SAN FRANCISCO – The big star of Nintendo's press summit is the long-awaited Metroid: Other M.

Nintendo's science fiction adventure game series is one of the company's most consistently excellent franchises. Often imitated and never duplicated, it melds fast shooting action with deep exploration that requires you to think and consider your environment.

Metroid: Other M, developed by Ninja Gaiden maker Team Ninja in collaboration with Nintendo, is the next-gen Metroid that everybody figured would happen, before the unexpected debut of the first-person shooter Metroid Prime in 2002. Other M is a more traditional game, but not entirely: It incorporates some first-person elements, but is largely played in third-person 3-D. The levels don't keep you locked to a 2-D plane of movement as in previous games – you can always walk in four directions wherever you are. But the level designs are generally laid out in a linear fashion, so it's always obvious where you're supposed to be going.

Other M is played with the Wii Remote only. Holding it sideways, you'll move Samus around in third-person, using the 1 and 2 buttons to jump and shoot. Samus will auto-lock onto enemies around her, to an extent – you do have to be generally facing the enemies for her auto-lock to engage. You can't aim up or down independently. The camera is entirely controlled by the game, and is always in the right spot, panning and zooming gently as you move throughout the rooms to give you the best, most dramatic view of where you're headed.

The A button drops you into Morph Ball mode, and pressing 1 will drop bombs. Later in the game, you'll hold the 1 button to charge up and let loose with face-melting Power Bombs.

Got all that? Well, here's where it gets interesting.

If you point the Wiimote at the screen, you'll automatically jump into first-person mode. In first-person, which looks just like Prime, you can't move your feet. You can rotate in place, looking up, down, and all around, by holding the B button. This is also used to lock on to things you want to examine, and most importantly lock on to enemies. Once you're locked on, you can blast them with your arm cannon or fire missiles at them. You can only fire missiles in first-person.

You can recharge some of your missiles and energy by holding the Wiimote vertically and holding the A button. If Samus is near-death – if she takes too much damage she'll drop to zero health but not die until the next hit – you can get a bar of energy back by recharging, but the bar has to fill up all the way – if you get smacked while you're attempting this, you'll die. (I'm pretty sure death in the demo was disabled.)

And that's not all! At one point during the demo – when I was exploring the women's bathroom in a space station – the camera shifted to a Resident Evil-style behind-the-shoulder view. I couldn't shoot, so I'm guessing this view will be used solely for close-up exploration sequences, not combat. Nothing much happened in the bathroom, FYI.

Anyway, that should finally answer everyone's questions as to how Other M controls. Now, how does it play? As promised, there are a lot of cinematic sequences intertwined into the gameplay. The whole thing kicks off with a big ol' sequence that series die-hards will recognize as the finale of Super Metroid: Samus, head locked inside of a Baby Metroid's gross tentacles, receives the Hyper Beam from the baby, and uses it to blast the gigantic gross one-eyed superform of Mother Brain into smithereens. Once that's all over, she wakes up in a recovery room: It was all a memory of her last adventure. Now, she's being quarantined and testing out her Power Suit, to make sure it's all good after that huge battle (and to teach us how to control the game, as described above).

A couple more of the moves in the tutorial: By pressing the D-pad just before an enemy attack hits, Samus can dodge out of the way. And once a humanoid-style enemy (like those dirty Space Pirates) has been incapacitated, she can walk up to it or jump on its head to deliver a badass death blow.

Once the intro is over, Samus heads out back into her ship, where she gets a distress call. She lands on the space station to find a Galactic Federation troop already there. She doesn't have to go it alone! In fact, it's her former troop, from when she was back in the G-Fed herself. We see a flashback where Samus quits over an "incident" that I'm sure we'll find out about later, and we find out that her former commander Adam still thinks she's a bit of a troublemaker. A loner. A rebel. A loose arm cannon.

Adam lets her hang out with the crew and help figure out what's up with this monster-infected ship, anyway. It's infected with monsters, first off, and if you've played the first Metroid you'll recognize the little spiky dudes shuffling along the walls, not to mention the scissors-shaped jerks that rush down from the ceiling. All your old friends are back, ready for you to blow up. Later in the demo, there was one particularly powerful type of enemy that stomped across the floor on its two feet that you can blast with a missile in first-person mode. But you can dispatch weaker enemies with standard shots in third-person.

You know how Samus always loses all of her weapons through some contrived unbelievable plot point at the beginning of every game? In this one, she's still got her missiles, bombs, and all that. She's just not authorized to use them. That's right: Samus can't use her cool stuff until her commanding officer gives the all-clear. Of course, I'd be shocked if she wasn't also finding cool new weapons around the base. There's an energy tank and a missile expansion in the demo, too, hidden behind walls you can bomb.

The game's mini-map shows you where hidden objects are, but of course it doesn't show you where to get them. So it doesn't make it easy on you when you know something is in the room with you, but not how to find it.

The rest of the demo introduces many gameplay elements that Metroid fans will expect – wall-jumping (very easy, since you just have to press 2 with decent timing), blowing open doors with missiles, etc. There's a boss encounter that you fight with your AI teammates – they'll use their freeze guns to freeze this crazy purple alien blob's arms, and then you blow them off with a missile. I'm guessing this is a prelude to having to do all this stuff yourself when you get the freeze beam later in the game.

As shown in this boss fight, there's definitely a bit of a learning curve to switching back and forth between first- and third-person, but the added complexity is worth it. The Other M demo is brief, but I really enjoyed my time with it. It's a bit early to tell for sure, but it seems Nintendo just might have reinvented Metroid successfully – again.