Game:

Metal Head (1995)

Duration: 8:59

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Original Air Date: September 05th, 2009

Metal Head is a title that saddens me. While it gets rather awful scores (and most comments against it are deservedly so), I look at this game and see a lot of untapped potential. I should start by saying it certainly had the right idea for a 32X game.

It has 3D graphics where a robot can move freely within the confines of a city that looked better than generally anything the SNES or Genesis could have (or rather, "has") done, with a certain sense of scale and depth, decent music with the cool feature to actually change the tempo of any and all tracks with four different settings, lots of spoken dialogue (for a cart), and the ability to display English or Japanese text.

You can toggle between various camera views and get numerous weapons to destroy your enemies with. It even has a generic story of some kind. With all of that, you'd have to wonder where it went wrong... and so it begins.

The problem with Metal Head is that it's extremely repetitive, choppy, has cumbersome controls, has poor draw distance, a pretty bad camera and it's very difficult to even make out enemy fire. What's worse is depending on how damaged you are, your radar becomes more or less useless as the display gets jacked-up, which is very uncool when you combine nearly invisible enemy fire with a slow robot and a time limit. You also have missions where people might come and "help" you, which is really the opposite, since you have to worry about them killing you too. Most enemies either match your speed or run circles around you and you'll want to turn it off before you know it.

What should have been an interesting title to show off what the 32X could do (like Shadow Squadron) turned out to be what many would consider a joke of a game or a technical achievement (which is a nice way of saying "it's not that great" to me), which is really unfortunate. Thankfully, I still have a few "good" 32X titles left to make videos for.

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