It’s so bad – and so genuinely insulting – that it makes me miss the old “my spaceship crashed and now I have to go find my equipment” conceit of past Metroid games. I can’t imagine that series fans – both male and female - will be very happy with this development.

The funny thing is, I actually got the sense that the developers were trying to present a favorable picture of the heroine. There’s a ham-fisted line or two about Samus trying to prove herself as a female soldier among male colleagues, and the Malkovich orders are presented as her “honoring” her former commander. It’s as if the writer was trying to make her look honorable and sympathetic at the same time, and they just did a spectacularly bad job of it.

So, what we have here is a game that combines fresh mechanics that generally work very well with a story that taints the hell out of the series and sucks a great deal of life out of the game itself. To put it in the simplest possible terms, Other M is largely a joy to play, and largely a torturous pain to watch, and you unfortunately cannot choose to experience one without the other.

Danielle Riendeau is a regular contributor to GameShark and is the cohost of Jumping the Shark , GameShark.com's official podcast.