on top of this is that combat is only really hard before you get the Light and Dark Beams and then after that you can just one-shot half of this game's enemy roster with a charged beam from either of them. not even Hunter Ing are hard because they just love flying into Light Fields of Death.

but also this makes a lot of sense because straight up you can just...leave!! rooms where enemies are attacking you! there are many rooms in the game where you can just walk right past enemies and go! so who on earth would go "what I need for these four Easy Space Pirates is a Special Bomb"??

( scrapped late enough that they just moved the HUD elements off of the screen and had written up inventory text for them - it had to have made it to some kind of prototype somewhere!! surely!! tcrf.net/Metroid_Prim... )

ALSO found it interesting that the scrapped Prime 2 concept which in hindsight is LITERALLY JUST FUCKING SYSTEM SHOCK 2 LMAO was not mentioned anywhere

honestly the entire ending segment (AFTER sky temple keys, which was very much intentional and I had read an EGM interview saying so) feels rushed. Dark Samus has a "new" form with like two attacks and despite having three different luminoth corpse models, the ending cutscene just has U-Mos clones.

(this was how I found out that I must've read - somewhere - that shooting things with the Light Beam yields Dark Ammo and vice-versa, because I *know* this and yet when I checked the inventory screen it sure enough is not mentioned anywhere. where did I learn it??)

The rest of the book alludes to Prime 1's extremely fucked dev cycle (and that Prime 2's was better, even), and even mentions how the Prime 2 ammo system was probably too confusing to players due to a lack of communication in-game, so I'm not sure it's a PR thing.

was actually a little disappointed that the Prime artbook that I got recently didn't really go into how the Emperor Ing concept art is clearly different from the final product and what development pressures led to them changing it.

also yeah. that boss is blatantly unfinished. the whole-ass logbook data is talking about a completely different set of mechanics that are just not in the game at all

ah god, the modbeasts from FFXIV are spreading to other games

bsky.app/profile/anth...

hahaha not even physical is safe! bsky.app/profile/anth...

"Not even in my wildest dreams did I imagine that one day I would paint a picture of hot Bowser for official material, announced by Miyamoto himself. 😭 I laughed so hard in disbelief while painting, you have no idea lol"