Metroid Prime Hunters isn't coming out until 2006 but you can still get your fill of Samus in Nintendo and Fuse Games' Metroid Prime Pinball for the Nintendo DS. With Mario Pinball Land under its belt and much more powerful technology to work with, Fuse has managed to successfully merge pinball and Metroid and created a wonderful game that's not only extremely fun to play but to listen to as well. They've even added force feedback with an included rumble pak that slides into the GBA cartridge slot, further immersing me to such a degree that the title's shortcomings are hardly noticeable. That is, unless I'm playing for too long.

Just as Mario was the star in Pinball Land, Samus takes center stage in her DS adventure by transforming herself into a morph ball and allowing you to use her to rack up points. There are ramps, flippers, bumpers, and the other standard issue things that one should expect in a pinball game, yet there's a slick sci-fi charm the series is known for. In all, the developers have done a masterful job integrating Nintendo's timeless series with standard issue pinball, but being a student of history, I'm already aware that it's not the most original of ideas. For everything this game does right, there's a much older game that features the very same thing. Devil's Crush for the TG-16 is amazing because it allows us to destroy demons while we play, and Sega's Pinball of the Dead lets us annihilate zombies with our ball while we jam to the quality soundtrack from the Dreamcast classic, The House of the Dead II. No, Metroid Prime Pinball isn't shockingly fresh. Rather, its developers have taken those old school designs and paid homage to this cool stuff by bringing it into the current generation. Spread across both screens, Pinball's boards truly shine, featuring Samus' space craft, marauding enemies such as space pirates, triclops, and parasites, and the overall attention to detail is just remarkable. Snow slowly floats to the ground, ice shatters, waves of enemies consume the top screen, rain pelts the alien landscape, and other cool effects light up the screen. This is, dare I say it, the most gorgeous portable pinball game ever made.

It also helps that the gameplay is spot on and somewhat familiar. The core mechanic, to rack up as many points as possible by aiming your ball with your flippers, remains, and the designers have borrowed from those aforementioned titles and injected their game with numerous action sequences. One, called Multiball, causes three Samus' to appear on the screen, allowing you to rack up triple the points, while others such as Shriekbat Shootout let you take control of Samus in her normal form and guide her laser canon from left to right as she decimates battalions of monsters. There are about 13 of these mini games, each of which poses a new challenge, and all of them help to keep things thrilling. Wall Jump, for example, allows you to leap across the screen using the L and R buttons. It has a bit of a learning curve, but again, it's just the developers trying to do something different that's supposed to remind us that we're playing a Metroid title.