No, this isn’t some sort of cruel joke. Nintendo of America is — in an uncharacteristically generous move — packing the entire Metroid Prime trilogy onto a single disc and publishing it for the price of $49.99 on August 24, 2009. An excellent deal for those of us that are feeling the financial pinch.
The two Gamecube games have been outfitted with motion control from Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. The New Play Control Wii-makes of Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 2: Echoes were sold as separate games in Japan for 3,990 yen each ($40).
IGN reports Prime and Echoes have both been updated with a widescreen aspect ratio, progressive scan and the token system from Corruption. Retro have also kept the 4-player split-screen multiplayer from Echoes intact and chosen to keep the narration from the PAL releases out of the first game (thank. God.).
The only downside to all this is that the Prime Trilogy version of Echoes has some noticeable compression during FMVs, no doubt due to space limitations. Still, it’s very impressive that Retro managed to fit all three games on a single DVD (I wonder if it will be dual-layered like Brawl was) and that they went the extra mile to tie all three together with an integrated front-end.
There’s no official word yet on whether or not Nintendo of Europe will be releasing the same package in PAL territories, but we don’t see why they wouldn’t.
