Last night I finished Metroid Prime.

The final boss was a lot easier than I remembered, same with Meta Ridley. Though to be fair, I didn't have it on hard mode, luckily, my brother still has his 100% hard mode file, so I loaded it up and beat Metroid Prime on my second try, first time I played the game I just about gave up on the final boss.

So yup, straight on to echoes now, it's kinda weird coz it all feels like one game, or one experience, but I can't go check out Tallon or any other areas from MP1.

I haven't played much of echoes yet, i just got the morph bomb a few minutes ago, these early boss fights are nearly killing me though, I guess I'm just being careless since they're just giant bugs.

Oh, and in Metroid Prime related news, Metroid Prime 3 has been given a release date; the 20th of August. Can't wait.

And again, it's Tuesday, so my friends will be coming round again, last episode of Heroes tonight, and I'm kinda glad.. gotten sick of the show, still this season finale should be good.

Not to mention my friend will have the Halo3 beta, so we'll probably be playing that all night, I'm actually really looking forward to it.

Last entry, Cocopuffs said more pics couldn't hurt, so why not:

Yep, the box art for Legend of Zelda - Phantom Hourglass.

I, like most people, am looking forward to this game, not just because they're returning to the beautiful world and style of Wind Waker, but because they're doing something new with the gameplay, even if it is kinda superficial.

One thing I'm very worried about, is the graphics, the DS is well capable of rendering a nice Wind Waker looking Zelda game, no troubles.

What I'm worried about is Nintendo are recycling the engine from Animal Crossing Wild World. Water effects aside, that game was pretty ugly, it had a nice style and everything, but way too many objects were sprites, and almost every object's edge was defined by the edge of the texture, and not a polygon seam, so there was almost 0 anti-aliasing, which made the game a pixelated mess.

But that's something I'm sure, in fact I know Nintendo have changed, the trees etc in Phantom Hourglass are no longer giant sprites, they're nice big 3D trees.

So what else is there to be worried about?

Well, since they're recycling the ACWW engine, the game is being constructed as a 2D game.

On any other system, I'd love this, but the DS… it doesn't work so well, that means two polygons are used for what would be a 16x16 tile in a 2d game, so for a long hall way, you could get by just using 8 polygons for the whole thing…

But in Phantom Hourglass, they could be using hundreds or thousands depending on how long that hallway is.

DS needs to go easy on the resources so they can maintain a good frame rate, I really hope they manage to get 60fps, but at the least I'm hoping for a consistent 30fps…

Oh, and this means the textures are really small and repetitive.. big no no for 3d games.

And then there's Link…

I don't think I need to clarify which one is from Wind Waker, and which from Phantom Hourglass.

Wind Waker Link's look of disgust says it all really, and yes there's your clarification.

Look at him.. He's all out of proportion, his facial details should be handled with polygons so he'd look great on a close up, and there are too many shades where his skin gets darker, there should just be one, two if you count the normal shade.

Still, I know it will be a good game, even if the graphics bug the hell out of me.

BYAAH!