With Nintendo’s Metroid Prime Trilogy — all three Metroid Prime games collected on a single disc and updated with Wii controls — just released this week, we spent the day with Austin-native developer Retro Studios to learn how the classic franchise fell into their laps, the process of re-interpreting it in first person, and how to read Nintendo’s haiku-like approach to game development.

Elsewhere on Offworld, we took an extended look at two of the best games released in recent weeks: the similarly classically Metroid-esque Xbox Live Arcade game Shadow Complex, and the fantastic downsizing of the Rock Band experience with Harmonix and Backbone’s PSP game Rock Band: Unplugged.

Finally, we took a straw poll to determine whether the average gamer really is 35, overweight and depressed, and then investigated whether Bejeweled could fight that depression, saw the bloodbath that is Diablo III’s new monk class, and took a trip into The Dark Spire — a ten-dollar DS dungeon-crawler that you might have missed.