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22 December 2023
Killer app.
If you don\'t know what that term means, I\'ll explain: a killer app is a game so outstandingly fun, awesome, and all around kickass, that people will pay any price to own it. Sure, Halo was only fifty bucks when it came out five years ago... but if you needed to buy an Xbox to play it on, that was another $300. Millions of gamers were ready to point and laugh as Microsoft\'s console died as quickly as it arrived... until they got a sniff of Halo. Suddenly $350 seemed like a sound investment to consumers worldwide. And for the Xbox, success followed.
If you don\'t know what that term means, I\'ll explain: a killer app is a game so outstandingly fun, awesome, and all around kickass, that people will pay any price to own it. Sure, Halo was only fifty bucks when it came out five years ago... but if you needed to buy an Xbox to play it on, that was another $300. Millions of gamers were ready to point and laugh as Microsoft\'s console died as quickly as it arrived... until they got a sniff of Halo. Suddenly $350 seemed like a sound investment to consumers worldwide. And for the Xbox, success followed.
I wasn\'t convinced, though. Stop me if I\'ve mentioned this three times before, but I just can\'t adjust to playing first-person shooting games with console controllers. I\'ve tried just about every control scheme imaginable, but absolutely nothing comes close to the precision available to PC gamers of using a mouse to aim. \"Mouselook\", as it\'s known, is the cadillac of first-person aiming. A mouse provides fluid, intuitive, unerringly accurate control that simply can\'t be done on Xbox, PS2, or GameCube\'s deformed radiation baby of a gamepad. What can I say? I\'m a mouselook snob.
But then there\'s the Nintendo DS. I wandered past a display at my local Best Boutique City Etc. store the other day, where they had Metroid Prime: Hunters available to play on Nintendo\'s nifty little portable system. Despite my longstanding disbelief that the Metroid series could be transformed from a side-scrolling platformer into an interesting first-person shooter, I gave the game a try.
It sounds impossible, but the control is flawless. Nintendo somehow managed to cram a perfect facsimile of mouselook control into this sleek little handheld device you can fold up and put in your pocket. By moving the stylus around the DS\'s touch screen, I was able to instantly aim my gun exactly where my brain was telling it to point with a simple flick of my wrist.
Game developers take notice: this is how a first-person shooter should control. If yours doesn\'t, then yours sucks. Nintendo has set the benchmark. Copy this game shamelessly. Until those expensive home consoles introduce a better way to contol aiming than a joystick, do not make shooting games for them. Metroid Prime: Hunters does everything right that all of you have been doing wrong this entire time, and it does it on hardware the size of two PopTarts.
So after playing the game for about a half hour (and having just come into some money via means which I don\'t care to disclose), I knew that the purchase of a Nintendo DS was worth it for Metroid alone. Sure, there\'s plenty of other cool games for the thing, but Metroid is still king of the mountain.
Killer app.
artid
3741
Old Image
9_4_nowplaying.jpg
issue
vol 9 - issue 04 (dec 2006)
section
entertainmental