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GameCube | Adventure | Metroid Prime 2: Echoes

Boxart for Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes 69 screen shots
  • GRAPHICS: 5.0
  • SOUND: 4.0
  • CONTROL: 4.5
  • FUN FACTOR 5.0
  • AVG USER SCORE 4.5
  • AVG CRITIC SCORE 4.6
Winner of the GamePro Editor's Choice Award

Update: Quality Time with Samus at the Nintendo Gamer Summit

Update by The Man In Black | 10/08/2004 | 09:14:04 AM PST

Nintendo is hitching its wagon to Samus Aran, and Metroid Prime 2 appears ready to take on the race for shelf space this holiday season.

Nintendo rolled out its new dual-screen DS system in fine fashion at its Gamers Summit in Seattle. With its slick styling, innovative gameplay schemes, imaginative software, and aggressive pricing; it certainly looked like a potential holiday sure-thing and one vision of video-gaming-to-come.

Then someone said it was Prime time -? Metroid Prime, that is.

They didn?t have to outline marketing plans, promote partnerships, or explain technology, all they had to do was start playing the game.

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes for the GameCube is easily (with all due respect to Mister Donkey Kong) the massive gorilla in Nintendo?s holiday lineup. One thing the Gamers Summit made clear is that the franchise that Samus Aran built is ready to carry the Big N through 2004.

The original Metroid (for the NES) is leading the charge as a Game Boy Classic game due out in October, and even the Nintendo DS itself is getting some Metroid love in the form of a playable demo packaged with the hardware of each new system called Metroid Prime Hunters: First Hunt. A complete version of the game is due out in early 2005 for DS.

Samus Among Us

Samus? Oh, she?s almost ready for GameCube prime time. The Gamers Summit featured a playable preview version customized to show off gameplay and graphics to the assembled journalists from around the world. And Metroid Prime 2 is looking pretty tough. Retro Studios and Nintendo, of course, are promising that this will be the best Metroid, yet.

The story, oft-repeated since the game tipped its hand at the last E3, has Samus Aran investigating the disappearance of a Federation counter-piracy force on a planet named Aether. She runs smack into a transdimensional world war that has caused Aether to be split into two realities, one good one evil, not surprisingly called Light Aether and Dark Aether. Barely ten minutes into the opening level, Samus is attacked by a horde of inky, prickly one-eyed insectoids that slam her around like yesterday?s empty can of Red Bull and steal several key abilities from her Varia Power Suit.


Samus' Dark Suit is but one of the new surprises to be found in Metroid Prime 2.

The bugs are called the Ing, but Aran?s attackers are just the brood! Metroid Prime 2 saves the adults until you get your FPS skills up to speed. That shouldn?t be hard to do for Metroid Prime vets, since this preview version revealed the virtually same control scheme as the first game. The dual world, light-versus-dark conflict establishes the differences.


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