Despite the limited number of Metroid kiosks at E3, and the incredibly long and slow lines to play Retro’s newest game, I finally got a chance to play the second half of the demo. More importantly, I finally figured out how to control the game without so much frustration.

The trick to good control in the E3 demo of Corruption is to enable “Expert" sensitivity in the pause menu. This setting allows you to perform all the aiming and turning with small, precise wrist movements, instead of larger movements of your entire arm which are required at the default sensitivity. Because you aren’t moving the remote nearly as much, it won’t drift outside of the sensor bar’s range, so you avoid the weird view-freeze bug and subsequent auto-calibration fix mentioned in my first set of impressions. It’s also just easier and more comfortable to play the game with smaller movements, and you can turn faster to keep up with quick flying enemies.

Armed with this much improved control setting, I had greater confidence in my shooting abilities when playing the second half of the demo. It’s a good thing, too, because the next section of the demo is a vertical shaft populated by extremely fast enemies that fly in circles around you. They pause occasionally to shoot, but not for long, so you have to act promptly to get off a shot at them before they start zooming around once more. These little guys are probably too hard for an E3 demo, as many other players seemed to have difficulty killing even one or two. In all, you have to shoot down several of these things before the next sequence begins. You shoot away some debris with the Charge Beam, then activate a switch and begin a lengthy vertical Morph Ball climb. The small tunnel forms a crude maze that allows you to climb up through the wall of the vertical shaft. Colored puffs of gas indicate spots where you can bomb jump higher than normal, sometimes into a bomb slot. There are three bomb slots to control a bridge at the top of the shaft, and near one of the devices is an energy tank, which helps a lot when fighting the upcoming boss. This Morph Ball sequence feels comforting after the difficult shooting sequence mentioned above, since the Morph Ball is controlled entirely with the analog joystick and the A button for bombs.

If you activate all three bomb slots, you can cross the bridge at the top to reach a platform in the center of the shaft. At this point, a cut-scene begins in which Samus stands up and activates a switch to lower the platform (it’s not clear why this needs to be done). As the upper section of the tower sinks down towards Samus, you see that Ridley is perched on top, somehow revived from his past defeats. He tackles Samus, sending them both hurtling down a very deep shaft.

The cut-scene ends, and now you must defeat Ridley before you both crash at the bottom of the shaft. In the demo, this requirement translates to a time limit of roughly five minutes, which is plenty as long as you have gained some proficiency with the aiming controls. You can still control Samus a little bit within the shaft, but she takes a few points of damage when you hit a wall, and there’s almost no room to move. So, this section is effectively a shooting gallery. You could feasibly dodge some of Ridley’s projectiles by moving to the opposite side of the shaft, but it’s easier to just blast his shots before they hit you. He drops pink-colored objects that act like depth charges, and though they approach slowly, it’s hard to shoot them all because there are so many at once. Ridley occasionally uses a huge laser, and this move can be dodged with the control stick, but it’s tricky to do so without slamming into the shaft wall. Ridley’s only weak point is his mouth, and you can damage him there at any time, but it’s hard to do so when he’s far away. The best time to hurt him is when he comes up very close for a few melee attacks. At this point, the camera swivels so that you are looking horizontally at the wall, rather than down the shaft towards the bottom. Ridley is at point-blank range, and you need to shoot the Charge Beam at his hands and mouth to prevent his attacks and knock down his life bar. It’s not very difficult if you can aim with confidence, although the shaking, apparent speed of falling, and intensity of the situation make it hard to concentrate on precise aiming. Luckily, the Charge Beam has a pretty big blast, so you don’t need to shoot perfectly, just well.

When Ridley finally loses all his energy, another cut-scene shows Samus prying open his jaws and firing a few shots right down his throat. He dies (or loses consciousness, more likely) and falls away, while the mysterious bounty hunter from earlier scenes swoops down to catch Samus and slide back up on a bridge of ice. The boss battle is very exciting and yet not terribly difficult, since the tight confines of the shaft let you concentrate on just aiming. In our interview during the show, Retro said that this shooting gallery type of gameplay was used to provide just that: an intense boss battle near the start of the game that doesn’t require mastery of the controls. They mentioned that it is probably unique to this particular boss battle.

Having now played the entire thing, I can say that the Corruption demo is quite beefy for an E3 showing, though it seems to represent only a small portion of what Retro Studios and Nintendo have planned for this game. I’m pleased to see that the environments are more interactive (and destructible) in this game, as they sometimes felt too sterile in the previous games, despite always being so well rendered. New uses for the Grappling Beam hint at plans to revisit old abilities in addition to the many new ones we know will be appearing in the final game. It is odd to see other characters directly interacting with Samus, but Samus herself is still completely silent, and the gameplay between cut-scenes is very much in the Prime tradition. I’m interested to see how the new method of storytelling will turn out, but I know the game itself will push the Metroid formula in some exciting new ways while still keeping all the adventure aspects that I love so much. That this epic game will be a Wii launch title is just shocking when you comapare it to other Wii games being shown at E3, most of which come across as glorified tech demos.