About Some Things Ending

Last week, I suggested that I might not be able to get a full 100% score for item collection in Metroid: Other M. I should have had more faith in the game's designers. The area that was blocked off in the main routes is the area you escape through once the absolute final boss is defeated.

I defeated the final, final boss - Super Missiles are the key - trotted off to the lift, got stuck, Power Bombed my way out, dropped down...

...rolled into the vent shaft wrapped around the lift shaft to pick up that final missile tank...

...Got into the control booth in the operations room, shared an intimate moment between Samus and Adam's Helmet (steady on! No double-entendre intended!), then escaped the Bottle Ship in about 3 minutes.

I absolutely loved Metroid: Other M. While certain parts were utterly frustrating until I learned the key technique for defeating certain creatures, the story was engaging and the format of the game was clever, and managed to never put me off entirely, no matter how annoying certain parts got.

As for Samus, her characterisation was anything but weak. Showing her to be a realistic character, with fears, a traumatic past and emotional attachments (confused as they were - was Adam just a father figure?) brought her to life in a way that the old NES/SNES games, and even the Prime trilogy, never could.

Now if only Konami would make a Castlevania game in a similar style, rather than going all-out 3D...

And then, The Fades.

Troubled as I was by the plot holes (for example, Fades cannot touch, or be touched by, the living, and yet Jon was somehow able to become something more than a ghost when his former wife's blood dripped onto him/into his mouth?) they never harmed my enjoyment of the show, because the whole rose far above the sum of its parts. I should have been hokey, but it wasn't. Some of the performances seemed stiff or weak or wooden, and yet the characters stood up well, and were believable. At the centre of the story was the brilliantly geeky friendship between Mac and Paul - closer siblings than Paul and his biological sister.

One point (of many) that I found particularly vague in the final episode was about Sarah's brief return to husband Mark. It was hinted that she had an affair with Neil and, yes, she returned to her husband as a flesh-hungry Reborn... but how did they go from spending the night together, to Mark running off with Vicky, who he barely knows? I half expected to see her mopping up some black saliva just before they drove off...

We still don't know much about The Angelics (except that they possibly don't quite live up to their title), or what the deal is with Paul's resurrection and his wings, but the end of episode six was suitably ominous, and seems to indicate more to come in the future... I, for one, will be watching.