having a girly strop about me hogging the Wii and he then went on to vent his ire with a particularly nasty attack on the boss character, finishing him off with an impressively gruesome slash across the poor bloke’s throat. Even if none of the other superb Wii games grab you, Red Steel looks like being an extremely compelling reason to get a Wii.
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Sensei Ross – The HEXUS ninja
