One of the most delightful surprises of last year's Electronics Entertainment Expo was Nintendo's revelation that it had teamed with co-developer Tecmo (and more specifically, Team Ninja , best known for the Ninja Gaiden series) to create the next installment in the beloved Metroid franchise. Called Metroid: Other M , the title would exist outside of the Prime universe and engulf players in an experience both classically traditional and new as series heroine Samus Aran forged through alien space stations and blasted enemies from the third and first-person.

Samus+rocks+the+Bottle+Ship+in+behind-the-back+third-person.

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At Nintendo's Media Summit this week in San Francisco, the publisher dropped two more surprises on us. First, that Metroid: Other M will ship for Wii this June -- much sooner than previously expected. Second, that a demo of the game was fully playable from the event. A religious Metroid fan to the core, I wasted no time making my way to a private room to determine once and for all if Aran's latest adventure will hold its own against all of its great predecessors.Short answer: it does.Admittedly, I've remained the Other M skeptic -- clinging somewhat stubbornly to the possibility that this new partnership and the game's seeming focus on action in place of traditional exploration might dilute what I've come to think of as the Metroid experience. If you've played the series through the years, you undoubtedly know the intangible quality I reference. Purists like me still label the Metroid Prime franchise first-person adventure, not shooter, and when Aran's travels are concerned, I expect nothing less than re-traversal exploration first, everything else second.But I've played through the entirety of the Media Summit demo twice and I'm really pleased with the game that Nintendo and Tecmo have erected to replace the Prime titles -- at least, so far. Other M is a very different endeavor full of nods that harken back to the Super Nintendo days. It's incredibly fast. Action-packed. Amazingly cinematic -- offering what is easily the most revealing look at Aran as a character since her inception, which for uber-nerd-fans like me is a true gift. I found myself smiling at all of the phenomenal cut-scenes and the fact that Samus herself takes on genuine depth and layers via an inner-monologue, all of it voiced convincingly. But it's also got the exploration factor and that eerie, lingering sense of isolation that permeates the Metroid games. It's all wrapped in a beautiful graphical package that stomps all over the majority of titles filling Wii's library.The game opens with a lengthy pre-rendered cinematic, already a presentation win for Nintendo, a company too often unconcerned with such niceties. Space debris. Stars twinkling and fading in the immense darkness. Then, comets rain down on a series of ships and lumbering stations, all of which explode on impact. The outline of a little, blonde baby floats in the aftermath -- it's very 2001-esque. The baby ages, its hair growing in length, and before too long it is a full-blown girl, and then it's Samus.The scene fades to a closeup of Aran in her trademark Varia Suit, now remade with Japanese sensibilities. Slimmer, more polished, but with all the artistic pop of the Retro games -- just very different."Why am I still alive?" Samus asks from inside her suit.The camera pans backward and it becomes obvious that she's in the middle of a great battle -- the very same historic standoff between the bounty hunter and Mother Brain at the finale of 1994's Super Metroid. (Other M takes place a short while after these events in the timeline of the series.) Having just destroyed Ridley and Kraid, Aran is nearly defeated in battle by Mother Brain but is saved at the eleventh hour by a baby Metroid, which supercharges her suit. All of this is shown by way of an ultra-crisp cinematic depicting a truly enormous, hulking version of Mother Brain as its equally giant eye centers on the betrayal and then it obliterates the Metroid hatchling before Aran.Tiny, glowing particles -- presumably the remains of the baby Metroid -- fall on Samus as Mother Brain attacks and the heroine dodges out of the way and then lands on the ground once more in a pose designed to illicit cheers."Mother. Time to go!" Samus shouts and then unleashes a powerful blast from her trademark weapon.The scene fades again and Samus awakens to find herself in a hospital, dressed in her Zero Suit, her hair wrapped in a ponytail."Okay, Samus. Everything normal," some geek in a uniform says."I awoke to the familiar voice of a quarantine officer," Samus says via inner-monologue. "A dream. I had been reliving the tragic moments of my recent past. Thanks to the hyper beam, which was given to me somehow by the baby, I laid rest to Mother Brain." Of course, the explosion also took down the station, as well as everything nearby.Other M begins at this point. The geek tells Samus to walk through a door so that training can begin. In the room, she cinematically triggers her Varia Suit -- it simply appears over her Zero Suit as energy envelops her body and it looks fantastic, of course. Now you're ready to play.The controls are surprisingly uncomplicated. You hold the Wii remote sideways (most of the time, which I'll get to) and finger the D-Pad to move Samus. Digital controls, I know -- but they work very well within the context of the game. Oftentimes, the presentation is quasi-two-dimensional, meaning that despite the fact that the levels are constructed via polygons and full 3D, the viewpoint unfolds via a 2D angle. Samus can walk in and out of the foreground even as she runs left and right. There's a lot more to it than that, though, because the structure of the world enables her the ability to run sideways at one moment and then directly forward via behind-the-back third-person the next. The camera very competently follows the action regardless of your choices or placement, although there are the occasional quirks that need management -- for instance, the character might sometimes walk into the screen as she seeks a door, which is not ideal.The 1 button shoots her beam. Hold it down and she'll unleash a powerful charge attack. You'll quickly find that while there's no real lock-on system from third-person mode, the heroine very accurately auto-targets the nearest enemy. Simply face her into the general direction, press the 1 button and your chances of success are very high. The 2 button, meanwhile, is used for jumping. Press the A button and Aran will go into morph ball mode, at which point she can lay bombs every time you tap the 1 button. If you hold down the 1 button here, you'll drop a single power bomb, capable of burning up everything in the room in a powerful nuclear light. The controls feel very responsive and Samus moves through environments extremely fast -- an attribute of the character missing from the Prime games.