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When the game is so hot you have to physically cool it down to patch it.
Which is bad. The game loop shouldn't be dependent on a fixed cycle rate. Some games still do it to this day. I understand why some developers still do it, as it's easier to sync multiple threads when you are dealing with a fixed rate. It makes frame pacing a lot easier, too, which is important on a game console.
So are you saying that the dev kit was overclocked in addition to being frozen? I guess that makes sense but I was really confused when they said they were just freezing it to get the error to produce itself. At stock speeds freezing shouldn't really make any difference other than slightly lower core temps when first turned on (the CPU freq would still be the same, I mean I don't think that there was thermal throttling back in those days, was there?). That said, I get it that if it's overclocked then freezing could theoretically help it run stably without artifacts for a short while. Still, you would think that the cpu would heat up really fast as soon as it is taken out of the freezer and turned on (it certainly wouldn't stay cool for the 15 minutes they were talking about).
OK that might make sense then. Maybe the thermal sensor that is controlling the throttling reacts slower when frozen.
Couldn't you play the Wii version with a mouse before without any kind of hack? Or was that janky?
It was beyond janky. The IR sensor doesn't point like a mouse does.
The game was a work of art, I totally get why it's graphics scale so nicely. It's partly the insane effort from the developers that made Prime beautiful, but it is also that the game had an artistic vision that wasn't going for "look as real as possible" on the surface. They were OK with it looking almost a bit cartoony in places but they then dedicated everything to making the game's environments within that artistic vision feel so complete and with so much obvious effort to detail that the game ends up looking and feeling as good (if not better) than the most realistic games released at the time.
The original Halo also ran at 30 FPS while Metroid Prime ran at 60 FPS. It makes a huge difference. Aside from that I think that more effort went into the aesthetic design of Metroid Prime compared to Halo. It's obvious that Retro were inspired by Super Metroid, as the color palette and overall world design reflects this. Phendrana Drifts was the first icy Metroid area used in a game, and it fit right in with that design language. Halo, on the other hand, doesn't look too inspired. The color palette is bland, and all the areas look copy-pasted. It was the prelude to the brown "gritty realism" aesthetic we got in the 7th console generation.
I totally agree. The monotonously repeating architecture in Halo's single player campaign (and sometimes repeating entire levels backwards, etc) was the antithesis of everything Metroid Prime strived for and excelled at. I mean Phazon Mines (the last main world in Prime) in my view was as beautiful and distinctive as Chozo Ruins. I remember tunnels in the mines where you're walking on catwalks with glowing phazon crystals all around you, it was just stunning visually -- and this is all stuff that you're seeing for the first time in late game. Developers rarely put that much effort into later levels. In Halo's case, the first three levels were amazing but after that the rest of the game felt more like a copy-paste job. Prime was the absolute opposite of that.