The weight of expectations is a powerful thing. The original Metroid Prime trilogy, released across the GameCube and Wii, were both Nintendo's first real foray into first-person shooters and excellent examples of the genre, casting you as badass bounty hunter Samus Aran and setting you against armies of space pirates in exotic alien locales. Bringing over the exploration-focused gameplay of the series' 2D entries made for a thoroughly unique experience, and the games proved to be huge – maybe too big for their own good, in fact. It's been near on twenty years since Metroid Prime 3, and since then Metroid Prime 4 has been started, restarted, teased and teased again countless times. This time, though, it seems to have stuck.
As part of today's Nintendo Direct, the curtain was pulled back on the latest incarnation of the project, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, after much teasing. Beyond a reasonable development cycle, no doubt. Still, if it's even half as good as its predecessors it'll be excellent – and those spooky psychic powers Samus is sporting this time around are very promising.
Previously:
• Hack for Super NES emulators turns Zelda and Super Metroid into two-player games
• Metroid arm-cannon and Wii controller
• Solace: why make a soundtrack to a game that doesn't exist?
