Just so you know, you can use the edit button to add to your first post instead of making a new one. I'll get a 'Knight to merge the two for you.

As far as the Prime games go, I like 'em. I own both of them and I've completed the first a couple of times. I haven't finished Echoes yet, but I suspect I'll be spending much of spring break playing it in order to do so. At first, like many gamers, the first person perspective put me off, because Super Metroid is quite possibly my favorite game of all time and I wanted yet another game reminiscent of that. I still favor the 2D gameplay of the earlier titles, but I feel that Prime has captured the Metroid atmosphere and sense of exploration as well as any of the series' prequels.

The games are much more fun to play once the gamer accepts that it's not a first person shooter in the same sense as, say, Unreal. Like Lindy said, it's definitely an Adventure game first, which just happens to have a first person point of view. If a Quake or DOOM fan picks up Prime and expects to do some serious fragging, then of course they're not going to like it. I think the controls are great - The absence of the simultaneous running + Z axis isn't a big deal, because present is the Zelda-esque lock on feature, which eliminates any need to manually aim. There's nothing wrong with that, because the emphasis isn't on shooting. Rather, it's on adventure and exploration, like it always has been.