Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (GC)

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, known as Metroid Prime 2: Dark Echoes (メトロイドプライム2: ダークエコーズ Metoroido Puraimu Tsū: Dāku Ekōzu) in Japan, is a first-person, action-adventure video game developed by Retro Studios and published by Nintendo for the GameCube. It is the seventh published game in the Metroid series and a direct sequel to Metroid Prime.

Like it's predecessor, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes takes place in an open-ended world with interconnected regions, revolving around solving puzzles to uncover secrets, platform jumping, and shooting enemies. Echoes features parallel dimensions gameplay, Light Aether and Dark Aether, where changes in either dimension often reflect changes in the other. Dark Aether's atmosphere is caustic and damages Samus' Power Suit, requiring the player to move between designated "safe zones" that allow Samus' health to be regained slowly.

An updated version exists for the Wii as part of the Metroid Prime: Trilogy.

Black Bar and Severe Stutters
At seemingly random points throughout the game, the game will freeze for an instant, flashing to black and "redrawing". When it comes back, a black bar will be at the bottom of the screen, taking up 15% of the screen space and "squishing" the game in the remaining space. From thorough testing, this apparently occurs whenever the emulator stops the GPU thread for a split-second, causing the GPU and CPU threads to desync. Most games don't care about this, but Prime 2 freaks out and creates this error. Creating a new shadercache, from first run of the game or from going into a new area, will immediately cause the desync, 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 desync if a new effect or region is loaded. Playing with Dual Core disabled or using Sync GPU Thread is the only solution at this time. See.

Micro-stuttering
All of the Prime games suffer from micro-stuttering: small stops in the video that can become very annoying. It occurs in all graphics backends, but the OpenGL backend has consistently been the most resistant to the problem. Its severity varies depending on the revision and settings used, so if you want to play the game you should try a wide variety of combinations.

Refraction Slowdown
Refraction effects, such as raindrops on Samus' visor, cause slowdown in OpenGL. Even the strongest computers are affected by this issue, and there is no solution with the OpenGL backend at this time. D3D is not affected by this problem in this game.

Build 4.0.315 should be used for the time being until this is properly fixed in future builds. This build adds native texture pooling which address's the refraction slowdown somewhat (this feature was pulled in recent builds however, due to it causing issues in other games). Rain in FPS mode no longer slows down in regions such as Torvus Bog, and jumping into water has improved 80%.

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 is present whenever the HUD is on screen. There is no fix for this problem.

Broken Scan Visor
If 'Skip Destination Alpha Pass' is turned on, the scan visor will display nonsensical data and fail to work. Running the game without this option fixes the problem.