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Friday Flashback: Metal Storm

Robots are awesome. Gravity-defying physics are awesome. 2D, Nintendo Hard side-scrollers are awesome. And yet, with all of these qualities at the forefront, Irem's Metal Storm remains an obscure NES game far from most gamers' minds. It's really a shame, because this is a great-looking, challenging, creative shooter/platformer that deserved more respect.

At first glance, Metal Storm looks like another side-scrolling shoot-em-up, like Contra or Mega Man. While it indeed follows the formula of "go from point A to point B, fight boss at point B," it incorporates a few unique game mechanics. First, you can switch your personal gravity at any time. Hitting up and jump at the same time lets you fly to the ceiling, where you can move back and forth normally, but fall up and jump down. Combined with one-way platforms and moving walls that would shift whenever you switch gravity, this made for some challenging, creative level design. There are no bottomless pits in Metal Storm, either; in levels where you can fall off the screen, you just fly in from the other side. Certain levels can scroll up and down endlessly, forcing the players to use the repeating layout to get past traps and obstacles.

Even though there aren't any bottomless pits, Metal Storm is still a Nintendo Hard game. You might be a robot, but you can be killed from any bullet, enemy, or spike in one hit. Your gun is very weak at first, but you can pick up various upgrades to make it stronger, give you a fireball attack when you switch gravity, and even give you a shield that can block some projectiles. You need every bit of help you can get, considering how the screen can sometimes get filled with lasers, spike walls, lightning robots, and other things that can instantly kill you.

If you manage to master and beat the game, you can play through a second, Zelda Master Quest-style remixed hard mode with tweaked levels and much more dangerous enemies. If you're a masochist and want to play the second quest straight away, just enter the password H0N-NTQ3-FZR.

Despite its great design, eye-catching graphics, and remarkable difficulty levels, Metal Storm fell through the cracks of NES history. Currently, it's not even available on the Virtual Console, so you're going to have to go cartridge-hunting if you want to legally play this forgotten classic.