Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (Wii)

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is a first-person action-adventure game developed by Retro Studios and published by Nintendo for the Wii video game console. It is the tenth game in the Metroid series, and the final entry in the Metroid Prime Trilogy. The Wii Remote and Nunchuk devices are featured in a new control scheme that took a year to develop and caused the game's release to be delayed several times.

Gameplay for Metroid Prime 3 is similar to its predecessors: players explore open ended worlds, finding story clues and power ups, solving puzzles, jumping on platforms, and fighting enemies. Unlike past games however, the game is divided into several open worlds; each world is smaller than the single open world environments of Metroid Prime or Metroid Prime 2, but the combined size is greater. As with Metroid Prime 2, exploring the worlds is not aimless: players explore the world freely, but there are specific tasks meant to be accomplished on each world which are told to you beforehand. The game also includes hypermode, a phazon overload system that allows players to exchange health for massive damage. The biggest change is the controls. Metroid Prime 3 uses a new control system using the Wii Remote and Nunchuk, allowing free aiming and movement similar to mouse and keyboard controls.

Metroid Prime 3 was also included in Metroid Prime: Trilogy, which includes updated versions of its prequels: Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 2: Echoes.

Constant Wiimote Disconnects
Since, when using the MS Bluetooth Stack (the default bluetooth stack on Windows) Prime 3 will think that the wiimote is constantly disconnecting. Pressing Alt-F5 will restore it, but it will disconnect again seconds later. Windows users can disable "Enable Speaker Data" to solve this problem, or move to either the Toshiba Stack or the DolphinBar.

Shader Generation Stuttering and the Black Bar
This game suffers from severe stuttering during shader generation. Because of the differences between how the Wii works compared to personal computers, whenever something uses the Wii's GPU, Dolphin must generate a shader to emulate it on a PC GPU. Shader generation causes a slight emulation delay while it's being created, so Dolphin caches these shaders in its shadercache folder to help keep things smooth. Most games don't care about this and play fine, but with Metroid Prime 3, the shaders are so massive that they cause a significant delay, which creates a hard stutter and desyncs the GPU and CPU threads. The game freaks out over this desync, creating a black bar at the bottom of the screen, which takes up 15% of the screen space and "squishes" the game in the remaining space. The black bar will remain there from then on whether stuttering continues or ceases. Going into new areas or showing new effects will cause the stutter and black bar, as well as going in and out of fullscreen and even taking a screenshot. Building up a shadercache of an area helps, but it will still stutter and desync if a new effect or region is loaded.

There is no solution at this time. Playing with Dual Core disabled or using Sync GPU Thread is the only solution currently available, and both result in a significant performance hit on one of Dolphin's most demanding games. See.
 * PAL users can disable "PAL60 Mode (EuRGB60)" in the Wii settings to prevent the black bar from appearing. The stuttering during shader generation will remain, however.

Bloom Offset
Prime 3 has noticeable bloom offset problems. It will have several copies of the bloom spread out from the source, and can be very distracting. The only solution is to disable "Scaled EFB Copy", but this has some issues of its own. See.

Visors
Visors will only work if EFB to Ram is enabled. Though EFB to Ram is forced by the GameINI, visor corruption may still occur if you open the graphics configuration window during gameplay. Turn on EFB to Ram in the Dolphin GUI to avoid any problems.

Dot
When playing above 1x Native internal resolution, there is a dot in the center of the screen. It's small and easy to ignore, but it's always there. There is no fix for this problem.

Savestates
Using save states in MP3 will crash Dolphin. Use the in-game saving to avoid any problems. Seems to have been fixed in the recent builds ( and onward).

Pixelation Glitches
A large pixelated block may appear in the upper left area of the frame. It may only appear during movement (newer revisions) or be stuck there permanently (older revisions). To avoid this problem, use the D3D graphics backend. Fixed by, and detailed in the February Progress Report

Refraction Slowdown
Refraction effects, such as raindrops on Samus' visor and the heat effect after firing her weapon for an extended period, cause slowdown on all backends. OpenGL is affected worse, though D3D is affected as well. It also has slowdowns when several grapple points (yellow pulsing) are present on screen at once. Even the strongest computers are affected by this issue, and there is no solution at this time. Fixed by.

Blue Startup Video
Since, the opening video is... blue. It goes away as soon as a wiimote appears on the screen or after a period of time. It has no effect on gameplay. See. Fixed by.