DadCentric Reviews: "Metroid: Other M" For The Wii

Full disclosure: the good people at Nintendo and Golin Harris sent me a copy of "Metroid: Other M" for review purposes. More disclosure: it will become painfully apparent that I am not a "Gamer". I bust out the Wii infrequently at best, which provides a perfect segue to my introduction, in which I state that

I really wonder why the hell I bought a THIRD game console. I had an original Play Station, which got about 5 total hours of Play before I became bored with it. A couple of years ago, I bought an Xbox, which I played frequently, enough to make it through Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic. (SPOILER ALERT: You are Revan!) I blame Beth. She insisted on getting a Wii. "It'll be fun for Lucas. Plus I want Dance Dance Revolution."

A year and a half goes by. We amass a bunch of games. Most of them are for everyone else - Mario Kart, Boom Blox, and of course Dance Dance Revolution. My one "grownup" game is the Wii version of Medal of Honor, the one where you're a paratrooper. It bears a striking resemblance to a game I had on my old desktop PC back in 2002. (In other words, typical Wii graphics.) I know I'm not really a Gamer, for if I was, I'd be more insistent on getting an Xbox360. Still, I wish there was something to fill the void.

Enter Samus.

Samus is the Plucky Heroine of Metroid: Other M. (Having never played a Metroid game, I assumed that Metroid was the hero. Like Halo is the hero of the Halo games. Metroids are bad guys. I think.) She wears battle armor that makes her look like a mashup of Iron Man and the Michelin Man. One of her arms is a blaster. She can turn herself into a giant ball and roll around. The game begins, as so many seem to, with an expository story line that has something to do with a Giant Brain Monster. There are explosions. Then there's a Space Baby, like in 2001, only this Space Baby attacks and destroys the Giant Brain Monster, kind of like what the Bruce Willis Baby did to Kirstie Alley in Look Who's Talking Too. Then Samus wakes up in a space hospital. Then Samus finds something called a Bottle Ship, adrift in space. Does the Space Baby need the Bottle Ship? I don't know. It's all very Japanese. Or Flaming Lips.

But! Once it gets going, the game is great fun. Wii's graphics seem to be getting better and better, and the 3D settings are pretty rich. (At times, and I don't know if it's due to my TV, the picture did seem a bit dark, and objects, obstacles, and baddies were hard to make out.) The game allows you to toggle back and forth from 3rd to 1st person perspective, which you'll need to do to find stuff and solve challenges. Controlling Samus is fairly easy - maybe too easy, since there's an auto-aim function that makes killing things a bit less tricky. But the other elements of gameplay, especially trying to figure out which powers or moves or combinations allow you to get past obstacles, make up for this. (One bit of weirdness: Samus has a whole bunch of badass weapons at her disposal, but her ally on this mission is an ex-boyfriend/general with the unlikely name of Adam Malkovich, and to avoid upsetting him, she chooses not to use these weapons unless he says it's OK. The Japanese have a word for this type of illogical plot development: Waddafuh.)

Wii's carved out a niche for itself: the preferred console for people with kids. Metroid: Other M takes a step in establishing Wii as the go-to console for guys like me who like action/shooter videogames but don't necessarily have the energy or the time to devote hours to playing them. If you've got a Wii and some spare time in your day, and feel like blowing up some aliens, give Metroid: Other M a go. And if you figure out the whole deal with the Space Baby, let me know.