BW Media Spotlight

I’ve never gotten into the Metroid franchise. I don’t have the time, it’s not my kind of exploration game (although I do enjoy exploration games), and unless they give Samus a GPS I’ll be lost in five minutes. I’m already bad at video games, so why go after one I have no hope in playing. I want to have fun when I lose, dang it!

Still, I can understand the complaints surrounding the new game in the “Prime” series, a spin-off called Federation Force, where you play not as Samus Aran, the hero of the game, but a group of soldiers, like playing Halo in multiplayer. In fact, Federation Force IS a multiplayer game, with a Rocket League wanna-be called Blast Ball, used to practice the game controls. It’s not the first person shooter fans of the Prime wing of the Metroid fanbase was looking for and it could mean development spent on a chibi multiplayer game that even the promos say is hard to play single-player could have been better spent on a more traditional Metroid game (preferably with better characterization than Other M, the bane of fans) that the fans have been begging to get for years now. I totally understand where you’re coming from here and maybe you have a point. That said…what the hell, gamers?

You honestly went to Change.org, a website devoted to petitions on major issues of world events, to ask for a video game to be canceled and the producers fired? Oh I see it. World hunger. Civil rights. A cutesy Metroid game. All the same thing, right? I saw a comedy video where they set up a paramilitary group to hunt the creators down like Jason Borne joined Seal Team 6. It’s actually rather funny, but it does make the point that telling Nintendo to flush the lots and lots of money spent to create the game, the man hours (or woman hours, but you know how that one sector goes into death threat mode anytime a woman dares to work on a video game and makes the rest of the community look bad) given to the production, and shoving people who worked their backsides off to the curb (“because @#$%# their families, the purity of my game shelf is more important”) because you don’t like a direction of a game? Really? I thought petitioning the White House to build the Death Star was stupid, although that one still wins by missing the point of the Death Star!!!!!!! Just because it’s cool doesn’t mean you should.

So there has to be a better way to show your dislike of this series, right? There’s the old-fashioned boycott, but that just means not buying something. What does that prove? Well, my old Reviewers Unknown colleague and friend TestZero pointed me to a better solution…at least to those of you with holes in your collection.

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