These two monster hitters have been battling it out for months through blogs and message boards even before they were even released. Fan boys of all walks of life have thrown out their rants and raves on the both of these games about why they think one is better than the other. So now that the both of them are out and have made their impressions on the gaming world, will we finally be able to decide which is the more kick ass game? Not just yet. The battle still rages on because while Halo 3 has hit the entire world with a bang, Metroid Prime 3 : Corruption has yet tackle it’s position outside the United States (as of this writing).

What a lot of people are failing to understand is that while these two games are in a sense, first person shooters, they are way too different than one another to really make an easy comparison.  While the Halo series is well known and accepted as an FPS, the Metroid Prime series is considered more of a “first person adventure“.  The type of gamers that each of these games would appeal to would also be different, considering the gameplay itself is not very similar to one another. Not to mention certain features of each of these games are totally absence from the other. However, even with these differences, they both share a similar quality that appeals very much to the hardcore gamers. Which is why everyone loves to compare these two.

So whats the results of the battle so far? Well in terms of sales figure, Halo 3 totally mopped the floor before it was even release with an astounding 1.7 million pre-orders, then went on to dominate the rest of the world by making over $300 million by its first week. As of this writing, Halo 3 has currently sold over 5 million copies worldwide. Halo 3 had so much selling power that it even helped the Xbox 360 outsell the Wii during the month of September. Metroid Prime 3 on the other hand, is not even close by a margin. Currently only a little over 500k copies have been sold since it’s release in August 27 in the US alone. However, it should be known that aside from the Metroid Preview Channel, Nintendo decided to not make any effort to promote the game at all until over a week after it was release with one of their typical crappy “Wii would like to Play” commercials (making it seem like MP3 would make a great party game or something stupid like that). But even with the minimal advertising, MP3 managed to pull in a respectable 400k copies sold during its first week. Sales figures are still yet to be determined for the rest of the world until it releases on October 28 in the UK, November 8 in Australia, and unknown for Japan. So right now its quite safe to say, Halo 3 has won the battle.

With sales figures aside, lets get deep into the gritty details of each of these games and what makes them so awesome. After having a good first hand experiences with the both of them, I think I can make some “un-biased” comparison. Or at-least try to..

Main Character

Halo 3 has Master Chief. The quiet, 7-foot tall, SPARTAN Marine clad in a high tech green armour who spends his time kicking the Covenant’s ass throughout the galaxy. He is the epitome of what a hero is thought to be : big, strong, tough, fearless, and gallant. Ever since he made his first appearance in Halo : Combat Evolved in 2001, Master Chief has grown to become the new icon in video gaming media joining the ranks of famous characters like Mario, Sonic, and others. Because of this, he quite well known among all video gamers out there.

Metroid Prime 3 has Samus Aran, the silent protagonist in the Metroid Primeseries. And unlike most video game heroes, she is a female. With the usual cliches of todays girl-power-female-heroes aside, Samus sports a large shoulder sized body suit which allows her to perform super human abilities and kick Space Pirate’s ass as well as other strange creatures throughout the galaxy. She made her first appearance in the legendary Metroid game for the NES back in 1986 as the space Bounty Hunter, so one would think that she is quite well known by now - which is definitely not the case due to the large number of popular Nintendo video game heroes, and especially Mario..

• Winner : Master Chief - He has the slight edge in this one because of impact he made on the Xbox gaming community. Unfortunately, thanks to Nintendo’s relunctant to promote Samus any more than whats already done, she’s just one of the many faces of Nintendo.

Gameplay

Halo 3 is your typical first person shooter. It follows the same schematics of all the other FPS out there. You run and fight your way past check points until you reach your goal. Occasionally encountering enemies and bosses along the way and cut scenes to introduce the next area. Gameplay is very linear and you usually have an idea of what you’re suppose to be doing at all times. Most of the time you are on your own, but certain areas you will be aided by other characters in the game. The point of the game is clear and simple : shoot them before they shoot you, then keep going. One of the cool things about Halo 3 however is it’s multitude of weapons and the ability to fire from two weapons at the same time - a gameplay feature not present in many FPS games.

Metroid Prime 3 takes it’s gameplay style from all the previous Metroid games. And that is Metroid games are not all about action and fighting, but rather exploration and information gathering, thus many would refer to Metroid Prime 3 as a “first person adventure”. With that said, MP3 does have the same FPS perspective and you do your fair share of fighting, FPS style. However, while a general idea of the objective is given, how to do it is not exactly defined. Because of this, MP3 is slightly more linear than other Metroid games - which many people liked and others did not. There are a lot of puzzles along the way and you do some serious backtracking in the game - which of course is one of the aspects of the Metroid genre. A new gameplay feature allows you to lock on to an enemy and still maneuver around them. And you know those annoying shields that certain Covenants carries around in the Halo series? Well the Space Pirates have them too, except that you can actually rip them off in Metroid Prime 3.

• Winner: Metroid Prime 3 - I feel that MP3has the better gameplay of the two because it actually combines the typical FPS style of gaming with problem solvingin the process. A lot of people may not agree with me on this and would prefer mindless button mashing, but that’s their decision.

Controls

This one is a no brainer. While I do agree that the Xbox 360 does have a very well design control pad that works well for FPS games, you just simply can not compete against the Wii-mote - when done right.  From my poor experiences with other FPS games on the Wii, I was beginning to think that the Wii-mote probably isn’t suited for this type of game. Metroid Prime 3 changed all of that. I won’t go into anymore details. You have to experience it on your own if you haven’t already in order to really understand.

• Clear Winner: Metroid Prime 3

Game Features

Now I thought the single player gameplay for Halo 3 was pretty good. Nothing mind blowing, but pretty good. But Halo 3 is also come with other feature which makes the entire package so appealing. Such as the Forge, which allows players to add and move objects around the game world during gameplay, Save Films which allows players to save multiplayer gameplay to hard drive and view it again from any angle, and File Share which allows players to exchange screenshots, Forge files, game films, among each other or uploaded to a central server for public download. Of course the biggest feature and selling point for Halo 3 is it’s multiplayer aspects. You can play, co-op with a friend, locally against other players via split screen, and online against players from around the world. Not to mention, there are also different kinds of multiplayer games you can play such as free for all and a tag-like game.

Metroid Prime 3 has well…not much in terms of features. The only thing that actually comes close is this “extras” features in which you can use special tokens gained during gameplay which you can use to unlock special content like original design drawings and game music. Tokens can also be sent to other players via the Wii Connect 24. Other than that, that’s just about it…

• Clear Winner : Halo 3.  Many people was hoping that MP3would have some kind of multiplayer feature, while others thought MP3 didn’t really need all of that. I personally thought that it would have definitely enhanced that game had it did. But you can’t always get want you want.

Graphics

This is probably going to be a bad comparison, but I think it’s well worth mentioning. Obviously the Xbox 360 has superior graphics capabilities than the Wii, but how each is made use in the games is what actually matters. Halo 3’s graphics were definitely improved from their earlier released beta demo. However, since we’re all so use to seeing what the Xbox 360 is capable of, the graphics for Halo 3 is still nothing to be excited for. Now it wasn’t bad by any means and it was actually quite good, but I was expecting a lot more from it. It didn’t disappoints or excites, but rather it warrants a big “meh” from me.

The graphics for Metroid Prime 3 is visibly stunning and a true testament of what the Wii can do when it makes use of it’s graphics power. Granted it’s not pulling any serious next-gen card with it (though it comes very close to it), but the developers did an incredible job on it and I definitely think its one of the better games to actually look at. Now if only all Wii games can have graphics like this…

• Winner: Metroid Prime 3 - Even if Halo 3’s graphics wasn’t its main priority, I thought it could of use some work especially for a game of this caliber.

Overall

So now that we’ve been through a bit of comparisons with both games, which one do I believe is the better of the two? Well, it’s a tough one. Both games has it’s pros and cons and certain aspects may be more important to different people. I think that the overall better game as a whole would lean a bit towards Halo 3 - but that’s because if you don’t like the single player campaign, you can always switch to multiplayer and blast it out against other people. But with Metroid Prime 3, if you don’t like the single player campaign, then well, you just don’t like the game. But if I were to base it on the actual game itself, I would definitely have to go with Metroid Prime 3. But then again, it all comes down to the gamers themselves and which game they enjoy most - or perhaps which console they actually own (yeah you know what I mean). Both games are great and both kick some serious ass. If you have the option, I reccomend everyone to play both of them.

So there you have it. A run down of the two biggest games in recent month on the Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii. Now go play some games!