Just wanted to make a quick little entry.
Right now I'm sitting at Nintendo's headquarters in Redmond, WA watching a demonstration on the final build of Metroid Prime: Hunters. We're currently being led through the single player portion, and man is it looking good. NST's said that they recently ran through the single player adventure and clocked it, putting it just shorter than the time it takes to complete the original Metroid Prime on the GameCube.
I just saw a little slowdown in the boss battle with someone called "Spire", but nothing tremendously obnoxious.
The introduction to boss battles use dual-screen FMV similar to the trailers used in the demo from 2004. Multi camera and single display. Really slick.
Now, we're into the multiplayer aspect. The game actually has a "bark mode" like Nintendogs called "Rival Radar." Snag someone's profile in this mode and you can actually track your rival's progress over the Nintendo Wifi network.
The multiplayer modes include Survival, Bounty, Defender, Capture, Prime Hunter, and Nodes. There are, according to the demo, 19 different arenas to choose from. Lots of options to set before the battle: turn on or off the radar to see enemies on the lower screen, turn on or off friendly fire, adjust the level of damage shots give on an enemy. You can also set up what type of weapons to use during the match.
Everyone gets a "Hunters License" in Metroid Prime Hunters Wi-fi Connection. It keeps track of the Wi-fi wins/loss record, and lets people know who keeps dropping a game with a "connection history" percentage, reducing the percentage from 100% if they hit the power switch during a battle -- if the connection is accidentally lost, it won't affect that number. Nice.
Now we're into Voice over IP. It's like a walkie talkie, holding A to send the message. Sounds great. You can also instant message using an on-screen keyboard.
Heh, they're now showing a in-house video of the NST team playing Metroid Prime Hunters. Goofy stuff.
Now we're into the NintendoWifi.com link, features. The site will track data such as win streak, kill streak, headshots, who their favorite hunter is, who their favorite rivals are, how long they've spent on the WiFi network. It tracks how frequent you've used each hunter in battle. There will be a comparative leaderboard that stacks you up against your friends and rivals.
Metroid Prime Hunters has a microsite, launched yesterday. "
www.metroidhunters.com". They're walking us through it right now, but since you can see what I'm seeing, there's no point writing about this.
We're now in a break. Reggie will be chatting it up with us in a few minutes, unfortunately no filming's allowed. Bummer.
Reggie just walked in, so we'll be starting back up in just a moment. They're doing a drawing for a Crystal Samus, very rare. I doubt I'll win. Penny Arcade just did. Fix!
CrankyIGN just logged onto Nintendo Wi-Fi with Metroid Prime Hunters. You may be able to see that on the
http://www.nintendowifi.com site.
Just played some grueling matchups over the Wi-Fi network. First of all, the Voice over IP works like a champ, and there's very little delay between someone talking and others receiving the voice...like a quarter of a second. It's live chat -- the microphone simply goes live and broadcasts when someone presses the X button. Only one person can speak at a time, though...the speakers turn off when you hold the button down.
We played standard deathmatch with the point system, as well as Prime Hunter mode. This mode's pretty slick -- each player's on even terms until someone kills someone else. When this happens, they become the Prime Hunter. Their health continuously depletes, and can only be replenished if they kill someone in this mode. The idea is to stay the Prime Hunter for as long as possible (our match was set at 1:30 for the win).
The playtime is still going on, and at 12:30 we'll be interviewing NST for a video feature.
To be continued.
