General gaming discussion

I played a good chunk of Metroid Prime when I got a lend of it a year or two after it was released - don’t think I ever completed it, but certainly played a lot of it. But there’s something about revisiting it this time where it feels kind of revelatory. Maybe I was just too young first time to really get the things it was doing around level design, atmosphere and environment, but it’s been proving thrilling this time around. Yes it’s had a visual makeover and modernised controls (although back in the mid 2000s we were much more used to games having quirky control schemes) but it’s still a remarkably fresh and forward-thinking game in ways I think only a select few more recent games have really managed to capture or build upon.

I know there were plenty of people online demanding they make an anti-invasion statement. Honestly, I think that was an impossible ask - that's the kind of thing that ends with people having 'mysterious' falls from balconies in Russia. Now, there's an argument that their word fart of a statement was worse than saying nothing at all, but - regardless of the political beliefs of individual developers or managers - I'm not sure what else could have been expected from a studio about to release a commercial video game.

It'd be a more valid excuse if WB weren't more than happy to give the game to influencers/streamers, and indeed publicly release the game several days early for people who ponied up a bit of extra cash. And as @CatInABox says, DF is more than capable of taking day-one patches into account as part of the review process. There's no question that a lot of prominent outlets just didn't get the game in advance, whereas a lot of other publications - including the no-name blogs that often show up with the highest score on Metacritic - did. That's not to say the game is bad, of course, but it was clearly a 'managed' rollout.