The new Metroid game for the Wii is coming out very nicely. A Developer’s Diary video was released recently for the game and I was able to watch it in GameTrailers (subscribed through Miro). The bad news is, it’s all in Japanese. The good news is, I know a bit of Japanese.:)
For those of you who can understand it, I recommend that you watch it. And even if you don’t, it’s still pretty. Video after the jump.
Aside from a lot of commentary on why they did what they did, here are some things that seemed to matter to me. Since the original NES version of Metroid used only the D-Pad and the A and B buttons, they wanted to go back to its roots while still maintaining a rich and fairly complex game experience. They intended to do this by making the buttons contextual, that is to say, the action button’s behavior changes depending on the enemies you’re battling with, the D-Pad which is used normally to move Samus around becomes dodging when an enemy is firing on you, etc.
This time around, they wanted to show both sides of Samus–Samus the alien ass-kicking armored warrior, and Samus the fleshy female. They put a lot of work in on rigging Samus’s face to show a whole range of emotions. And gone is the shroud of mystery that has hounded Samus in previous games, but now everything about Samus’s character and background is revealed.
The game comes out August 31, 2010. Let’s all hope this is going to be one bad-ass game!
