Samus is a girl.

This week in Nintendo news...

A new game for our favorite handheld gaming platform The Nintendo DS was released on monday. We were lucky enough to pick a copy up yesterday, It's the continuation of the Metroid franchise called Metroid: Hunters. What follows is a poor man's review...

It's an amazing game, and I'll tell you why.

I played Metroid Prime for The Gamecube, and found the game a little slow and clunky. (no offense... none taken) And while the single player mode on this new game has similar problems it is much more fast paced. And don't even get me started on the multiplayer game... It's almost too fast paced!

You play this game with the thumb pad and the touch screen. Moving the stylus around the touch screen aims your gun in the game, while the thumb pad controls the character's movement. This is the closest thing I've experienced to playing with a keyboard and a mouse. And because of it, the shootem-up action is smooth and fast, just like it should be. I suspect there will be a learning curve for this style of gameplay, but it seems like it'll be worth it. And implies shades of what the Nintendo Revolution, and it's radical game controller could offer...

This game really shines when you play online. The single player game is cool, and I suspect it's where you'll get the training to learn to play the game efficiently, but as I said, it suffers from some of the same symptoms the old Gamecube game did. Online play is super fast, and the best part... There is no verbal interaction between players. I don't have to hear jerkface children from the midwest cussing and being racist.

If there is one drawback to the game, I would list it's lack of quick game start-up and shutdown. In single player you have to travel back to the beginning of the level to save. And in multiplayer the wait for starting an online game is a little long. Since the game is portable, I'd much rather be able to open the DS up, start a game, play for 2 minutes, then shut it down. But as I said, minor complaints.

On a super positive note, you can play Metroid on up to 3 separate Ds's with only one game card. That's the kind of costumer centric thinking that blows me away. Usually game companies want to squeeze every dollar they can out of us.