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N-Philes: So what makes the Prime sub-series worthwhile?
Trebor: Prime was a very important step in the Metroid series to me. It showed that Metroid could exist, and even thrive, in a three-dimensional world.
Nate: The first game proved much more worthwhile to us than the second, but I think that the motivation to run either of the games varies quite a lot from person to person. Some people enjoy giving other people pet tricks life in a high-visibility speed run, while others are more egotistic, preferring to bash other people's times into the ground than to help out anyone else. A third group struggles only against the clock, trying to get that next lowest minute no matter what the cost. For them it's only about those numbers on the mission final screen. I also think that these groups' motivations overlap to a certain extent.
N-Philes: Metroid Prime is rated at #52 of the best all time games from IGN, and Super Metroid is rated #10. The "First Person Adventure" title appears to be a new genre set by Prime. Did the sequel surpass or merely add to the adventure quality of its 2D predecessors, or is this something best left to the side scrolling titles?
Trebor: I definitely think it added to the sense of adventure in the Metroid series. With the first person view, you feel like you are actually a part of the action, not merely controlling a character as in the side-scrollers.
Nate: My personal opinion is that Metroid Prime was the perfect sequel. Super Metroid was as close to perfection as one could get in the genre before Prime arrived, and then prime took everything Super Metroid was and added a third dimension to it. The irony is that Metroid Prime was not intended by its designers to be nearly this huge of a thing. Probably 99% of the things we've found in Prime were actually oversights on Retro's part, while with Super it's not so easy to say (partly because none of us speaks Japanese all that well). Incidentally, the thinking right now is that this is precisely the reason why Prime 2 was so disappointing to us--that Retro actually referenced our discoveries while testing Prime 2 and removed the reasons we liked the first game from the sequel.
N-Philes: The localization process for games is more than just translating a language with different words and font. What are the variations Metroid Prime produced, and why is the hardcore Prime community so opinionated on these releases?
Nate: A more or less exhaustive list of version differences can be found at Metroid 2002. It's best to start with this link, which lists the various known versions of the first Prime and how to identify them.
From there you can check out videos of the differences. The primary reason why the differences are so important today is that every time Retro changed the game, they created a different category for speed running at SDA, because you can't meaningfully compare clear times from two different versions. Also, the changes obviously affected how certain tricks are performed in the game, sometimes making them quite a bit harder, more time consuming, or both.
N-Philes: What kind of hidden secrets/glitches have you found to be of personal interest and why?
Trebor: Man, there are so many. Probably the most important to me is the fact that you can get into the bomb slot at the top of Geo Thermal Core without raising any of the platforms in the room. That was the last step in confirming 22%, the current lowest percent you can obtain, and still complete the game.
Nate: It's hard for me to put one above all the others, but probably one of the most significant was the bomb jump over the bars in Great Tree Hall, allowing you to go from the entrance of the Underwater Frigate area to its exit in a matter of seconds. Because there's no reason to go through that area unless you're going for 100% completion, you can save a huge amount of time with that trick and (hopefully) look great doing it. I think I also like that trick so much because once I mastered it, I considered myself an elite player of the game, as it's virtually unheard of for a newb to get that trick without first enduring hours and hours of mind-numbing torture. And that's just to do it once; to nail it on the first try is something else entirely. In short, it's useful, and it requires true skill and understanding of the game to pull off.
N-Philes: Hack assisted or otherwise, what do you guys think of speed runs?
Nate: Well, I'm probably a tad bit biased, as I also help run Speed Demos Archive. But I think that, for most people who are now or ever were involved with Prime, this idea of optimizing the game is very important. Early on, there was one group looking at the question of what the lowest percentage of pickups was that the game could be beaten with (or without, if you prefer), while the other group was looking at how the game could be optimized, or in other words, how fast it could be beaten. Over time, those two groups merged as their discoveries proved useful in both realms. For example, that trick I mentioned earlier about skipping the Frigate was originally discovered in a low percent context but later was reused in both Radix's and my own 100% speed runs around November of 2003 to help us get through that part of the game faster (we went back to get the pickups in the Frigate later in the game when we were more powerful). Thus, a trick originally intended only to help beat the game with ridiculously low percent pickups ended up a staple of later speed runs. So I think that even the stuff that we do without speed in mind eventually ends up contributing to speed runs down the road.
As for so-called tool assisted "speed runs," I think that they are best left to die of their own accord.
Trebor: I love speed runs, myself. They can give players reason to play a game when all other options are exhausted, thereby adding replay value when it isn't there otherwise. Speed runs also give rise to a level of competition between players that isn't normally found by playing games. When you watch a good run, you are left with a sense of wonder that you won't normally find when playing.
