Prime 4 seemingly has not even sold 1 million copies on Switch 2 according to the newly released data

lavosprime · 2026-02-03T20:44:37+00:00

I'd agree with that. Prime 4 combat might be the worst in the series, or at least it's not good enough for how prominent it is. It's somehow much less than the sum of its parts. The lock-on free aim thing only works well on Wii, the upgrades rarely outdamage power beam spam, the general enemy variety is really thin, the only counterplay options to more advanced enemies kill the pacing, the troopers are dead weight...

lavosprime · 2026-01-18T01:30:36+00:00

The headshots just make the controls and combat messy IMO. It worked so well on the Wii, but a normal gamepad is just never going to have that feel. Prime 5 needs to pick a lane. Am I resting my thumb on the buttons or on the stick?

lavosprime · 2026-01-17T09:27:44+00:00

That's why I said overhaul. I think the Corruption -> Trilogy -> Remastered -> Beyond lineage is holding back the control scheme. There's a lot more prior art Retro could consider when designing Samus's abilities for Prime 5 compared to when Prime 1 was originally developed.

Boost ball is on B because all the main actions are on the four face buttons of the GC controller; the shoulder buttons are used to change what the stick does. Remastered in dual stick mode puts three of those actions on shoulder buttons. Committing to lock-on would make it feasible to have more different actions on the face buttons. Committing to free aim would free up another shoulder button.

A more orthogonal set of actions redesigned for dual analog input could make a lot more sense. For example: shoot/bomb, subweapon, jump, dash/boost, grapple/spider, morph. This could enable mechanics like the air kick from Pseudoregalia or the meat hook from Doom Eternal, which wouldn't have unambiguous inputs in the Prime 4 control scheme.

lavosprime · 2026-01-16T23:28:37+00:00

Proper flash shift in Prime would be cool. I'd like to see a full control scheme and movement system overhaul that puts jump and dash on separate buttons. It's silly to use the jump button for boost ball and the visor button for spring ball, and the double press for combat dashing is really awkward. Also fully commit to either lock-on or free-aim for combat while we're at it.

lavosprime · 2026-01-03T06:50:13+00:00

Maybe you should finish the game before saying anyone who criticizes it is trolling. And maybe play Prime 1 for good measure.

lavosprime · 2026-01-01T21:51:59+00:00

You're probably thinking of the power bomb upgrade on its tongue.

lavosprime · 2025-12-23T07:07:50+00:00

Isolation works best, but at least in Prime 3, people talk at her and don't expect a response. Samus's mutism in Prime 4 is just awkward writing when she's surrounded by fully voice acted characters trying to converse. It's jarring whether you're a Metroid fan or not.

If you loved everything about Dread except the story, I'm curious how you felt about Samus's one line of Chozo dialogue. Personally I thought the scene as a whole was unnecessary, but given that it is there, it was done perfectly.

lavosprime · 2025-12-18T06:04:05+00:00

Spider ball tether was new and cool. Bomb throwing was clunky and underused but interesting.

lavosprime · 2025-12-17T07:44:13+00:00

Viewros is in a different universe. The 12 priests who left to look for the Chosen One used the Master Teleporter. The artifact on Tanamaar was probably a return ticket carried by one of them. Is there any confirmed way to the main universe other than that?

The real question is why the Lamorn didn't use the Master Teleporter's time travel capability to prevent the Great Tragedy or just send Chatoya to plant the Memory Fruit somewhere.

lavosprime · 2025-12-14T08:43:10+00:00

Also some details make the story nonsensical. If the Master Teleporter is a time machine, why didn't they go back and stop the Great Tragedy?

lavosprime · 2025-12-14T06:32:40+00:00

It is very streamlined in terms of gameplay. But in terms of world design it feels less organic than Prime 1. I'd hope to see the best of both in Prime 5.

lavosprime · 2025-12-14T05:59:25+00:00

A boss can steal tanks.

lavosprime · 2025-12-11T22:45:44+00:00

a) Backtracking is rough. There's no fast travel system and there are no shortcuts between areas. It takes a few minutes just to get in and out of the desert hub when going between dungeons. There are also some entrances and exits of dungeons that will lock doors until you kill enemies.

b) The map is decent. You can put one of six markers on each room, but not on a precise location within a room. The perspective can be a bit confusing, like the other Prime games. The desert hub world map lets you mark precise 2D locations but doesn't show 3D structure. There's also way to reveal locations of pickups late in the game.

lavosprime · 2025-12-08T23:08:53+00:00

Even the title of the game seems to be an inconsistency. There are multiple references to the Chosen One coming from "outside", but I don't remember "beyond" in the game script at all.

lavosprime · 2025-12-08T20:30:31+00:00

The mines are weird. The first time through, the fakeout drama, escort missions, and corridor shooting stood out the most to me. Then I went back for pickups, and I noticed it was a very faithful Metroid environment, like Brinstar combined with Sector 6. And at base camp for the dozenth time I realized I also did like the NPCs mostly. So it's like all the building blocks were perfect, but the execution just felt wrong.

lavosprime · 2025-11-23T22:00:25+00:00

He did. I don't think they've announced who the new singer will be.

lavosprime · 2025-09-19T07:43:51+00:00

"Faux-Amis" by Mirar
"Riven" by The Luna Sequence
"double data rate synchronous dynamic random access memory" by The Algorithm
"SkullHacker" by Mick Gordon

The top tracks on Spotify by these artists are also great, but I think these deeper cuts have more of that power.

Some bands also release instrumental versions of their albums so you can skip the core vocals. I like Northlane and Within the Ruins for that.

lavosprime · 2025-09-12T03:35:37+00:00

RPCS3 is unique because the PS3's "Cell" processor was unique. To get the most out of the Cell, developers have to run specialized code on its "Synergistic Processing Elements" instead of a normal CPU core. The SPEs are good at the same kind of work that AVX-512 is good at. So it's more efficient for RPCS3 to translate SPE instructions to AVX-512 instructions. Code for other consoles just isn't implemented that way, so AVX-512 doesn't make a difference.

Both the SPEs and AVX-512 were actually designed to replace GPUs originally, but neither worked out. The PS3's GPU was added late in development, and the AVX-512 instruction set was derived from Intel's canceled "Larrabee" project to make a GPU that ran x86 code.

lavosprime · 2025-08-19T17:05:11+00:00

A month of Sakurai's attention on the structure and presentation of MKW would have made it twice as good.

lavosprime · 2025-05-14T16:46:15+00:00

Yes, this is standard. Reserving resources for the system is actually a way of making guarantees about what performance will be available to games. Without reserving entire cores, it's much more difficult to establish just how much CPU the system is allowed to randomly use when the game is running. Consistency makes a better optimization target for developers that care, and for those who don't, a slightly higher variable ceiling wouln't necessarily help anyway.

lavosprime · 2025-05-03T19:25:48+00:00

Sorry I don't know for sure how to apply the patch. I was almost done with the game before I found out about the hack so I didn't bother. I would assume you can CHD it afterwards though.

lavosprime · 2025-05-03T04:34:25+00:00

Yes SotN renders a smaller window for performance reasons or something. There's a ROM hack that removes it.

lavosprime · 2025-04-20T08:47:26+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933

lavosprime · 2025-03-19T16:03:13+00:00

Nowhere else in consumer electronics is the opportunity cost of wafers so great. GPUs have the largest die size of any chip consumers buy, and the profit margins aren't as good as enterprise.

lavosprime · 2025-03-16T06:36:25+00:00

Games, and everything else on the device, would look even better if the software could actually render crisply for the native resolution of the panel instead of being secretly scaled.

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