How to play Metroid Prime in VR (Oculus, Vive)

First, get Dolphin VR. It's a VR compatible fork of the excellent Dolphin (Gamecube, Wii) emulator. Be warned: There's a lot of tweaking necessary for an optimal experience. Various things about Gamecube games do not work well in VR. For example by default, stuff you wouldn't be able to see if playing on a TV disappears to save memory, but you can see this happening in the larger view afforded by the HMD.

There are integrated check boxes you can check that do stuff like forcing the whole environment to render all the time regardless of whether it's being looked at. There's also normally black bars that appear during cinematics, but these too can be turned off via an included hack accessible by right clicking the game's banner in the game list, choosing "properties" and looking under tabs like "hide objects" and "AR codes" to find the hacks you want to enable or disable.

Basically, you'll want to check these boxes, as well as the single box at the top of the list that says "This Code Must Be On". There's also a box under the config tab of the main Dolphin menu that says "enable cheats", without which none of the AR codes will work.

When both of those are checked, proceed to check this box under "hide objects" to remove the black bars. While you're at it, resolution is much too low by default and can be adjusted up to a Rift appropriate 4x native (2560*2112) in the graphics tab at the top of the main Dolphin window.

I also had trouble getting the Xbox One pad that comes with the Rift to work. I fixed this by putting xinput1_3.dll into the Dolphin folder. Simple fix for a problem that was really frustrating until I found a suggestion that worked for me, as I could see the game working but not play it!

Once all of this is done, the experience is unbelievable. Menus are in 2D but once in the game, it's fully realized with positional tracking even. I don't understand how that was accomplished but it's wonderful. Metroid Prime is an ideal series for VR. The wonky controls many complained about when it came out are now a blessing as it decouples your head from your gun without making aiming difficult.

With all tweaks in place it feels like it was always meant for VR. It is such a natural fit, I can't communicate it to you, you have to try it. Right now most made-for-VR games aren't fully fleshed out as the medium is still pretty young, but you can "skip ahead" and play the sort of long, AAA quality fleshed out VR game we can expect to become standard right now by playing games (like Metroid Prime) already developed to that standard, but cleverly adapted to VR.

Supposedly Metroid Prime Trilogy also lets you use a real wiimote and nunchuk as the controls. So your arm would become Samus' blaster and move with it, still comfortably decoupled from head movement. I've not tried that yet as my old Wiimotes are missing but I imagine it'll take the experience up yet another notch.

Some other Gamecube titles that "just work" in VR: Twilight Princess, Resident Evil 4, Mario Kart: Double Dash. F-Zero looks great but has framerate hiccups, Super Mario Sunshine has a few graphical glitches and paint that can't be cleaned up but otherwise works ok.