Echoes: Prime gamin'

Everybody loves pinball.

It's a simple game, and unashamedly so. All there is to it is a that constant tap-touch on the sides of the machine, always, always, always, even if the ball isn't anywhere near those flicky things. Tap first, ask questions later, and you're pretty much guaranteed a good time. The same deal goes for Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, the newest addition to the classic Nintendo franchise.

Here's the deal: Give that metaphorical pinball some arms, legs, and a space gun, and you can recall how cool it is to play as Samus, the sexily-armored Nintendo icon with a penchant for blasting up aliens. She's back to save a new world from a terrible danger, and she does it by shooting first, asking questions later.

Echoes has a larger emphasis on exploration than destruction, however. The heart of the game is in the roaming, discovering and information gathering. There's about a billion places for Samus to scan and inspect, traveling by foot or portal or hole in the wall. Whenever one of those holes is too small for her to enter erect, Samus can condense herself into a "morph ball"--oh man, it never gets old--and roll her way through. (And just to push that pinball analogy over the edge, she gets shot out of a "kinetic orb cannon" in ball form and goes flying all over the place. Teehee.)

So in that regard, Metroid Prime 2 is still a kids' game. It dresses itself up with a "dark" story and ominous music, but for the most part it's bright colors and the usual bad guy butt-kicking. The bad guys this time around are the Ing, an evil alien suffix bent on beating Samus black and blue. They come from the bad half of the schizophrenic planet Aether, which was torn into Light and Dark Worlds ages ago. Now the Ing are ripping through the barrier between the realms and wreaking havoc on the nice side of the planet. They've not only killed scores of Samus' Federation comrades, but they've also stolen the Light World's vital energy; it's up to Samus to get it back.

As always, Samus is a lone ranger. She's got some alien tech to help her out (courtesy of the Light World's Luminoth race), but other than that, she has this adventure to herself--which makes for a lonely game. The formula has worked for all the other Prime incarnations, but the general lack of activity around Samus does make things a bit dry. The silence does help, however, in lying the intrigue thick. For example, when Samus first arrives on Aether, the bodies of her Federation buddies are strewn on the ground or dangling from above in spider webs, mimicking the old horror movie feel. In fact, the game comes off as very Hitchcock: the stillness is the suspense, the action is concise.

The design of the game is just as calculated. Echoes has an incredibly textured feel to its look. The environments are a complex of angles, curves and colors. The intricacies involved in the aesthetics of the game--the neon/smooth polygons of computer images, the organic crookedness of caves and tunnels, the vibrant pulse of light-oriented weapons and gadgets--are the stuff of magic.

Think pinball. Big flashy lights and you're a ball on the go. Enjoy.