Alright, so, a new gameplay preview for Metroid Prime 4 released just recently and you can judge for yourself, but as someone who was alive and kicking in 2002, it’s genuinely painful to watch. They say it doesn’t feel much like Metroid at all and I’m inclined to agree.
Hey, did you want a strong atmosphere of isolation and mystery conveyed through a sci-fi narrative told subtly through environmental storytelling?
Tough shit because Timmy Cuntface doesn’t like that so much. Instead you get the complete opposite, walking through in an extremely bright, Destiny 2-esq environment as Miles, adorable blorbo according to the most annoying people you've ever met, yammers in your ear constantly.
Pictured: why video games REQUIRE constant voice acting.
The sad thing is, it’s hard to be surprised by this sort of thing anymore. Let me put it this way, I’m still old enough to remember video rental stores and I got introduced to so much cool shit that way – be that anime, the old classics, obscure hidden gems - you name it, and there was a ton of variety that you just don’t see anymore.
However, at some point, it felt like a lot of what I was interested in went away, in favour of... a million shitty comedy movies, like Norbit. Fucking Norbit. An entire wall of Norbit.
And this has happened enough in my life to where it’s like an endless cycle, in which every single time there’s people or a business or whatever bringing cool or weird shit to the masses, it inevitably shifts to focusing entirely on, excuse me, fucking morons, until it’s inevitably killed.
So, it’s hard to be surprised because there’s a reason why they stopped making these and “normal people” have been very vocal about how much they don’t care about Metroid, and how much they hated Metroid Dread, so it stands to reason why they would end up ruining it for their sake.
This happens all the time. It happened to Monster Hunter. It happened to Fallout, which used to have a complicated central theme about Man's inhumanity to Man, which was then flanderized by clueless hacks into “Wow! Cool Wasteland!” This happened to Baldur’s Gate, which used to be a character driven RPG about Nature versus Nurture, which was eventually taken and watered down into the critical role, generic porn parody version of itself.
And it'll happen to you...
A part of my frustration is that I’ve hinted at before that there’s not as much diversity in media anymore. Hey, do you like big, quippy, CGI superhero fuck-fests? Do you like Game of Thrones style soap operas? What about Dark Souls? What, you mean to say you don’t like slow, boring, linear hot chip action-adventure games? You better because that’s just what the entertainment industry is now. It’s what movies, television, and video games have metastasized into ever since Netflix came in and ruined everything forever.
See, there’s this clip here of Matt Damon explaining that the loss of the DVD made a lot of non-Blockbuster films a bigger risk because they had lost an entire source of revenue they had previously been able to rely on. And that killed entire swaths of films that couldn’t cover their expenses anymore.
A lot of my favourite movies, by all intensive purposes, were what you could call “DVD movies”. That’s what Fight Club was, that’s what Scott Pilgrim vs. The World was, Office Space, Heathers, Showgirls, Riding in Cars with Boys, etc. Heck, to be fair, Encanto is my favourite Disney movie and it’s the closest to a modern day example of this phenomenon.
Okay, that was movies, now let’s get into television. You could argue that it didn’t actually matter if a show had low ratings because even after it was over, the network could just sell it to other channels to fill in empty time slots. This encouraged studios to greenlit a lot more shows with a lot more variety, usually at around 65 episodes because that was the ideal size for syndication.
The problem? Oh, right, it’s like I said, Netflix ruined everything. While syndication is still around today, the current trend of making shows shorter and easier to binge, on a second screen nonetheless, means that they don’t make for ideal syndication. Instead, what you have is shows with massive budgets needing to fit into a subscription model, which means they are therefore more homogenized for mass appeal than ever before.
See, the benefit of having ratings powerhouses like Friends or The Simpsons constantly making a billion dollars every year, was that they had a 24-hour schedule to fill in anyways, so making a less popular show to fill in time-slots was better getting some money, than it was getting no money. It was a use it or lose it type of situation, but in the age of streaming, it’s just more sensible to make fewer shows that push subscriptions for a month and then cancel them.
Ultimately though, this is all a waste of fucking time. I could explicate on the importance of different and unique and “jank” media because that's how we got Metroid in the first place, and it’s how you got a lot of your favourite movies and TV shows as well, but fact of the matter is, most people don’t give two shits. They never cared all that much to begin with and their interest in different media is at an all time low, if not, they’re actively hostile towards it.
Fact of the matter is, most people tend to prefer comfort and stability in their entertainment. They don’t like to think and they don’t like to be challenged. Those who play the game win, and the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. Art is a business, you can play the game and prosper, or you can put in the effort and be punished.
This has never been more apparent than the clamouring over video game remakes. See, as game design ideas get defamiliarized and more generalized across the entire medium, we see games drift towards these commercially acceptable, simplified versions of ideas spread across so many games.
Skill trees have become smaller, random encounters and class systems are vanishing entirely, and abrasive decisions like the inability to control your party members are removed outright.
How about this, Resident Evil 2 is an excellent game, both of them are, but it also carries with it that frustration of being a remake of a PS1-era survival-horror game... that does exactly what you would expect a PS4 remake of a PS1 horror game to do. And it isn’t just that Resident Evil has been watered down into an industry-wide standardized form, but it's the fact that people like it, they want to experience the past in homogenized, more standardized ways.
What kills me here is Silent Hill 2. It bugs me that this once strange game, one of the best to ever fucking do it, once defined by it’s uncanny acting and dream-like surreality... was remade into yet another fairly standard horror game that checks all the boxes for what “normal” video game gameplay and voice acting is supposed to be. And do you know how most people feel about this?
See, all these dumb hicks think the Silent Hill 2 remake fixes the obviously bad parts of the game and makes them good! And it drives me fucking nuts because it not only speaks to a general unwillingness to experience new and different and uncomfortable things, but we continue to treat games as toys and old games as broken toys that need fixing. So, make it "normal" now, please.
Regardless, you can tell 2025 has been an incredibly refreshing year for video games because these aforementioned hicks have been crashing out every step of the way. We’ve just come off an era where everyone had been citing Persona 3 Reload and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth as games of the year.
Expedition 33 and Silksong have been some of the biggest successes of the year, and are completely original titles. And it’s also been at the behest of those who wish to harm the artistic legacy of video games in the name of hyper-convenience and homogenization, rather than help it.