Video

That's the tragic loop, though. Legit like 80% of Nintendo's decisions could be described as 'they would be financially stupid to do this' and then they do it anyway. It would be stupid to not port TP and WW HD, it would be stupid to charge 60 dollars for an HD port of a Wii game with barely any fixes, it would be stupid to strike down emulation sites and not provide a legal alternative to them, it would be stupid to be hyping up the release for the fourth numbered entry in a series without giving anyone a proper way to play the 2nd and 3rd ones. You can track the logic of these things down to a science, have well-researched evidence, and organise it all into spreadsheets about why not doing those things would be absolutely stupid, and Nintendo will still do it anyway. But at the same time, Nintendo will display moments of genuine brilliance by doing things like making a remaster of Prime 1 that looks so good people can't believe it runs natively on the hardware and sell it for 40 bucks. They display just enough practical intelligence to not assume they're always going to make the stupidest decision possible, and that's what makes tracking their thought processes a nightmare.

If this kind of thing continues, the amount of people making games might get drastically smaller if they all end up going out of business.

@@Shweelan Already happening, you have the mobile, gaming as service by the big corps, AA and indie fitting the rest. AAA block busters only one or two by the likes of Sony and nintendo because that is what they are used to.

One of the best things about the remaster isn't just how well it polishes and freshens up the experience for veterans of the series, it's how it makes the game accessible to a whole new group of people who either missed out on it the first time or never finished it back in the day.

Possibly. I'd just have to find something I was genuinely interested in reviewing, because I tend to lose interest in forcing myself to revisit games for the sake of reviewing them.

Honestly, with it being a series from 1985, the fact the oldest release we don't have is a game from almost 20 years after that, it could be a lot worse.

Literally never said that. Please rewatch the video using your ears this time and pick up on the fact I talked about all the rumours surrounding why Prime 2 and 3 haven't been ported and said nothing about releasing them before they were ready.

Reporting on rumours and articles about the possible reasons Prime 2 and 3 haven't been ported is not 'gaslighting'. Not only that, but I also didn't say any of these rumours were true at any point, and its all just hypotheticals and guesswork based on unsubstantiated rumours.

Or have prime 2 come out later this year, prime 3 come out early next year, and Prime 4 come out mid to late 2025

It's not too out of the box of an idea. They dropped the remaster of Prime 1 out of nowhere in a normal direct, so there's a chance they could do the same thing for 2 and 3 at another one later this year.

I don't wanna be that guy, but you are aware of the fact that Nintendo is a few million sales away from having the highest-selling video game console of all time all the while having multiple games on the Switch platform that have sold over 30 million units, meanwhile Sony has shipped half the PS5s Nintendo did Switches in its first four years, and has only had one PS5 game sell over 10 million units at the moment, right? Like I'm not a Nintendo fan and I don't care about console wars because they're unbelievably stupid, but saying 'Sony is killing Nintendo' while Nintendo is on the most successful run in the company's history at a time when Sony has less than 15 exclusives for their console after 4 years on the market is just objectively wrong.

The argument as to why they only remastered Prime 1 is that its both the highest-selling Prime game and beloved by most fans of the trilogy. The other 2 sold less than half of what Prime 1 did and have no end of detractors that will decry them as inferior sequels that ruined the good work the first one did. The logic is that Prime 1 is the best foot to step forward on and doesn't run the risk of turning people off and killing the hype of Prime 4 if they release an expensive remaster trilogy and the public at large thinks 2 and 3 are garbage. hypothetically. Also I must ask: Prime 1 remastered was given a graphical overhaul so impressive people genuinely struggled to believe could run on the hardware it released on, was given several overhauled and brand new control schemes from different releases to accommodate the playstyles of every person who has played the series on different systems, and was shadow-dropped for 40 bucks by a company that consistently releases 60 dollar uprezzes of Wii games from ten years ago. What is it about Prime 1 remastered that makes you say it was a rip-off that deserved to be boycotted?

Dread was a lot of people’s first Metroid game and it was designed to be that way. The hype for Prime 4 seems to hinge on it being a sequel to Prime 3 than Dread was to fusion

Tbf, Metroids 1-4 are mostly-self-contained storylines that can be played in a vacuum without missing much that also aren't numbered, which makes them seem even more disconnected. Even Dread being a direct sequel to Fusion catches you up on the events of Fusion in the opening cutscene and once that's out of the way you're left to go crazy with the game's current story. Prime 4, on the other hand, is a numbered sequel to a sub-series that's pulling it's major villain from two previous games in the series. I'm hoping the number and the more-connected narrative of the Prime series gets Nintendo to port at least Prime 2 and 3 with a 'previously on' recap cutscene for the events of Hunters and Federation Force to catch people up. That's what I think is the logical path to tread, but like I said in the video, 'Nintendo' and 'logic' don't often go too well together in sentences.

I'm really hoping its the latter. I'd just love to get versions of Prime 2 and 3 that don't need to be emulated and overhauled with homebrew software to be playable, especially after the huge purge of ROMs from Vimm that's made emulating them even harder in the modern day.

I do hope if they get around to remastering Prime 2 and 3, they use the Wii versions as the base, mostly for Prime 2. Gamecube Prime 2 has some notoriously awful segments in it thanks to one of the producers forcing Retro to crank up the difficulty to an insane level to try and recapture that 'NES hard' feeling, with fights like the Boost Guardian and the Spider Guardian being the best examples of that. The Wii version of Prime 2 actually tones down the difficulty substantially back to what Retro wanted it to be before their vision got overwritten, and it makes those fights be the interesting formula change-ups they were designed to be instead of being this insanely over-tuned difficulty spikes that most people despised.

Tbf, Glen's role as the 'creator' of Dead Space and 'director' of Dead Space are very much not the same. Glen Schofield served as a producer on the first game who came up with ideas and concepts that he handed off to directors, designers, artists, and modellers who filtered his concepts into usable features. He only stepped into the director's chair for Callisto after producing DS1 and leaving the company before 2 started major development, so the giant drop-off in quality between DS and Callisto makes sense because he was never the guy who made DS good to begin with. The marketing around Callisto was deceptive as hell and kept painting Glen as if he was the mastermind behind the original game and pulled all the strings on that, when that just wasn't the case at all.

Tbf they sold the full remaster of Prime 1 for 40 bucks. If they're gonna slap-job Prime 2 and 3 on there, there's a genuine chance they could sell of them for 20 bucks a pop. Or they could do 60 bucks for both of them. Nintendo once again being as unpredictable as it gets.

I kinda wish HD remasters did what Halo Anniversary did where you could switch between the graphical style/aesthetic at will, so if you liked the original more you could play it with a higher resolution, frame rate, and the mechanical improvements. I remember one thing that always annoyed the hell out of me with TP HD was how there was no option to set the game to the Wii's mirrored 'right-handed mode' unless you picked Hero Mode.

@@Shweelan Yeah, the inability to mirror the game without Hard Mode was kind of an odd omission.

It's even weirder to me because the right-handed layout of the map is already in the game with the hard mode. The Wii version of TP outsold the Gamecube version and is regarded by a lot of people as the 'definitive' TP, so to exclude the option to freely switch to the version most people are familiar with without a difficulty bump is so strange.

I'm hoping the surprising sales of the Prime 1 remastered lit a fire under Nintendo's ass and woke them up to how much people want more of this series.

I feel you on that one, man. I constantly flip-flop between supporting Nintendo because they'll spend years throwing out nothing but anti-consumer practices that feel like a genuine slap in the face to audiences, and then they'll drop a game that ends up becoming one of my favourite games of the generation out of the blue. They honestly feel like two completely different companies at certain points because one day they'll be evil to the core and greedy as can be, and the next they'll start refusing to shut down studios, the CEO will take a pay cut to prevent layoffs, allowing franchises with lower sales numbers to survive where others would shutter the company, and do AA development on wild, quirky ideas and passion projects the other companies would never let fly at any point because they think it's interesting. They somehow manage to bounce back and forth between being the worst company of the week and the most kind and fair corporation in the gaming industry, and it happens like three times a year.

Hopefully. I'd love to see them both.

Back to back! 👌🏻👌🏻👌🏻👌🏻

Okay? What does Prime 3 being a Wii game have to do with anything?

It's wild, isn't it? Nintendo will polish up and ship out remasters of games nobody asked for yet will ignore people screaming from the rooftops for them to port the already-existing HD remasters of two games from one of their biggest franchises. It's that beautiful Nintendo logic at work again.

@@ShweelanI’m starting to think the Zelda ports were made up rumors at this point.

Lord almighty, I hope not. Or even worse if they lock them behind an 80 dollar special edition like Activision did with Modern Warfare Remastered.

At this rate we're gonna be waiting a while, unfortunately.

I'd settle for HD ports to be honest. Remasters would be cool though. I'm just happy to be getting Prime 4 after all these years.

@@applejuicejunkie316 Since he’d said it last year. It’s possible they might be working on Prime 2 & 3 Remastered as we speak, both getting individual releases by next year!

Hoping and praying that he got to make this dream a reality. Both games absolutely deserve the same treatment the first one got.

​@@applejuicejunkie316Probably going to be a "good enough" soulless release like other games as of late.

I'm not sure how that would work with Prime 3 since that one was a Wii game. 2 being behind a paywall I can 100% see, though. That sounds exactly like Nintendo.

@@Shweelan a Wii game could be easily translated to the switch utilizing a joycon as the Wii remote. But I still think the paywall route will their answer.

A double-pack for 40 bucks would be my preferred method of getting them, especially if they're not going to be giving them the remastered treatment Prime 1 got.

iirc, the reason Prime 1 existed was to get the new Retro staff familiar with the Prime games and how to work on them technically and mechanically, right? If that's not right, let me know.

@Shweelan The ResetEra leaker/insider claimed that after a troubled project that was scrapped, Retro needed to put their people to work on something, that's when the remastering of, at first, all three Prime games came about, however, when Prime 4 got handed back to them, they decided to focus on finishing only Prime 1, the other two remasters got scrapped. The current understanding is that 2 and 3 would either not be done at all, as their existence is no longer needed anymore, or be outsourced to other devs, with MPR serving as a guideline, Jeff's source appears to be following up on the later case.

Right, right, that sounds familiar. I think I might've read about that when doing research on an older Prime 4 video I did and had forgotten it until now. Thank you for reminding me of this!

There's a specific homebrew of the Dolphin emulator called Primehack which makes the Prime Trilogy for the Wii playable on keyboard and mouse, and they managed to get all of 3's motion controls and gesture inputs to work on the scroll wheel and key bindings. I imagine if they can crack that, Nintendo can probably do the same and just make the Wii pointer aiming a generic right-stick aiming system.

Or they could also not be coming at all lol, in typical Nintendo fashion 😵

I think a double pack would be the best way to go about it, personally. Sell them for around 40-45 bucks before Prime 4 comes out and maybe do digital bundles where you can get all 3 games on the eShop for a reduced price in the lead-up to the game's release. That's what makes sense to me, but what makes sense to Nintendo is an unknowable mystery.

Hopefully.

It's again the repeated cycle of Nintendo not utilising franchises people are begging for and not making the moves people think they would. They're a walking enigma of a company that seem to be fumbling their way through their business for years at a time that will then drop a game that defines a generation and everyone reassesses them as geniuses that have their finger on the pulse like nobody else does.

But Prime 3 is a Wii game 🤔

​@@davidsalazar2077 exactly

GameCube will never come to NSO when they can just take one GameCube game, crank up the resolution, and resell it for a full $60 on Switch.

They could even do a Wii game NSO category and put the trilogy on there too. The sky's the limit when it comes to Nintendo reconstructing the virtual console but worse.

I don't think Prime remastered was ever full price, was it?

Okay the Pikmin example wasn't something I was aware of myself. If Nintendo's chosen to ride the lightning that close to the edge before, then they might full-well be gearing up to drop Prime 2 and 3 30 days before 4.

@@Shweelan exactly so yes while I want 2 and 3 extremely bad don’t worry there’s more than enough time for the game to come out

The simple solution would be to port them both to modern consoles and just reduce the price if they're worried about getting flak for overcharging, but there's that whole 'unpredictable Nintendo logic' at work again. As for porting them too many times, I don't think that statement exists in a post-original Resident Evil 4 world. That's game that's been ported at least 15 times since 2005, which has shown the entire world that as long as people keep buying the rereleases, companies will keep doing them. A third port to newer hardware when the most recent platform you can get them on is a financial flop of a console from 2012 is asking too much of the audience, personally.

Honestly, I'm hoping the success of things like Dread, Prime 1 remastered, and the hype for 4 made Nintendo take a second look at potential remasters of Prime 2 and 3 and decided to give them the same makeover than 1 got rather than them just being HD uprezzes. I'm not expecting it to be the case, but I am still delusional enough to hope.

I agree on every point except that I think it'll come out right before Prime 4. They've already got reworked controls (they would have to for it to function on Switch). So the only things necessary are graphical updates. Certainly not something that can happen in months, but if they release sometime in mid-2024, they'll have had over 2 years to work on the textures. I think that's feasible.

@@onetruebrick I feel like people might get Metroid fatigue if they release 2 and 3 as separate remasters the same way they did with Prime 1, right before 4. It would make more sense to give them the Pikmin treatment. Prime 3 should have its FPS boosted to 60, of course

@@StJimmy765 I don't think I ever implied that they would be released separately. It's likely going to be a combo pack. There really isn't enough time to do them separately before Prime 4 comes out.

@@onetruebrick For sure. It’s sad, I would have loved to see what they could do with the Sanctuary fortress in a full Prime 2 remaster