Just bought a Gamecube controller and mem card

Prolly cause they had years to dev Metroid and less than 1 year to make launch titles for the wii?

Wait til you see Metroid Wii

Metroid Prime 1 and 2 are absolutely some of the best looking games of the previous generation. it's as if Retro Studios is Nintendo's new Rare with the quality they are putting out.

It is because the Gamecube is a powerful system that had progressive component support the first few years of the consoles life before it was removed and those first launch titles like Star Fox Adventures, Star Wars Rogue Squadron II, and Metroid Prime were made to support 16:9 with either an option or a stretching option. However the Wii is slightly more powerful than the GC which in a way answers your question. The Gamecube launch titles looked better graphically at the time and stand up very well today is mainly because at the time, the gamecube was the most powerful system on the market graphics-wise. It was way more powerful than the then aging PS2 and some argue even today it was more powerful than the X-Box if the programmers took advantage of it. So at the time, a game like Rogue Squadron II looked amazing as a launch title and many many people bought Gamecubes simply to have the most powerful system with the best looking games. At my local gamestop, they have LCD's hooked up to all the next gen systems. Ofcourse, on an LCD, the Wii looks far worse than it does on a CRT. Back when the GC was released, all the demo screens were CRT's and 4:3 so they looked perfect. Today at gamestop, I cringe when I see the graphics of any game on one of those LCD's.. It is a blocky blurry mess and makes even the PS3 look bad.. The good news for you if you are enjoying Metroid Prime now, Nintendo is definately having a Metroid Wii game in the works which should fully use the Wii-mote for aiming and shooting...Something to look foreward to.

There are plenty of videos of MP3 gameplay available, and graphically it looks virtually identical to MP and MP2.

I read somewhere that the graphics in the MP games were the result of using tight environments - while they fit with the style of Metroid, they also reduced the amount of rendering the hardware had to do. Seems like a plausible explanation.

Wii only. The GCN is, for all intents and purposes, a dead console. MP3 seems to have been built from the ground up using the Wii controls, with a lot of interaction with the environment via the nunchuck.

I'm glad to hear someone else say they liked the GCN controller. It's easily my favorite from the last generation. The Dual Shock 2 is so SNES, and I actually skipped buying an XBox at launch after using "The Duke".

I think it's much more comfortable to hold than the Classic controller, the Wiimote/Nunchuk combo (the nunchuk never feels quite right in my hand), or the N64 controller.

You actually have that backwards! I read on IGN that when Retro was presented with the wiimote controller that they stated they wouldn't be able to produce a Metroid game with it, and then someone at Retro came up with the idea of a nunchuck attachment to solve that problem.

In other words, the Wii was built from the ground up for MP3! OK, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but to some degree it's actually true.


One of the things that impresses me with the Metroid Prime games is the way they mask load times by loading an area when a door is opened. You'll always see a small area connecting a large area so that the system has enough resources to handle two areas at the same time. This lets you fire at enemies through open doors into the neighboring area. You can never have three areas exposed at one time. On 2002's Metroid Prime you aren't usually aware of load times and the graphics are incredible. Compare that to the P.O.S. known as Red Steel!

Then I play a PS3 demo system and have to sit through a 45 second load screen on everything, and third party Nintendo games still tend to have excessive load times. I'm glad that Nintendo is anal about load times on their own titles.




I liked the GCN controller as well, and it was a huge improve over the unusable N64 controller. That thing was big in all the wrong places and tight in places where you needed space. A third party controller was a necessity for that system. I don't like the PSX & PS2 controllers and wonder why they still continue to give the d-pad better real estate than the analog stick. I really liked the original Xbox controller. I'm tired of controllers always being designed for the hand of an 8 year old.

the load times were one of the reasons that Nintendo went with the smaller discs for the Gamecube. less area for the reading laser to cover means shorter seek times. i kind of miss that on my Wii. Zelda TP on Wii seems to have longer loads than Wind Waker did on GCN. still far better than what i see on the other non-DS consoles though.

The Gamecube wasn't more powerful than the Xbox, don't spread rumors.

Load times also has a lot to do with the complexity of the data being loaded. There isn't a game on the Cube or Wii that's very complex graphically. Gears of War loads very quickly for a game that really has something to show off, now that's impressive. Zelda looks like sh*t.

The Wii can have great looking games if programmers want to make such. The Gamecube was more powerful than the PS2 (less powerful than the XBox, though), and the PS2 had amazing looking games last generation -- God of War, Final Fantasy X, Metal Gear Solid, etc. The Gamecube's biggest problem was the 1.5 GB discs which limited the total number of textures and other data used in a game.

The Wii, of course, is more powerful than the GC (around 1.5 times as powerful as the original XBox, in fact) and no longer has the 1.5 GB discs.

The question, however, is if developers will actually make great games for the Wii and really use it's potential; or, if they'll rely so much on the remote and fun-factor that they use the Wii as a low-cost platform and skimp on graphics. MP3 doesn't really hit the mark, either. It looks like they re-wrote the engine to take advantage of the remote (which is good; it's the most important improvement the game can have), but failed to change the rendering engine much at all. Super Mario Galaxy looks good, but it has the problem that the Mario universe is heavily stylized and therefore has an inherent limit on how "good" it can look.

Unless third-parties jump in with reasonably high-budget games, I'm not sure we'll really see what the Wii can do until the first Wii-exclusive Zelda game. I really hope Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles hits the mark, as Square is usually good about that. The GC edition was one of the best looking GC games in my opinion, so the Wii would be fantastic if they updated the engine.

The Wii's main problem is how successful the DS is, and how home-console gaming is largely dying out in Japan. There are plenty high-budget, third-party games coming to Nintendo through the DS, while the Wii gets little love. Assuming the new Final Fantasy Tactics A2 for the DS is more like the original FF Tactics (very adult, political/religious corruption game) instead of the FF Tactics Advance for the GBA (very childish and trivial) than the DS is getting one heck of a turn-based strat. The trend looks like it will continue througout next year, specifically with respect to the big Japanese third-party devs. The big US third-party devs seem to be sticking with the 360 for the foreseeable future.

Metroid Prime 1&2, in particular, worked great w/ the GC controller. One of the most intuitive game experiences I can remember, which is one of the primary reasons the MP games are just about my all-time favorites. I wish I could go back to playing it again for the first time ... congrats!

I just bought Rogue Leader and am trying to play it on the Wii. I forgot to buy a memory card but shouldn't I still be able to play? I can't get past the "No memory card found" screen.

Maybe not, but most Xbox games don't look noticeably better than Resident Evil 4, Rogue Squadron, or even Pikmin 2.