Nintendo’s return to Comic-Con was less… extravagant than I was expecting. The company had one of the smaller gaming booths at the Con, only taking up a small 4×2 block plot, but the swag they had was pretty great (I’ll probably write on that later today)

On to Other M. With Nintendo’s cramped booth arrangements, they made the odd decision to only have one Wii running the game. To make up for it, they had running on a pretty nice big-screen, surround sound setup.

While waiting for my turn to come up, I had plenty of time to watch some of the game’s opening cutscenes and hear Samus speak some of her first lines in English.

Visually, the cutscenes are great. They’re very detailed and the voices seemed to fit well with their respective characters. Yes, even Samus. The actress they hired to do her voice managed to capture that direct, not-so-refined tone that the Japanese team wanted.

After finally getting my mitts on the Wii Remote, the first thing that immediately stood out for me were the combat controls. With the limited amount of buttons on the standalone remote, Nintendo made sure to use all of them and to good effect.

Held in NES configuration, 1 fires your arm cannon (and can be charged), 2 jumps and A activates morph ball mode. When you point the Wii Remote at the screen, the perspective shifts to first-person, and A becomes the fire button and B locks on to enemies. In this mode, Samus is completely stationary, but she is able to freely look around while holding B.

In a change from previous Metroids, Samus now auto targets nearby enemies. While it may sound like an unwelcome addition, it actually works well to cover for the the fact that trying to line up a shot with the D-Pad would be near-impossible.

One of Samus’ new moves is the quick dodge. If you press the D-Pad in any direction right before an enemy hits Samus, she will perform a quick roll out of harm’s way. Against the run-of-the-mill, lower level baddies, the move is almost pointless to use, but against bosses and sub-bosses, the move becomes incredibly useful in setting up counterattacks.

The level I played led into a mini boss fight against two chameleon-like creatures and served as a little test of all the skills I had learned. Fighting the bosses required me to go into first-person and scan for the invisible enemies so I could launch rockets into their face. Once exposed, the enemies were stunned and could be dispatched with a neat up-close special move. When near a downed enemy, pressing the 1 button and the D-Pad in the direction of the enemy will initiate the special move specific to that enemy. In this case, Samus would grab the sub-boss by the head slam it to the ground and deliver a point-blank shot to the face, practially finishing off the creature.

Overall, Metroid: Other M feels very much like a bridge between the classic and Prime play styles. The controls worked well in the demo, except for an occasional issue with the lock-on in first-person view. The audio was fantastic with varied “screeees” and roars from the different enemies.

With the game’s release only a month away, it’s easy to call this one a day one purchase.

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