Metroid Musing: Should Metroid Prime 4 Include More Than Four Beams and Visors?
While we still know very little about the mysterious Metroid Prime 4, beyond the developmental snafu of course, Nintendo calling it “Prime 4” does tell us a few things. We can safely assume that this game will: be an FPS; that scanning will make its return; and that this will feel familiar to the Metroid Prime Trilogy that we all know and love.
One thing that may not need to be familiar, however, is the amount of visors and beams that the player can collect. When the original Metroid Prime launched almost 20 years ago, players were capped at four beams and four visors for a very practical reason: the Nintendo GameCube controller had a D-pad and the C-stick, both of which were assigned to the beams and visors, and had a finite number of directions that the pad and stick could point to. Future Metroid Prime games stuck to this limitation for the most part, making “four” the maximum number of slots available for weaponry.
Fast forward 20 years though, and your typical FPS has introduced common item switching options like weapon wheels, which can pack as many different options as you want into one input.
While some may be attached to the classic number, I would love to be able to play Metroid Prime 4 and have a dozen different types of beams and visors to choose from, which would also help freshen up what you find on the overworld – how cool would it be to be rewarded for completing an optional intricate puzzle with a killer beam versus another missile expansion?
Would you like to see the four item cap removed from Samus’s beams and visors? Or should Prime 4 keep it simple and classic? Let us know in the comments below!
Andy Spiteri is the Webmaster of Omega Metroid and Host of the Omega Metroid Podcast, The Zelda Cast, and Virtual Theater. Probably drinking a Tim Horton’s Double Double as you read this.
