Topic: Metroid Prime 4: Beyond

I haven't really been keeping current with anything since DK Bananza, but I'm defo going day one with this. The footage looks phenomenal. Time to dust off my Switch 2!

Hopefully Nintendo goes full troll and offers Switch character icons of the Federation soldiers.

@NintendoByNature
I take that back. The Muumba mouse attachment actually also works great with face buttons. I just discovered a loose grip for it where thumb rests over face buttons, pointer over R, middle finger over ZR, ring finger in the recessed indent meant to provide grip, and pinky slight gripping bottom right rim of the accessory which, along with ring finger indent, provides enough grip to slightly lift up and reposition when needed.

$30 will get you the pad and the mouse accessory if you want a proper comfortable experience. Granted, Metroid Prime 4 has gyro, and I think I prefer gyro because it's not like, a precision shooter. Mouse mode will work great and will be a fine example of it, but I think mouse mode will be my preferred method for games that dont have gyro, like Tomb Raider, or for precision shooters when they come, like DOOM The Dark Ages. Still good to have the pad and accessory to try out for various games. You could just use the mouse strap accessory with string cut off to test out, then get the full accessory once you've determined whether its something you wanna spend $20 on. But the $10 pad? Thats an easy decision (imo) for a system that has the capability.

And the benefit of the strap accessory is its easy to bounce between using as a normal controller split joycon style, and using it in mouse mode when shooting. That's actually been how I've been playing in Tomb Raider. Whenever a gun/bow fight breaks out I just set it down into mouse mode.

@JaxonH good shout on that. I doubt it'll get much use from me, but at 10, it's worth trying out.

When the game inevitably gets a notably better Metacritic rating than Air Riders (which is going to happen even IF every negative assumption of this game somehow ends up being true), Nintendo should post it next to a pic of this Myles guy who I don't care about.

It’s time for the pre-release Metacritic predictions contest!

I did pretty well with DK: Bananza (went for 89 and it’s currently sitting on 91) but I’m feeling less confident about this game.

…But that’s not going to stop me from giving it a go! I predict that Prime 4 will get a Metacritic score of…

85

I'll predict 90-91. I think the reviews will say it does lots of things even better than metroid prime remastered and then give it a lower score on average.

Surley it must score better than Donkey Kong Bananza. 🤔 I'll predict that Metroid Prime 4: Beyond will get a Metacritic score of;

93

😅

85. I think it does probably have some problems, on the basis of being in development for so long.

But I'm going to say again, automatic better score than Air Riders almost regardless of merit because of what both games are. shrugs

Air Ride is 79. The Metroid Prime games have gotten 97, 92, 85, 90, 91, and 94. So I think it is pretty safe to assume the new one will be well above Kirby.

Yeah, exactly. A Metroid Prime worse than previous games can easily outscore the best possible, seemingly more beloved than the latest Mario Kart, Air Ride sequel because of what the games are.

I'm undecided if my opinion of this is about the limitations of certain types of cool niche games that don't work like safer games or active annoyance at game reviewers. It's not really about the games themselves, as someone who expects to at least mostly love Prime 4.

My personal Metascore guess is 90-92.

@kkslider5552000
I don't think development length is an indication of quality concern. It was rebooted from scratch in 2019, so it's only been 6 yrs and change, which is typical for Retro Studios.

But I do expect around 87 because there will be 1-2 reviewers who go ape $#!% over the game having actual characters with personality and not just remaking the same exact game as Prime 1 all over again. Both Hyrule Warriors and Kirby Air Ride reviewed well but had aggregate pulled down from one site which gave a 4/10 back to back for both of them.

But I don't really care what score it lands at. To me, I'm convinced already this is a 10/10 game. There's always a possibility I'm proven wrong, but I don't expect that to happen. I love everything about this game from what I've seen and am absolutely thrilled with Metroid finally introducing some additional characters that aren't nameless NPCs, with quality voice acting and dialog that helps you get to know them and engage you emotionally, which will also help characterize Samus more even without her speaking. Though I do hope she speaks in this game. At least a little bit. Even just a line or two, I'd be happy. Dread whet my appetite for more spoken Samus dialog.

But ya, I think it would get 90+ except for the fact some people are really stubborn, and out of pride won't walk back their knee-jerk reactions even if the game proves them wrong.

@NintendoByNature
I think you'll be surprised. For games with gyro, that's just more preferable, but for games that don't have gyro but do offer mouse aiming? It's the way to go. Playing Tomb Raider (which I beat on PS4 when it launched using just right analog to aim) is soooo much easier when I quickly set the joycon down on the pad to aim whenever a gunfight breaks out. I'm even starting to use it all the time, even just for camera.

I will caution you though- expect a learning curve. Any time you use a new control scheme, it's going to feel weird at first. But like the right analog stick when it was invented, if you just invest a little time using it, you'll come to appreciate its superiority over the "old way of doing things". Give it an hour or two to find the right grip, to develop some muscle memory and sharpen your skills, remapping buttons if necessary (absolutely MUST swap L3 and R3 when playing Tomb Raider with mouse). Be sure to adjust both system level and in-game sensitivities as well, try it out on the slower end, the middle, and the faster end and see what suits you best.

Just be sure to use the mouse strap. And cut that wrist strap off (or don't, if you actually use it- could help since the joycon slides off the pad easily, but I don't leave it on the pad personally, I swap back and forth with using as a controller in hand and switching to mouse mode when in combat).

I may well be lowballing. I hope I’m lowballing. Not that 85 is at all low!

Also, in order to ensure the fairness of the contest, any scores given as a range (e.g. 93-95) shall be converted to the midpoint of that range, which puts @FishyS on 90.5 and @Nep-Nep-Freak on 91. Guessing the same score as another user is absolutely fine!

I take metascores with a pinch of salt at the best of times but they're particularly bad for comparing games across eras.

Anyway, I'll set the bar at the 79 that Other M got. Even allowing for a fair amount of grade deflation over the years, they'd have to turn in a pretty poor effort for it to score worse.

I'm going to wager around ~80ish, +/- 2 or 3 points either side.

I think MP4 will absolutely be 'pretty good' but I have reservations about whether this will live up to expectations.

For me personally, I don't have a ton of skin in this game - I much prefer the 2D entries and think Dread is a masterclass. I just would have loved to have seen what could have been done with MP4 if it was a Switch2 exclusive (vs BC with Switch1). I have no doubt we will see a ton of extra sheen and FPS improvements playing on S2, but surely the overall scope of the game has been compromised to ensure it can run proficiently on the old hardware.

@JaxonH

For numerical context, the mean average (to 2 d.p.) of all review scores on Metacritic is currently 79.62 for Air Riders (based on 76 reviews) and 80.01 for Hyrule Warriors: AoI (based on 89 reviews).

If we remove the Metro's score of 40 from each dataset, the mean score becomes 80.15 for Kirby and 80.47 for Hyrule Warriors — a jump of roughly half a percentage point in either case.

Now, half a percentage point is non-trivial influence for a single publication to have, but equally, it's not clear whether it actually had any effect on the Metascore at all. It puts it in 'might have dragged the Metascore down by one point... might have not' territory.

We don't know, because the Metascore isn't simply the mean average of the all the scores on Metacritic, but a weighed average which assigns more influence to publications deemed 'credible', and then normalises the resulting data. I don't have access to their secret formula, but both games have a Metascore of 79, which is pretty close to the mean scores of 79.62 and 80.01.

Unless Metacritic's algorithm assigns an insanely high weighting to the Metro's reviews, I think it's safe to say that the most it could have dragged the games' Metascores down by is a single point, and very possibly not even that.

@Maxz

I would add to this that, even if it did drag the score down by 1 point. . . should this be viewed as meaningful? Absolutely not, because review scores ( and thus their aggregate ) simply aren't that precise of a measure. Honestly, I'd say that no difference in score less than 5 points is significant, and that's probably me being generous.

Now, does this mean a 1 point difference never matters in the real world? No, people make big deals about tiny differences all the time. However, they shouldn't, and are mistaken for doing so, which is not the same thing. That people don't learn the concept of "margin of error" doesn't mean it ceases to exist.

@Maxz
Problem is they use weighted, not arithmetic means, and we don't know the weighting applied. Hence why OpenCritic and Metacritic can have aggregates that vary by 2, 3, even 4 points sometimes. In fact I often see 3 point deltas between them. If it was a simple average anyone could calculate it and it would always be the same.

That may not sound like much, but gamers see a 79 and equate to "70's range", whereas they see an 82 and equate to "80's range". Many games score 88, seen as good, but a 91 is suddenly GotY material. So a tiny difference can have a disproportionate impact in the mind of gamers. Not saying that's rational, just saying that's what it is. Even a single point differentiating an 89 from a 90 can have a significant impact on how the masses view a game.

@metaphysician
As someone who knows high level math well beyond Calculus 3, I've explained the concept of margin of error before to ppl. They don't get it nor do they care.

I even offered to build a spreadsheet for NintendoLife that auto-calculated the standard deviation for each score, and produced a +/- margin of error @95% confidence. The owner of the site wasn't interested.

I said user scores submitted on the site should take into account quantity of reviews submitted. Obviously, the fewer reviews submitted the wider the confidence interval. More scores would tighten the interval. But they didnt care.

Most ppl are like that. But it probably doesn't really matter because that's only valid if the scores are all unbiased, and I think I can safely say we can never be sure all scores are unbiased. Particularly with aggregate sites.

Ergo, reviews aggregates can be generally helpful but are largely useless as a be-all end-all summation of a game's quality. Best to find THREE specific reviewers you trust, whose tastes align with your own, and ignore everyone else. I say 3 because only 1 puts too much trust in a fallible opinion, and 2 could split both ways. 3 is the tiebreaker.

@JaxonH

“Problem is they use weighted, not arithmetic means, and we don't know the weighting applied.”

Yes, this is precisely my point. We don’t know. Therefore we cannot definitely claim that “Kirby Air Ride reviewed well but had aggregate pulled down from one site.”

All we can do is speculate based on the data we have access to, which tells us that the Metro’s review affected the unweighted mean by roughly half a percentage point (based on 76 reviews). For it to have affected the weighted Metacritic score by more than 1 point, it must be weighted extremely heavily. It could just as well be weighted very lightly, making its influence even more slight.

I’m not saying your statement (Kirby has its Metascore pulled down by one review) is wrong. I don’t have the data to do that. I’m just agreeing with you that we don’t know. Neither of us has the data to prove if it’s right.

Taking this uncertainly into account, “Kirby might have had its aggregate pulled down from one site” is the best we can claim.