Explore and blast baddies on Nintendo 3DS in ‘Metroid: Samus Returns’

By Gabe Gurwin June 13, 2017

Metroid Prime 4 is coming to the Nintendo Switch next year, but fans of Samus Aran will be able to play a game on 3DS quite a bit sooner. Metroid: Samus Returns is a remake of the Game Boy-exclusive Metroid II: Return of Samus, built to take full advantage of the portable system’s features.

The game’s official trailer shows a Metroid devouring an alien as Samus’ ship crashes down to the ground of an alien planet — her character model looks very similar to what we’ve seen in Prime and Other M. After investigating the scene, Samus is attacked by a spider-like creature and the action begins. Samus’ missiles and blaster shots look wonderful, even on the 3DS’s aging hardware, and it all appears to be running at a smooth framerate that will make navigating the game’s environment hazard significantly less frustrating.

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Samus’ missiles and blaster shots look wonderful, even on the 3DS’s aging hardware

Some cinematic flair also appears to be included in Samus Returns. After damaging an enemy, camera spins around as Samus is knocked on her back before the screen quickly cuts to black. The 2.5D perspective used by some other recent side-scrollers hasn’t always looked as crisp as classic sprite-based artwork, but Nintendo seems to have knocked it out of the park this time around.

Metroid: Samus Returns hits the 3DS family of systems on September 15, and it will come with special Amiibo in addition to supporting previous Samus Amiibo figures. It’s one of several games still coming to the system. Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon will launch in November, while Hey! Pikmin is scheduled to arrive this summer. A version of Fire Emblem Warriors will also be coming to New 3DS and New 2DS systems.

For more coverage of Nintendo’s E3 2017 lineup, as well as the games from publishers like Bethesda, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Sony, and Microsoft, be sure to check out our E3 2017 hub. We also have on-site coverage of games coming all this week.

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Don’t expect Zelda’s $70 price to become the new Switch standard, says Nintendo

Link looks at his hand in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will be Nintendo's first Switch game to be priced at $70. News that Tears of the Kingdom, a sequel to one of the bestselling and most critically acclaimed titles on the system, will have an increased price compared to its predecessor came as a surprise over three-and-a-half years after its announcement. It also raised questions about what the future of pricing for Nintendo games will be, especially as Sony, Microsoft, and third-party publishers all upped the cost of their new games in recent years.
While Nintendo will release Tears of Kingdom at $70, a spokesperson for the company tells Digital Trends that this will not always be the case for its first-party games going forward.
"No," the spokesperson said when Digital Trends asked if this is a new standard. "We determine the suggested retail price for any Nintendo product on a case-by-case basis."
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – Official Trailer #2
To get more insight into the price shift, I spoke to Omdia Principal Analyst George Jijiashvili, who explains what has caused the price of games to go up in recent years and how Tears of the Kingdom demonstrates that Nintendo will "remain flexible about first-party title pricing." Ultimately, Nintendo fans are finally starting to feel the impact of inflation that's been sweeping across the game industry, even if it's only "on a case-by-case basis" for now.
The price is right
Nintendo claims that not every one of its significant first-party game will be $70, and we can actually already see that in action. Preorders just went live for Pikmin 4, which launches on July 21, after Tears of the Kingdom, and it only costs $60. Still, Zelda's price tag indicates that going forward, Nintendo will at least consider raising the price of its most anticipated games to $70. But why start with Tears of the Kingdom?
When asked why it chose Tears of the Kingdom as its first $70 Nintendo Switch game, a Nintendo spokesperson simply reiterated that the company will "determine the suggested retail price for any Nintendo product on a case-by-case basis." Still, it's a surprising choice for Nintendo to make that pricing change to just one exclusive game almost six years into the Switch's life span. Jijiashvili thinks the choice to do this with Tears of the Kingdom was a pretty apparent one for Nintendo, although it won't apply to everything going forward.
"If you are going to make a game $70, it's going to be the follow-up to one of your most critically acclaimed and bestselling games ever," Jijiashvili tells Digital Trends. "I don’t think that this means that $70 will become the standard price for all major Nintendo releases. It's worth noting that Metroid Prime Remastered is priced at $40. It's clear that Nintendo will remain flexible about first-party title pricing."

It makes basic financial sense for Nintendo to ask for a little bit more for a game it knows will be one of the biggest releases of 2023. But what factors in the game industry and world's economy at large caused Nintendo to make this decision?
Priced Out
For more than a decade, people got comfortable with AAA video games being priced at $60. Of course, there were occasional exceptions to this rule, but it was seen as an industry standard until the dawn of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Publisher 2K was one of the first to announce a price increase, and companies like EA, Sony, and Microsoft have all followed suit. Jijiashvili chalks this up to inflation-related pressure on game publishers.
"The games industry has already been experiencing a lot of inflationary pressure," he explains. "AAA games are much more expensive to make now than they used to be, but prices have actually been declining in inflation-adjusted terms -- if prices had risen with inflation since 1990, they would now be over $90. On top of that, we’ve had a big burst of general inflation, meaning that publishers are looking at big increases in everything from salaries to tools. It’s going to be really hard for most publishers to avoid passing on all those extra costs at some point."
Jijiashvili provided us with a graphic created by Omdia that "shows what the typical price points for each generation would look like if you adjusted for inflation." As you can see, the inflation-adjusted prices are only exponentially growing, and the big game pricing shifts the graph highlights were all technically not even enough to keep up with inflation when they happened.

Gaming

Metroid Prime Remastered just surprise launched on Nintendo Switch

Samus Aran stands tall in Metroid Prime Remastered.

A remastered edition of Metroid Prime was just surprise announced via February's Nintendo Direct. Even more shocking is the news that Metroid Prime Remastered is available to download via the Switch eShop today.

Nintendo Direct 2.8.2023 - Nintendo Switch

Gaming

Here’s what E3 2023 could look like without Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft

Playstation character wall at E3 2018

Let's start with the good news: E3 2023 will be held in its in-person format once again after three long years of digital events necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, this time with ReedPop at the helm. The bad news is that Sony, Xbox, and Nintendo -- gaming's "Big 3" -- may not show up at the industry’s biggest convention this summer.

This is according to a report from IGN citing multiple sources, who claimd the companies won’t be a part of the show or make appearances on the floor at the Los Angeles Convention Center in any way. Their absence from this year’s E3, especially Nintendo’s, may come as a shock to the gaming community, but it's not such a surprise when looking at the past few iterations of E3. Even before the pandemic locked everyone down in 2020, Sony and Xbox had been hosting their own E3-style livestreams, so it was more likely they would do it again this year anyway. Nintendo, on the other hand, managed to show off its upcoming games via Nintendo Direct streams and at its booth, console kiosks and all.