Achievement unlocked.

Virtual carrot on a stick, now appearing on Wii. 

The demo of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, now playable at finer gaming retailers across the USA, has brought to light a heretofore unknown feature: achievements.

As you progress through the game, tokens of various colors will be awarded based on scanning enemies, items, and lore, as well as for completing certain objectives and defeating bosses on various difficulties. These can then be redeemed in-game to unlock content. You can also receive "friend vouchers" which, when sent to friends, will award them special tokens.

While this is unlikely to become a feature of every Wii title and is probably just something Retro cooked up themselves, it is still very cool and hopefully other developers will follow suit. I'm a big fan of good achievements, especially when they are tied to unlocking in-game content. In 360 games, too often the achievement is the reward. Unlockables have slowly gone the way of the dodo with the advent of microtransactions. Most games are unlikely to give up more than a harder difficulty nowadays and sometimes even those are offered as downloads.

[via GoNintendo]