A FEW THINGS THAT METROID : OTHER M GOT RIGHT

Nintendo and Team Ninja’s recent effort with the Metroid series, Metroid : Other M (Nintendo, 2010), gave gamers, it would seem, a lot to complain about. The silent and hard-as-nails bounty hunter Samus Aran was given a little more backstory than usual (which was already strongly hinted at in Metroid Fusion (Nintendo, 2002), for all you nit-pickers) , and that was enough to put the whole gaming community ablaze. The game did, in my opinion, include its story tastefully, in concentrated bursts so as not to distract from the gameplay and general solitary ambience, trademark of the series. What would be good cannon fodder for all haters is the whole mother-and-maternity related symbolism, grossly tacked on the game, that would have benefited of a more subtle integration than a litteral ‘mother-daughter relationship gone awry in a baby-bottle-shaped spaceship’ thing actually going on. Or how Samus comes in fully-equipped but is waiting for orders given by her father figure, another prism to the redundant theme, to use all of her firepower (a far better excuse would have been that since the Space Federation tinkered with her suit to get samples of the baby Metroid, they could have as well cloned the Chozian technology of her suit aboard the Bottle Ship, but then again, that’s just me).

Let us focus on the positive aspects of the game, now. There’s a lot it did right.

Alan Wake: la puissance du mot

L'acte de création, comme quiconque s'est prêté au jeu le sait, vient avec son lot d'angoisses, de doutes et de craintes. Plusieurs questions assaillent le créateur; mon œuvre réussira-t-elle à témoigner de ma vision, de mon intention? Serai-je à la hauteur de cette vision? Et les mots, ces petites choses couchées sur le papier, peuvent se révéler de puissantes armes, certaines à double tranchant. Il y a le rythme, la sonorité, le sens parfois kaléidoscopique de certains mots. Tout ceci dessine un terrain drôlement fertile pour le créateur de jeu vidéo, et Alan Wake (Xbox 360, Remedy, 2010) apparaît alors comme une opportunité exceptionnelle d’aborder ces peurs.