Perhaps the most notable difference between Corruption and previous Metroid Prime games is, of course, the controls. The previous two games were remarkable for managing to come up with joystick-based controls that didn't suck, by tossing out the need to aim and instead providing a lock-on mechanism. But now, with the Wii, we have a genuine pointing device! And I think Corruption did an excellent job with that. The wiimote unfortunately is still not equivalent to a mouse since a mouse is a relative pointing device whereas the wiimote is an absolute one. A mouse can move infinitely in any direction (by picking it up while jerking it back) whereas the wiimote can only move within the confines of the screen. Thus, first-order wiimote motion cannot translate directly into steering. Instead, the more you point the cursor to one side of the screen, the faster you turn in that direction, which makes it roughly equivalent to a joystick as far as steering is concerned. However, the cursor does translate directly to aiming in the obvious way: your shots hit whatever is under the cursor. And aiming, is, of course, the part that otherwise sucks with a joystick. The wiimote still is not as good as a mouse for first-person shooters, but it comes much, much closer. I was quite happy with it, and generally had no trouble strafing and shooting at the same time (even without using the lock-on mechanism, which is still provided). Furthermore, unlike the previous games in the series, being able to turn and strafe at the same time *without* being locked on to any one point meant I could smoothly turn corners the way I do in any FPS, and generally felt really good.

It's funny how well Retro manages to integrate moody, cinematic sequences directly with gameplay. In each Metroid Prime game, the first time I encounter metroids (the jellyfish-like creatures which latch on to your head and suck your energy), I find myself incredibly scared, even though they are actually not that hard to fight. Retro always finds a way to present them that makes you want to hide and turn back. They manage to set it up so that anyone who is familiar with metroids can see that they are coming, and will cower in fear. In fact, in Corruption, I actually did try to turn back, hoping to do a different area first, but discovered that the way back was not accessible.

My only complaint is that the drifted further away from the "retraversal" style that I liked from the original (and from 2D Metroid games). In Corruption, the game world is separated into multiple planets, each of which has several landing sites between which you can fly freely. The game progressed relatively linearly from one planet to the next, such that the only real reason to go back to previous planets was to pick up items that were previously inaccessible. I felt like this lost something from the fully-contiguous, organic, non-linear world of the original Metroid Prime, and even from the hub-style world of MP2: Echoes.

Overall, it's hard to say if I liked Corruption better than Prime. Metroid Prime's contiguous world was a huge factor in its favor, but Corruption's control scheme was much nicer. The game's internal clock claimed I spent 16:26 on it, but the Wii's logs added up to 24:47. I don't know what caused this discrepancy, but the latter time is surely the accurate one. I managed to get 100% of the items without any help from any guides. There is actually a way to obtain maps in-game which mark the general locations of all items, which was a genius idea that actually got me to go and find everything. I'm not going to go on an undirected search of the entire world looking for the one thing I missed, but if told what room it is in I will certainly search it thoroughly.

Yet another awesome game from Nintendo.