Another Metroid 2(021) Rewind: A Metroid Series Playthrough

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AM2R - First Impressions

Going from the absolutely glacial pacing and jankiness of the back half of Echoes to a smooth, streamlined remake of what might already be the series’ fastest game is really putting the two halves of this series into stark relief. For everything the Prime games share in common with the Metroid 1–5 sequence, their pacing is worlds apart. It’s obvious looking at their average time to beat that the Prime games are a lot longer, but they’re also just a lot slower. In the first one, I think that benefitted its atmosphere and unfurling world; in Echoes, I think the game ended up wearing out its welcome. In either, case compared to them, the first hour or so of AM2R plays like a forest fire. It becomes particularly obvious when it drops the spider ball on you fifteen minutes in. And this isn’t the Prime spider ball, which keeps you on a few flashy tracks — the Metroid II spider ball recontextualizes every single room in the game, and is probably the series’ most powerful traversal ability outside the (non-Prime) Screw Attack. It leads to a fast, expansive opening to a game that I already know isn’t all that big.

(Eventually, when this is all done, I’m gonna write a long thing about the Screw Attack, how perfect it is, how it’s become the thing that defines Metroid for me, but that’s for another time.)

Anyway, I can definitely see the idea here. This was made to be Metroid II’s Zero Mission, a remake that brings it in line with the mechanics, art style, and general feel of Super Metroid. I like Super Metroid a whole lot — so much that it’s the one game in this whole thread I barely had anything to say about. But there are things lost in that transition. In my write-up of Metroid II, I focused a lot on the soundtrack, how the game’s harsh core theme works to drive Samus deeper and deeper into SR388. That track has been reimagined as an slow, understated, moody, almost soothing melody — a great ambient theme in line with the soundtrack of Super Metroid or even Prime (it’s got lots of Prime’s signature synths and theremin worked in there). It’s a nice track to listen to, and it’s also one that does not do the same kind of thematic work that it does in the original game.

Put simply, it’s a theme about exploration, not extermination.

Interestingly enough, that is not how I feel about the version from Samus Returns, which reimagines that theme as a harsh, deafening, intimidating number that absolutely has the same effect as the original. In case you’re curious, here’s all of them to compare.

I think there might be something really interesting waiting for me once I finally get to Samus Returns, because from early impressions, I’m think these are two radically different ways to remake a game. It’s now been five years since I played that game, and I can’t really speak much to its sense of hostility or drive or the way it frames Samus’s mission of extermination, but the music paints a pretty evocative picture of what these games are going for. The first impression here is that, like Zero Mission, AM2R is trading the hostility of those first two games for the mystery of Super Metroid.

Also, hey, the other reason I didn’t just wait until I was done with AM2R to make this post (aside from this being my current avenue of procrastination) is that, if any of y’all are coming to this thread having just played Prime (or Prime 2), I highly recommend the Abnormal Mapping episodes about both games. I listened to both today and I think their observations reflect and deepen a lot of my thoughts on Echoes especially, and also they go into a more detailed discussion of the Zelda-ness of the 3D Metroid games that I couldn’t stop rambling about earlier on. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I feel like Echoes especially occupies a midpoint between Ocarina of Time and Dark Souls on the spectrum of how much of the game’s world is built out of Zelda dungeons. OoT has your traditional separate dungeons and overworld; Echoes has, essentially, four dungeons (with offshoots and mirror dungeons) linked together by discrete travel points; and Dark Souls just asks “what if everything was dungeon?”

Anyway, more coming once I finish this one! Which could be tomorrow or in two weeks — at this point I have no idea.

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AM2R (Another Metroid 2 Remake) - Final Thoughts

First, a thanks to @vehemently for recommending I add this to the list this way way back. I hadn’t planned on it, partly because I wasn’t sure about having three versions of Metroid II on this list, and partly because I wasn’t sure whether it as a fan remake fit with the larger project. As it is though, it’s an extremely interesting piece of work and well worth playing by itself as a satisfying metroid game, and — for a host of reasons — it opened up a line of thinking I think I may write something separate about.

Ok, premable done — AM2R is, indeed, like Zero Mission, a remake of one of the first two Metroid games in the vein of Super Metroid. As such, it takes a lot of what makes Metroid II an idiosyncratic and uniquely styled entry in the series and sands it down, inserts some new mechanics and ideas, and polishes it to a mirror shine. Even though the increase in graphical fidelity is only essentially one generation (this looks like a SNES game in most respects), it’s obvious from its smoothness and responsiveness of AM2R’s feel that it was made a quarter century after Metroid II. It’s a great feeling one of these. And I can say that because I actually enjoyed the shinespark puzzles here — the only other time I’ve liked that mechanic at all was in Dread.

Anyway, while I’m on the record here as having not really liked Zero Mission all that much, I really, really enjoyed my time with AM2R. Is part of that because it was a welcome break from the Prime games, and reminded me that the 2D Metroids are usually fast-paced 6 hour affairs and not grueling 16 hour expeditions? Yeah, a bit. But I think there is actually something worthwhile in the project of trying to dig around in Metroid II for its Super Metroid form (and I think part of the reason I didn’t feel that way with Zero Mission is that they already found the first game’s Super Metroid form — it was literally Super Metroid). Also, there’s some of Prime in here too, like a logbook that scans automatically with information about each area, as well as discrete biomes and functions for each new area Samus comes across. Again, there’s a bit in here where you can see all the years of game design philosophy between Metroid II and this: spaces are all clearly functional, both in name and in appearance, all littered with Environmental Storytelling (caps intended) of what I might call the BioShock variety. There’s addition and subtraction with that. I do miss the aridness of Metroid II, the hostiity of its environments, the loneliness of it all, and the way it made SR388 truly feel like a wasteland. There are some sections in here where the scenery and environment changes so much that it becomes a little jarring, and it makes it incredibly obvious that this world is not particularly natural in origin.

But I think that opens room for something that does, for whatever its worth, cohere more with the storyline of the series, and the sense in later games that there is a larger world outside these small but crucial quests that Samus herself is tasked with. There’s a moment where a bunch of space marine-type guys show up and get absolutely murked by an Omega Metroid (which, oddly, are probably the easiest of the metroids — the boss balance is a bit out of whack), which really reinforces a) how powerful the metroids are and b) how ridiculously powerful a fully kitted-out Samus is.

It also brought me to a set of broader thoughts I’m going to turn into their own actual essay, and probably post here and on the game crit thread when I’m done. This game, via its colors and environmental design and the way Samus’s upgrades are spaced throughout its levels, brought me into thinking about contact damage. Metroid games are all about contact damage — learning what hurts to touch, and what doesn’t, and what changes after various upgrades are acquired. There are so many interfaces between Samus and her contact with the world. And there’s also the moment that all of these games have towards the end, where suddenly it’s you who gets to deal contact damage. I’ve started to think of it as the I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds moment — like finding the blue Gravity Gun in Half-Life 2, or the emotional catharsis of the Smart Pistol in Titanfall 2.

Anyway, this is that thing I said I was going to write about the Screw Attack. Coming whenever I can put down thoughts more organized than these,

AND NEXT, coming probably soon — I guess there’s nothing left for me to do but play Prime 3. And then it’s Samus Returns, and then I’m done! Whoo! Certainly not forgetting anything. Certainly not forgetting anything at all.

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Ok I played like ten minutes of Corruption because Daylight Savings Time is silly and bad and I can’t sleep and lol. lmao even.

I thought Echoes was pretty obvious but this game is just… doing the Half-Life opening. Straight up, no ambiguity. Silent protagonist shows up to a science place where Things are Happening, you see stuff going on around you in unreachable corridors, people milling about, interactions where NPCs say your name with mild awe, checkpoints and scans to modulate the pacing, mild tutorialization via environmental interaction, and you’ve gotta meet an important person about a thing. It’s like Half-Life put on a Star Wars suit.

Also man, PrimeHack is amazing. It’s stunning to me that people managed to successfully adapt this Wii game to dual stick controls almost seamlessly. And the Steam Deck trackpad is actually perfect for all the pseudo-point-and-click stuff this game is clearly going to be filled with. Highly recommend this method of playing if you’ve got it.

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Metroid Prime 3: Corruption - Initial Thoughts

Because of the fairly large gaps between each game’s release, something you can do with Metroid is take a kind of tour through different eras of game design. Over the course of the 2D series (and especially because of the remakes), you can track sometimes-drastic changes to the developers’ approaches to tutorialization, world design, and information delivery. Then, with the Prime series, you can see the transition from Prime into Echoes as the shift from the colorful fantasy aesthetics of early games (forest, desert, lava world, ice world) to the mid-2000s era of dim, drab, and gloomy science-fiction.

And now it’s 2007. The Wii has exploded in popularity, and motion control gimmicks are everywhere. We’re still making sci-fi shooters, but the gloominess is maybe a little toned down. The pendulum has fully swung towards maximum informativeness — tooltips are everywhere, characters constantly remind you where you need to go like they’re in a network TV show after a commercial break, and the level design itself is signposted, streamlined, simple, and terrified of any of its players getting lost.

More Era Thoughts

This is where Corruption finds itself. This game already has more named, voiced characters than the entire series up to this point has had combined. Not only that, but it has cutscenes — story cutscenes, with multiple characters and long (for Metroid at least), voice-acted sequences. Samus talks to people (or, more accurately, they talk at her), grunts and other hunters alike. Also, for the first (and I think only) time, she’s actually being given missions and flying between planets. Moreover, literally every time you approach an interaction point, a tooltip shows up with a button prompt, and tutorial flags are almost everywhere (including on a bunch of little environmental triggers that require motion control). This game never wants you to be confused by something in its world, or how a part of it works — which puts it in stark opposition to basically the entirety of its series up until this point.

That’s all to say that Corruption is a very, very different game than any Metroid game I’ve played yet (which, at this point, is everything but Other M and the two Prime spinoffs*). Which is not to say it’s bad! I’m enjoying my time with it so far, and, in particular, its early boss fights are night and day compared to the pain that came at the end of Echoes. The Ridley-falling-down-the-shaft fight was actually really creative and fun, and the free-aim shooting feels… fine? Good, even? Lock-on is very finicky and much more limited than it was in the previous games, but aiming and strafing is pretty simple. Which is important — because Corruption seems to be all about combat, with occasional traversal puzzles and very little in terms of exploration. The moment that really cemented that for me was landing on the first planet — in Prime and Echoes, that moment was one of desperation and scale: landing on an empty world and being overwhelmed by its apparent vastness. Here, you land on a fortress in the midst of a galactic missile fight and get instantly briefed by one of the many soldiers milling around. Once more, you have an immediate, explicit objective in response to a clear and existential threat — a meteor that seems to be filled with Phazon and looks like something that might just be alive. All that combines to make something that that feels incredibly different from those lonely openings on Tallon IV and Aether. I’m curious to see where it goes.

Also, the other hunters are great. They’re colorful and fun in a tropey way, and give a sense of what other strange abilities someone might have in this universe. They also may all just be X-Men (Mystique and Iceman, and then a cyborg guy who I can’t think of a perfect analogue for but that I’m sure exists). Which is great! After ten of these games building a fairly cohesive aesthetic tradition, I’m down for some expansion and play on that.

*I think I want to play Hunters and Federation Force. At least, it feels weird to come this far and not at least try. So, uh, might insert those before or after Other M. I’ll see how easy it is for me to get my hands on both.

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Metroid Prime 3: Corruption - Mid-Game Thoughts

Playing them as close together as I have, it’s hard to see Corruption as anything but a clear refutation of everything Echoes tried to do. Don’t get me wrong — it’s different from the whole series in a whole host of ways, but it seems particularly bent on taking the foundation of the first Metroid Prime and producing as different a game as possible from Echoes as it possibly can. Echoes turned its map into a sprawling hub-and-spoke warren; Corruption discards the idea of an interconnected world entirely and creates a bunch of… I really can’t call them anything else but dungeons that you navigate between via flying Samus’s ship. Echoes felt maximalist with its upgrades, giving Samus every possible option to choose between and building enemies around specific ones; Corruption is incredibly streamlined by comparison, with most upgrades building on a few core abilities (like the grapple beam, which now has combat use). In that vein, Echoes had almost-constant switching — between visors, beams, missiles, etc., while Corruption joins some of the later 2D games in making beam and missile types stack. Echoes’ world was mostly brown and grey, boggy and arid and forlorn; Corruption pinballs Samus back and forth between what I can really only describe as fantasy-hued, Star Wars planets, with a massive aesthetic range.

I said the Star Wars thing before, in my thoughts about the game’s opening, but it bears repeating because one of the game’s planets features a floating steampunk city above a sea of stormclouds and makes for the spitting image of Cloud City from Empire Strikes Back. And it’s called SkyTown. The Chozo sure had a way with words. It’s a great area though — it’s probably my favorite version of the anomalous Chozo ruins area that’s in all of these games, the steampunk set dressing brings something entirely new to the series, and it has some very fun rail-grinding sequences that are only partially ruined by these terrible floating buzzsaw things. Overall, Corruption does have a few arresting sequences and locales; another big one is the frozen temple on the lava planet where the Screw Attack is hiding, and is apparently so forgotten and isolated that her Federation commanders can’t reach Samus by radio anymore. It’s neat!

Anyway, all of this combines to make much, much faster-paced game than its two predecessors. Here, instead of backtracking across a big map, Samus just hightails it to the nearest landing point and jets off to wherever she needs to go. It also — again showing the era we’ve reached in game design at large — has a straight-up objective system and log that lays out very clearly where you need to go next. I think the game’s hand-holding is often a bit much, but with a map broken up like this, in which it’s now much, much harder to scan for differently colored doors or unexplored rooms, it feels like a necessity. Also, the game just straight-up told me when the next upgrade was on a planet I’d already visited. It does that. Though Corruption’s world design is about as far from a 2D Metroid game as it can get, it does the best of any of the 3D games of matching the 2D games’ pacing, which also tips the balance back from exploration towards combat.

Thankfully — the combat here is pretty great! Hypermode, which is the game’s name for Samus’s newly acquired Phazon cannon, is a really, really fun mechanic to use in both short, pitched firefights and longer boss encounters. And having it feed on energy rather than its own ammo system like Echoes is an inspired touch; energy pickups are plentiful enough that I’m never worried about using it too much, but it still requires some caution do avoid depleting too much health. Corruption has a lot of setpiece fights: in particular, many rooms oriented around space pirate battles or other encounters, but they’re always pretty fast (and they thankfully haven’t tried to reskin the Chozo Ghosts again EDIT: NOPE THEY’RE HERE I JUST HADN’T FOUND THEM YET). And the boss fights are good! Some of the best in the series, even — and easily the best of the Prime games by a wide, wide margin. I should have realized at the start that each of those other Hunter pals would eventually be a boss you’d need to fight, and both the ones I’ve killed so far (before they were absorbed by a spooky, floating, tentacled version of Dark Samus/Metroid Prime) have been stellar battles. The first one, Rundas, has one of the series’ best battle themes.

All of this is to say that Corruption is, at least compared to the rest of the series, a very fun and also very frictionless experience. It’s got a thing it’s trying to do, a kind of game it’s trying to be, and you know what? It’s pretty damn good at it. Barring a big flop in the third act, I’m definitely going to prefer this game to Echoes, and it might be up there with the first game. I’m having a blast.

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Metroid Prime 3: Corruption - Final Thoughts

It is my pleasure to report that Metroid Prime 3 straight-up rules. I love this game. I might like it more than the first Prime. On one hand, that’s at least partially because its last act is competently paced and its final bosses are memorable showcases rather than agonizing slogs — but on the other, I think that’s a perfectly valid reason to have this opinion! Unlike Echoes, which burrows into the first game’s foundation and builds itself a little survival horror bunker, Corruption builds a launchpad and shoots off into the stars. It iterates on a lot of Prime’s roughest ideas (like specific enemy weaknesses) in ways that don’t hinder its flow, and while there’s something to miss in the lack of a huge, interconnected world, the smaller dungeon-like sections mean that the game rarely drags out journeys back and forth.

World Design Thoughts!

Moreover, those different planets and areas give the game a chance to really stretch its range. The contrast between the combustible jungles (and frozen temple) of Bryyo, the steampunk sky-city of Elysia, and the red-washed, techno-fascist nightmare of the Pirate Homeworld goes well beyond the usual forest zone/lava zone/ice zone that these games usually do, and while the tone it ends up with is more action-y than previous entries have gone for, it really does work. Each planet feels like a complete world: functional spaces that exist in different systems and came to be from different origins and cultures. They’re largely done in swathes, without fine details — but that’s fine! It’s doing the Star Wars thing! And it’s really good at it!

Some Good Space Horror and the Artifact Hunt

All that said though, the game still manages to insert a little bit of that old loneliness and isolation this series is so good at. Midway through Samus’s journey, she gains the ability to land on an abandoned, bombed-out space station called the GFS Valhalla, which is at this point overrun with metroids and other nasty space creatures. There are no other characters here, no space pirates, no bounty hunters or enemies — just the husks of dead soldiers that, when shot with the plasma beam, shrivel into dust. There’s one particular thing the game does maybe two or three times, where you open a door and immediately see a human corpse behind it vaporize, that spooked me every time. The whole sequence felt rooted in the kind of sci-fi horror that these games started with, and it works especially well backgrounded with the brighter, more action-packed planets on which the rest of the game takes place.

The Valhalla also plays host to Corruption’s version of the Artifact Hunt — and this time it’s actually really good too! There are several “energy cells” scattered around the game that Samus can yank out of certain generators and carry with her, and there are several receptacles for them on the Valhalla that open up new passageways: some to power-ups, some to a room containing a piece of the game’s critical path. As in the previous games, there are hints to their locations (now held in little drones that float around this empty space station) — but most of them aren’t even necessary because almost every cell is part of a major puzzle. By the time I needed to go hunting, I was only missing two of them, and they weren’t hard to find.

Ending Thoughts

Anyway, that brings me to the ending, which sees Samus and the Federation launch a full-scale assault on the source of Phazon — a living, sentient planet that seems to be sending these Leviathan Seeds out into the universe as a form of parasitic reproduction. It turns out, Phazon isn’t really the strangely radioactive material the first couple games made it seem; like all the other loci of the Metroid series, it’s a kind of parasite. A seemingly eusocial one, in which all of its different forms operate with a single shared goal and purpose. It seems to turn metroids into these strange, buglike things (as opposed to their natural reptilian forms from Metroid II), and formed Dark Samus by combining her Phazon Suit with the remains of the Metroid Prime. It’s a suitably scaled threat for a game like this, and the last sequence on Phaaze is fittingly alien and strange. The final battle, first against Dark Samus and then against the remains of the corrupted Aurora Unit, is a brilliant fight that really capitalizes on the game’s scale and momentum. Corruption has the best bosses of the 3D games and it’s not particularly close — all of them were different, memorable, and (surprisingly, considering what Echoes’s bosses were like), fun.

And that’s really where my thoughts on Corruption land. It’s just a fucking blast of a game. It flexes a kind of range that I don’t think any of these games have really tried to do in the past, while iterating on a bunch of ideas that hadn’t quite been done the best in the past. In some ways it’s bright and vibrant and exhilarating, but it also goes some incredibly somber places. I think it could do more with the other bounty hunters — Samus essentially having to execute her co-workers and friends because they got space rabies is something the game mostly just leaves as emotional subtext (and knowing what came after this maybe it’s for the best that it does), but those fights, particularly in their scoring, have a lot of sadness and emotion wrapped up in them. Watching Samus’s suit slowly grow more and more infected over the course of the game — those blue veins getting brighter and more distinct with each leviathan she kills — also really gives it a sense of finality. The main series games are often about transformation, be it the mere act of powering up a suit or finding all these upgrades, or the many times Samus herself has her own body transformed into the image of other organisms. The Prime games add to that this theme of doubling, of reproduction: of an organism recreating itself time after time, and possessing entire planets to achieve that end. The fact that it places both of them so close together: an empowering transformation alongside a destructive one, seems to get to the root of these games’ conception of horror. There is only instability here: only change and uncertainty, and the only way to stave off the destructive kind is to embrace your own.

That’s a very rough thought, and I know I can do better. I’ll keep mulling it over as I start to wind this whole endeavor down. So! Join me next time as all these good feelings get immediately torn to shreds, because after a year and a half and eleven other games it’s finally time for me to play Metroid: Other M.

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Metroid: Other M - Opening

Oh no.

Usually, when I gear up play a game with a reputation like this one, I have some doubts. Sometimes the criticism seems like it has to be at least a bit overblown. How bad could it really be?

Well one thing I do appreciate about Other M is how it immediately makes clear that nope, this is going to be awful. The game opens with a long cinematic that rehashes the final battle of Super Metroid — one of the absolute high points of the series — from the moment Samus has her energy restored by the metroid hatchling. Except, now it’s the baby. She calls it that about sixty times. The CGI animation here is awful; it makes both Mother Brain and the metroid look comical and silly, and the voiceover makes it a thousand times worse. Really, this is an incredible case for how a viewer’s imagination is often much, much better than actually having a character speak, because it’s absolutely possible to imagine Samus feeling the kinds of emotions the game is telegraphing, but it does so in such a ham-fisted way it’s impossible to take seriously.

Anyway, the cutscene segues into a tutorial sequence in an empty room, where the game telegraphs its control scheme via an annoyingly snarky Federation officer coaching Samus through using her missiles and bombs and whatnot. Then, another cutscene — Samus gets in her ship, hears a distress signal coded as “Baby’s Cry,” (woof) and jets off to a station in distress. Once there, she runs into a squad of soldiers led by some guy named Adam. You’ve all probably heard this, but Adam is her former commanding officer, and she basically reverts back to adolescence when around him, which includes not being able to use equipped weapons because he hasn’t authorized it and swearing to follow whatever orders he happens to give. This plays out during a… fine? opening boss fight that really just makes me dread the point where this control scheme gets more complex. Adam then sends the squad off to explore parts of the facility, tells Samus that by his grace she can use bombs but she better not dare use a power bomb so help him god, and sends her off.

Okay, opening summary done, so here’s the thing about Other M. I can see a skeleton here that, in the hands of a competent writer and development team, actually could have been interesting. But Nintendo gave this game to the developers of Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball and it shows. I would actually really like to see a Metroid story that deals with the very likely PTSD Samus is accruing from all the shit she has to do — from, like I said in the last post, having to kill all her friends to stop the spread of Phazon; by becoming a mother figure to a creature whose species she was sent to exterminate; by having that creature literally sacrifice itself for her survival and then destroying her entire homeworld in the aftermath. Also! She was a teenager in a (seemingly) all-male army; it’s definitely believable she might have a fucked up relationship with a former commanding officer, one that could go in several different directions and all of which could lead to interesting stories. There is actual material here that could have made for a meaningful experience, even if the game itself wanted to be a gamer from 2009’s idea of “cinematic.” This wasn’t doomed from the start. The people making it were just farther out of their depth than a toddler in the Marianas Trench.

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STEPHEN A: Skip, I want to ADDRESS the issue!
[Bayless nods]
We KNOW Other M is a bad game!
BAYLESS: Absolutely

In most of the ways a game can be bad, Other M a bad game. Everything to do with the story is bad. The writing is bad. The voice acting is listless and poorly directed. The combat is… fine? It’s too busy at times, and while it’s got a nice punchiness, it’s at its best when Samus literally just stands still and fires or dodges incoming attacks, which is not the most engaging way to play a video game. It shifts between three separate points-of-view: its usual pseudo-3D, an over-the-shoulder cam for story sequences, and the first person view it switches into when you hold the Wii Remote forward instead of sideways. (Sidenote: this control scheme is why this game is virtually impossible to emulate well.) The boss fights I’ve played so far require you to switch between first and third person on the fly, which is not smooth, nor conducive to the kind of dodging the game expects. Samus has essentially none of her usual abilities and yet the game is already harder to manage moment-to-moment than a fully tricked out Prime sequel. Bad game!

STEPHEN A: BUT!

The game’s approach to setting and environmental design is, admittedly, pretty cool. The abandoned space station it takes place on is in some ways a more detailed reimagining of Fusion’s setting, in that it has ecologically diverse biomes locked behind different sectors, each supporting their own set of flora and fauna. And it works well — it may have just been a one-off interaction, but it seemed like some of the creatures were actually interacting with each other: bugs falling into carnivorous plants and being eaten and the like. What’s really compelling though is the way many of these rooms are projected with the illusion of an open-air world, with whatever their main scenery is stretching into the distance. Those rooms always have terminals Samus can interact with, which turns off those projectors and reveals the station’s harsh grey walls where wide grasslands or forests had seemed to be. It’s a great trick! The way it plays with the feeling of invisible walls is cool, because if you run up against the walls while the room is in projection mode, they’ll get kinda distorted and fuzzy like you’re in the Matrix. It’s a great idea. There were apparently a couple competent environmental artists at Team Ninja doing their thing while everyone else was off building sandcastles with asbestos.

Also, as I work through this, I’ve decided how to handle Prime Hunters and Federation Force. Both seem to barely use the DS touchscreen, so I think emulating them is probably the way to go, and I’m going to give each an hour and see if I feel compelled to continue (I feel like that’s more likely with the former than the latter). I may do that as I work through Other M, or right afterwards.

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