Metal Head (32X)

I guess that's Sergeant Metal Head then. That looks very PlayStation era to me.

It's a 3d texture mapped mech game! Well mostly textured, it seems they started to run out when they got to his legs.

Hahaha, they've got speech for the mission briefings, but not video. Instead they cycle through photos of the commander making random expressions to make it look he's saying the words. I can't be bothered creating an animation to show how this looks, so I'll bring Bob from Super Slapshot back in to demonstrate:

The technique works fine in games that use cartoon portraits like Metal Gear Solid, but with photographs it just looks ridiculous.

This really doesn't look too bad for a game running on a boosted Mega Drive, except for the tiny draw distance. The road just disappears after a certain point, and you can see the background instead. I think I actually would have preferred it disappearing into fog.

I guess I stomp around the city following the radar and shoot everything I see then?

Taste chaingun, evil jeep! Well I'm reasonably sure it was evil, it did show up on the radar. The music is trying to convince me that this is exciting but I think it might be lying.

That isn't a wall you're seeing behind the jeep by the way, that's the world disappearing and the background showing through.

Hey, I found an enemy mech. This seems pretty easy so far, though I'm not sure where my health is so for all I know I could be driving a smoking shattered wreck of a robot a hair's breadth away from blowing to pieces.

Hey, there's a third person view. My mech looks fine to me... wait, where's my radar gone? Did those assholes break my radar?

I feel like I'm in one of those horror movies, wandering the streets alone.

"HELLO! IS ANYBODY THERE?"

Without my radar I have to search every street for enemies, and they all seem to be completely deserted.


54 SECONDS LATER.

'HURRY UP' it says! I've done nothing but pace around this damn city, I just can't find the last few enemies. For all I know I'm just going around in circles.

"Points earned... ZERO! Because you were slow and lazy and didn't kill every enemy on the map in six minutes." I wasn't liking it much anyway. It was a pretty basic shooter and without the radar it became tedious.


Next game.