Frag You!

When I was in secondary school, the frequency in which I upgraded my PC was determined by id Software's game releases. When Quake came out, I managed to get my hands on a second hand 486 DX4-100 MHz processor. The release of Quake II got me going the Pentium way, with a second hand Pentium 200 MHz processor.

Second hand stuff were considered pretty valuable back in the day, reason being that new parts were expensive and not easy to come by. By the time Quake III came out, I had a brand new AMD K6-2 rig overclocked to over 560MHz and a Permedia 3D OpenGL graphics card with 4 megabytes of video RAM.

This trend of upgrading my PC has continued until last year, culminating in a rig that could run Quake 4. Having gone through so much (games and CPUs), what does a through and through PC-based FPS-games player like me have to say about Metroid Prime Hunters, a first person shooter (FPS) for the Nintendo DS?

A phrase muttered by a friend when he watched me play this game basically sums it all: "It's a revolution!". Now, to elaborate. Metroid Prime Hunters is the first FPS I've played on my Nintendo DS. As an FPS player who loves nothing more than to "shoot anything that moves", this game works for me on so many levels.

The controls, which combine the use of the stylus, d-pad and the left trigger button, are so intuitive that they transplant the accuracy of the mouse/keyboard combination most often found in PC shooters. This is important as nothing breaks a game more than poor controls and MPH's control scheme avoids this pitfall by being intuitive and very easy to get into.

Graphics wise, this game is stunning for a Nintendo DS game. Unlike the newer Tony Hawk game, which was pretty with it's cell shaded look, MPH stuck to conventional textures but with a graphics engine capable of rendering eye-candy reminiscent of Quake III, just grainier.

I've just started playing the single player portion of the game and I'm already loving it. This game is also WFC enabled, for worldwide online play (more on that in another article) and has support for the Rumble Pak.

Since this is a pretty old title, you should have no difficulty finding this title in the secondhand market. Age doesn't affect this title as it is still the definitive first person shooter on the Nintendo DS.