...sitting at my desk, tapping my fingers, waiting for the inevitable "Shut it!" pic...

You just have to kill them quicker then...!

Are you dodging and firing and freezing groups of them at a time?

'Cuz you should be!

It seriously isn't that hard... The only problem I had with the Queen was thinking I had to fight HER even with the Metroids swarming around me!

Once I figured out I had to kill THEM first I didn't have a problem.

I don't know why you are having so much trouble...?

Maybe I'm forgetting something...?

Thanks guys.

Biggest problem I have is that they dodge charged blasts quite well. Some get frozen, some dont so when I want to go 1st person I get nailed by the free metroid.

I finished the game.

Well one things for certain.

Samus has only fought Ridley twice before. Metroid Other M makes it quite clear what Sakamoto thinks of the Prime series. He ignores them, they are not cannon.

Will go for 100% tomorrow.

GG got stuck where?

phantom_leo said:

I have started to try to 100% the game this weekend, but kept on getting stuck at that STOOPID, STOOPID Energy Tank at the top of that Tower Structure in the Residential Area of Sector 1.

I must have tried a dozen times to ShineSpark up there and Space Jump over to it, only to hit an invisible wall.

It made me STOP playing on 3 separate occassions throughout the weekend.

Finally got it, but wow that was pointlessly hard!

I bet GG can get that easily.

G4TV said:

          
               Metroid: Other M Review
          

By Abbie Heppe

http://g4tv.com/games/wii/61992/metroid-other-m/review/

In the world of Other M, Samus stumbles upon her old Galactic Federation squad mates while answering a distress call on a seemingly abandoned vessel. Among the people she encounters is her former captain, Adam Malkovich. In the most contrived manner possible, Samus loses her special abilities. How? She opts not to use them. Why? She wants to show Adam she can follow orders.


          Yes, that’s right. The woman who in the first five minutes of the game gives the squad access to the ship by using her missiles is restricted from using her abilities -- some which could open a path or save her life in the future -- until a bland male character dictates it to her. She does this because she likes him, but only as a friend.


          In short, you're asked to forget that Samus has spent the last 10-15 years on solitary missions ridding the galaxy of Space Pirates, saving the universe and surviving on her own as a bounty hunter. Instead, Other M expects you to accept her as a submissive, child-like and self-doubting little girl that cannot possibly wield the amount of power she possesses unless directed to by a man.


          What is presented would be a brilliant prequel to Metroid, documenting Samus as she departs the Galactic Federation and sets out on her own; however, at this point she could easily be considered a veteran with more combat experience than half the galactic army combined. The payoff to her self-doubting modus operandi is her becoming the powerful icon we have all loved since the NES though it's a great origin story and little more. And even then, there's the simpering VO work and narration that betrays all the aspirations of character development.


          Yes, Samus uses the phrase “confession time” like a 12 year old girl scrawling in her Lisa Frank diary but really, the Alan Wake-meets-Lifetime Channel Original Movie narration gets old faster than you can say “daddy issues.” Until Other M, Samus has existed as a silent protagonist with only the personality that we have bestowed upon her in our own imaginations. Regardless of whether or not the interpretation in Other M can be reconciled with your own perception of her, there is a moment later in the game that cannot be justified…ever. Confronted by her longstanding nemesis, Ridley, she is spliced into flashes of a little girl, crying and afraid, despite the fact she has already defeated Ridley at least FOUR times already, once when he was a powerful robot. Terrible.


          Now, once the game is underway and the insipid cutscenes come to a thankful rest, a bevy of other problems arise. Other M forsakes the perfectly acceptable use of the Wii remote in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption and adopts a control scheme that has the user holding the Wiimote sideways then pointing at the screen to use missiles or “scan” the environment. “Scan” is in quotation marks as the first person mode is also forced on the player in several illogical sequences when it doesn’t need to be because the scan dynamic is hardly used in the rest of the game.

          If you didn’t resent the first person mode enough already, think about having to recalibrate your reticule every time you want to use a missile attack.  Since most of the boss combat involves firing charge shots until you can find the time to go into first person mode and get a missile off, it gets old really fast.

So, is it all as soul-crushingly terrible as it sounds? Yes, yes it is. There are some great moments in the secondary plotline, if you can turn off the volume and ignore Samus’s voice entirely, but that’s not really the point of the game. The point is to flesh out one of the most iconic (and nonsexualized) female characters in gaming history and yet the outcome is insulting to both Samus and her fans.


          When she isn’t submissive and obedient, the flashbacks portray her as bratty and childish and the whole mess smacks of sexism. Almost every other aspect of gameplay including character design, sound and level design is mediocre. I’m sorry Metroid fans, because this isn’t what I wanted either. I also didn’t want to hear the phrase “fledgling girl’s heart” in anything but the phrase “I disintegrated the fledgling girl’s heart with a plasma beam,” but with Other M, no one gets what they want and half a good story with a smattering of acceptable decisions is far below the bar Nintendo has previously established for the series

2 out of 5

IGN said:

          
               Killing Samus
          
               How Metroid: Other M ruined gaming's greatest heroine.
          

Audrey Drake is a freelance contributor for IGN. You can follow her blog at My IGN for more of her thoughts on gaming.

"I felt that if I let my guard down I would easily be broken. Beyond that, I was scared."


          This self-conscious statement is one of the first that players hear spoken by Samus Aran, the ruthless bounty hunter and heroine of the classic Metroid series. In Metroid: Other M, the formerly silent character is given voice for the first time, a voice that goes against everything her character once stood for and backtracks on the trails she once blazed.


          As this new game would have it, the same Samus who single-handedly destroyed an entire alien species and murdered countless space pirates was actually a fragile, emotional mess beneath all that armor.


          As a longtime Metroid fan, I beg to differ.


          The new direction of Samus' character is completely out of left field. It's hard to reconcile the woman portrayed in Other M with the one who, in Super Metroid, lobbed missile after missile at Mother Brain's face, and afterward was still composed enough to hastily return to her ship before the planet exploded.

               
                    Look Who's Talkin'... Samus
          

          While under the player's control, she is exactly the Samus of old, fearlessly dusting off dozens of enemies at once, all without losing her cool. The moment a cutscene begins to roll, however, she is transformed into someone completely new and unrecognizable. Someone who is insecure about what a former employer thinks of her, gets hurt when called an outsider, has serious daddy issues, and even, at times, chokes in the face of fear. The duality of her character within Other M is confusing in and of itself, and only lends to the feeling that the Samus of the cinema scenes simply doesn't belong, and just plain isn't the woman I grew up idolizing.


          In a videogame landscape filled with helpless princesses and brainless bimbos, the concept of a woman who was indiscernible from her male counterparts was novel to say the least. She wasn't the wide-eyed, innocent damsel-in-distress, nor was she the objectified, scantily-clad hussy (you never so much as caught a glimpse of her outside of her armored Power Suit until the end of the game). Instead, the Samus of past titles was a rare example of a female character whose actions, and not her gender, were what defined her, and who was as uncompromising, steady and in control as any other hero out there.


          Other M takes these formerly defining traits away from her, making her into just another generic, overly emotional female character. Where she once broke gender stereotypes, in Other M she exemplifies them. Her independence is reduced to subservience, her fearlessness to panic.

Ready for action, Samus looks like the hero of old.

In the opening cinematic, which recreates the final fight with Mother Brain from the end of Super Metroid, one of the first emotions we see out of Samus is her remorse at the untimely death of a baby metroid at the hands of the giant boss. We then find out that this moment has been haunting her, and that she is crestfallen at the idea that she'll never see the metroid (which she refers to as "the baby") ever again.


          This is the same metroid she willingly gave up for study at the beginning of Super Metroid. In Other M, however, a creature that she is never previously portrayed as having any real attachment to becomes something of a maternal metaphor. In an irrationally overdramatic stupor, Samus loses all track of time after the baby's death. This maternal shift is completely out of the blue, as these feelings are never so much as hinted at in previous titles.


          The dynamic between Samus and her former commanding officer, Adam Malkovich, is also entirely unbefitting the bounty hunter who was once known for her independence. The reason behind her departure from Malkovich's command is shrouded in mystery and built up to be something of considerable significance. I was shocked at how anticlimactic the revelation turned out to be, not to mention how drenched the moment was in undue melodrama. Samus departs the Federation after questioning one of Malkovich's commands, and it seems the fact that she doubted him has caused her endless grief. Seriously, the entire incident that players wait most of the game to hear about solely amounts to Samus momentarily questioning her commanding officer's authority.


          But this is only the tip of the subservient iceberg. Throughout Other M, and even up until the final, climactic scene, Samus follows Malkovich's orders to the point of absurd submissiveness. This is a stark contrast to how Samus was portrayed in the past. Even in Metroid: Fusion, in which she follows the directions of a computerized commanding officer, she clearly states at the game's outset that she dislikes taking orders.


          In Other M, however, this sentiment is never echoed. In fact, there is never an example in the entire game of her disobeying Malkovich, even at the cost of her own safety. She is so determined to not break orders that she would rather burn alive in a lava pit than engage her Varia suit, which would protect her from the heat. As her soon to-be-corpse is frying, she insists on taking the damage rather than defy a single order from Malkovich, who isn't even officially her commanding officer anymore. He didn't even tell her not to use the suit upgrade, he simply hadn't specifically authorized it yet.

A contemplative Samus... with mole.

Samus' obedience is not the only new trait she is given in Other M. She is also, at several points, fearful and irrational. After taking on the life of a solitary bounty hunter—and rising to acclaim as the toughest in the galaxy—Other M would have players believe that Samus would actually cower before a returning boss from a previous game. She is literally shown transforming into a helpless child, unable to move or protect herself. The same Samus who has killed countless bosses (this one included) without breaking a sweat is rendered fear-stricken, and this behavior is never given any justification or context. As Other M would have it, beneath the visor of the intergalactic hero is a scared, little girl.


          In Other M, I heard Samus speak for the first time, and I was devastated to find that my longtime friend wasn't the woman I thought she was. Someone who was once my favorite heroine, and an inspiration, was now a woman I wish had just kept her mouth shut.

Thoughts?

The second article I had not seen, for the most part very over the top and emotional reaction to the game, just like a woman would react.

I disagree with one scene in the game, the Ridley one, outside of that I felt she remained in character. As Leo pointed out the Baby Metroid changed her a bit and this game explores that.

"Sorry to keep you waiting, Adam. Let's go home."

100% ! ! !

What is that?