N +

-When you load up Metroid Trilogy, you can access all three games from a hub individually. You don't have to beat Prime to unlock Echoes or finish Echoes to play Corruption and what you do in one game doesn't have an impact in what you do in other games. You could even play like 20% of Echoes and then double back to Prime whenever you got bored. It's convenient, I suppose, but I think it makes the plot feel disjointed. Or, you know, unimportant since they're not trying to preserve continuity.

-The Wii Controls: They feel good, they play well and they cut back on some of the menu selection and scan point operation tedium. For example, to select the scanner, all you have to do is hold down the minus button to pull up a heads-up display. From there, you just point at the item you want to select it and then point that item at whatever you want to scan – very painless and very quick, which is going to make it easier to absorb what story there is through scan points.

-Myriad Tweaks: Trilogy supports 16:9 widescreen. They've added bloom lighting to all three games. Doors open faster. Loading times are faster. Samus can now do that ball-form jump where she drops a bomb and – with a well-timed Wii Remote flick – get extra air when it goes off in all three games. It might not seem like any one of these things really matters, but altogether, the tweaks go a long way toward making the games feel good and play well.

Tweaked, But Not Too Much: Nintendo says the tweaks to the control scheme don't compromise the difficulty in the game and that they've preserved the puzzle element in all the games. I believe them, because Samus' ball-form jump from Corruption could in theory wreck some jumping puzzles from Prime and Echoes. But during my hands-on time with Echoes, I didn't feel like anything had gotten easier. It just got prettier; and while that made it a little less frustrating in difficult jumping sections, it wasn't less challenging.