Metroid Prime 2: Echoes has one of the best title screens ever.
It begins off with edge-lit glimpses and silhouettes, a bit like a Bond intro. But instead of bare our bodies and wait-was-that-a-nipple, there’s something grotesque and alien and impressively FMV in the darkness.
There’s those traditional Prime-y choir synths, which might be the mournful sounds of an historical civilisation, or just a planet’s historical past given voice.
And the textual content comes with such superior panning and scanning and normal UI maximalism, with this honeycombed screen texture and skittering letters flicking on and off — some of the letters from Retro Studios Game become Metroid — and noises that are half hacking, half insectoid trills, with a heartbeat sound beneath.
The choir goes one word greater for the fourth word, there are two more lub-dub pulses before a essential beat of silence, and then that drop of the essential theme, clear and brilliant – a signal from space. Then the best bit! That bizarre shimmer-shudder sound as the Metroid Prime 2 title enters the screen. You can really feel it in your ASMR gland.
And do not get me began on the sense of epic heroism from raising the last two notes of the phrase when the melody gets repeated.
So much of the Prime collection’ appeal is here. The temper, the music, the mechanical scanning and interfacing with worlds historic and natural, and you’ve not even pressed Start! (You should press Start.)
But perhaps you like the authentic Prime one more; the eerie crackle and fade-in of Nintendo and Retro Studios presents, the Lucozade orange that might be a Metroid’s innards, the spooky model of the essential theme.
The 2023 remaster ‘fixes’ the short animation cycle so that the tendril sways up and down but it seems a bit foolish. That abrupt VHS loop in the authentic had the sinister really feel of discovered footage, like the scene of a crime.
But the title screen was more than just a flashy entry level, a good hallway to the home (learn: lethal planet). It set the tone, framed the recreation. And in my reminiscence, it’s now half of the recreation’s texture and motion: When you press Start, it does that little swing into a totally different half of the Metroid (with more bioelectric fizzing), and then after selecting your save, there’s that swooping guided tour and gradual fade-out.
This sequence of that spacey intro theme adopted by the more upbeat choral blare of the file choose, before Samus emerges to that iconic five-note fanfare, is a cadence as inseparably linked in my thoughts as the observe sequence on an album. After In The End comes A Place For My Head.
Heck, I’ve not even performed Prime 3 and yet I by some means ‘remember’ the title screen, most likely just from some YouTube archaeology. But it still caught because it rocks, with that tragic, vaguely feminine siren synth and an ink blot of infestation across textual content that’s gelled collectively like cells.
Recognisably Prime, with that meld of the natural and the technological, and you can forgive that too-long fade-to-black and the goofy font of ‘Corruption’ because in the second bit of the tune there’s that determined high word wail as the Terminator drums kick in.
So good. Who even wants to play the recreation?! (I do, Nintendo – please release those remasters.)
But then again, perhaps you favor the 2D Metroid title screens, and I can respect that.
You might like the cinematic Super Metroid, with its alarm shrill escalation before that full-screen reveal of our bodies deathly still beside a shifting (but still caged?) Metroid at the centre, the thick bass coming in waves like a planet’s pulse.
Or the stars and floor of OG Metroid and Zero Mission, starting with the crust of the world before the journey beneath. Or the impressively creepy off-key dissonance of the Metroid 2 one, that progresses to a tune that consists of the low health alarm as a pattern/anxiety set off. Wild!
Or perhaps you favor the straighter Metroid font used in the Mercury Steam video games, without the skew that gives it that Star Wars-intro sense of vastness and journey. (Why would you favor this?)
Some people are apprehensive about Prime 4 because of a motorcycle in a PS2 desert, which is truthful, I guess. I think it seems rad personally, and am excited for the prospect of more Prime. More of that slow-grow of data and talents, the weighty feeling of squelch and scrunch as you traipse through attractive biomes, the natural curve of alien structure.
But also the pleasure of participating with something so attractive and evocative that I might still think about its title screen 20 years later.