Condensation mists on my visor, and eldritch, ghostly sound effects chirrup, clang and squawk. Slowly, I round a corner, and… What. The. Hell. Is. That? A Magmoor, perhaps, or a mother Sheegoth, or (heaven help me) an Omega Pirate. The creatures of Metroid Prime are constructions of awe-inspiring malevolence: whether made of rock, ice, or supernatural energy fields, they are almost as beautiful as they are threatening. One thing this game does very well indeed is to stage-manage the dramatic encounter with the enemy. And a powerful sense of enemy is one of those difficult-to-quantify but easy-to-recognise qualities that good action videogames will strive to evoke.

In Prime, of course, as well as in other games, the sense of enemy depends not merely on drawing an interesting-looking foe, but on many areas of design conspiring together. The long periods of near-silent, lonely exploration on the abandoned spaceship and then on Tallon IV, with the exquisite rusting architecture and weather effects, work to imbue a sense of a real, living environment - not a cunning bath of polygons the level designers knocked up in a week or two, but someone else’s home, in which you are trespassing. It is the same management of tempo that made the early Tomb Raider games impressive: the longer you go without unholstering your guns, the more meaningful a violent encounter becomes. The enemy as yet unseen and only imagined is the most worrying.

Unfortunately, Prime undercuts this dramatic structure with the thoroughly bogus decision to feature respawning minor foes. Now it could be argued that respawning creatures in this game are necessary to make your travels more interesting, given that the game’s environmental layout demands so much backtracking. But to argue that way is like stabbing someone in the arm, and then stabbing them in the leg to distract them from the pain in their arm. It would be better never to have stabbed them at all. Games that hard-wire a requirement to backtrack so much are taking the concept of value for money to a dubious extreme.

Moreover, the artificiality - the obvious programmedness - of Prime’s respawning enemies tends to make it more difficult to suspend one’s disbelief in general. If you know that defeating an enemy will not have a permanent effect - if he’ll just zap back to life when you come back to the room - then the requirement to dispatch him is no longer an exciting challenge but a chore.
Prime remains a superb game, almost unrivalled in the density of its visual imagination and engineered to provide regular shocks of wonder and surprise. But the game clearly represents two different ways of managing the sense of enemy: a right way, with the aesthetically splendid bosses, and a wrong way, with the respawning pirates and their not-so-cuddly friends, who represent just a set of tedious, anonymous obstacles.

One way in which other games seek to imbue a sense of enemy is by using human enemies that can talk, and whom you can encounter a few times before the final showdown in order to build up some very basic species of emotional history with them. (Arguably, a person or monster you have only just met cannot be an enemy except in the most abstract sense.) The dramatic structure of the first Metal Gear Solid is seminal in this regard: I developed a visceral personal hatred for Vulcan Raven before I finally killed him in the freezing warehouse, and the showdown with the Metal Gear was compelling precisely because the machine was being piloted by Liquid. (By a not-so-strange trick of arithmetic, having to destroy five automated Metal Gears in the sequel is less than one-fifth as entertaining.)

Still, the boss encounter as a game paradigm is highly artificial, and if you are not going to acknowledge and play creatively on that artificiality as Kojima does, it increasingly seems like a relic of gaming’s past. It might even be argued that games which need impressive boss encounters are precisely those which need to make up for the fact that their hordes of “normal” enemies are uninspiring, unengaging combatants. Maybe one of the reasons I’m still playing Halo is precisely because it does not feature so much as a single 100-foot tall, laser-eyed reptile with conveniently dodgy knees, whose appearance would become just boring the third time round; instead, the carefully timed introduction of each new and more fearsome enemy species just adds combinatorially to the warfare possibilities. Because it features such a relatively small variety of adversaries, the game manages to characterise each type to a rare degree: you know these enemies by the way they behave, even by the way they sound, as much as by the way they look. Know thine enemy, runs the old advice; concomitantly in videogames, only adversaries that you can know to this degree of sophistication become true enemies.

Psychologically, it is perhaps increasingly desirable to be convinced in such games that we are dealing with an enemy, and not just performing a high-speed object-targeting-and-manipulation puzzle of the sort that has long been familiar. Of course it is satisfying to blow a kilometre-long spaceship to gloriously rendered smithereens, or to defeat a huge mutant plant after finding out where its weak points are, but such actions can be executed with a certain impersonal disengagement. A true enemy, on the other hand, engages the whole mind.

But this is not to say that the solution is necessarily hundreds of lines of B-movie script. “You killed my polygonal father!” is not the only way. After all, one of the most memorable enemies in the history of videogaming is the Mutant in Defender. A barely-there clump of pixels, but a murderous trajectory, a horrible noise, and a vengeance-crazed reminder of your own failure. Meanwhile, no developer yet has quite captured the loathsome magnificence of HR Giger’s creature designs for Aliens, and the implacable menace of their scuttling movements. A videogame alien that really did seem terrifyingly alien, in both its appearance and its unpredictable behaviour, would be a refreshing change.

Perhaps in future years, some designers might begin to fulfil the promise of offering truly worthy adversaries, instead of the join-the-dots template of ever more spectacularly designed bosses and their helpfully vulnerable dynamic routines. A Moriarty to your Sherlock Holmes; a Commodus to your Maximus; a Saruman to your Gandalf. Even an army of angels to your Miltonic Satan. In a way, a true enemy is someone you care about.

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