I rented Mafia 2 and Metroid: Other M the other day.
After finishing Mafia 2, I must say I really enjoyed it. I managed a hard difficulty playthrough, and it put up a good challenge in most cases. In other cases, it was a tad overkill... and poor checkpoint placement make it frustrating to do entire sections over again. But I really liked it overall; it had a very good story, though the ending is a bit of a disappointment. However the part where
you and Joe go to kill Tommy Angelo, reenacting the ending of the first game more than makes up for it.
I'm a fair ways into Other M, and I'm having a blast with it. The writing can be a bit long-winded at times, and some of the voicework is stilted, but it's an interesting change for the Metroid franchise, and a pretty good attempt at making Samus more of a character rather than another Nintendo "mascot", as some would say. Controls are great, even if it's single remote only. The game puts up a good, fair challenge; the difficulty isn't impossible like Ninja Gaiden, but if you get hit by the larger creatures and bosses, you're gonna get a sizable chunk taken out of your health. My only real gripes with the gameplay is that you can only shoot missiles in the first-person view, which can make for some hairy situations if you need to shoot a missle quickly, and that your exploration is rather limited, but you can still backtrack for some of the upgrades. Overall, I'm very pleased with this game, f**k the haters. To be honest, if Metroid didn't go in the direction of the Prime games, I think you'd get a quite a few of gameplay features from this game. For some reason, it feels like old-school Metroid at times, and I rather like it. Other M is excellent, but it's very hard to follow up the Prime series, which I'm sure is why some people are put off by it. Others may be put off by the heavy use of a storyline told through characters. But hey, don't knock it until you try it.
