Gravity is rad, and reversed, in the latest Retronauts Micro
Heigh ho everybody, and welcome once again to the Retronauts show! We've got a real corker this wee— aw, OK, it's just another off-week Micro episode. On the plus side, I've decided to ditch my boring one-man-show approach to Micros and bring other people into the conversation, which should be a relief to everyone. To kick things off this week, we have Sam Claiborn from IGN in the studio to enthuse over classic NES mech platformer Metal Storm for a few minutes with me.
Metal Storm is one of those games that plays better in person than it does via audio — it's a brief and fairly simple game, and its appeal comes from the way it pushes the NES hardware, and from the way its mechanics turn a straightforward five-stage platform shooter into a dense, nail-biting challenge. The game's central premise (you can invert gravity while in mid-air) demands a higher standard of level design than the usual NES fare, and every screen of Metal Storm stands out as a sort of inventive action puzzle... without being an actual puzzle game. Trust me, I've seen a lot of those in my Game Boy adventures, and this ain't one.
The biggest downside to Metal Storm is that you're not going to be able to find a cartridge-only copy of the game for less than $100 unless you get really lucky. It'll never show up on a download service, either, because publisher Irem ditched gaming altogether and, last I'd read, had delisted all its games from PSN and Virtual Console. This is why classic video game is so darned stupid most of the time.
Download Links
Libsyn (13:02, 9.4 MB) | MP3 Download | SoundCloud
Thanks to Sam for dropping by, and I'll be playing the game on a live stream later this week via USgamer. So you can check it out that way if you're curious about Metal Storm but too lazy (or scrupulous!) to emulate it.
