 Hello and welcome again to this week's edition of what the hell do I actually do in this game. This week it's Metal Marines. Take a look at this cover for starters. Who is that? Malcolm McDowell? What's with all the hands? You start up the game and you can either jump right in or get some advice, which tells you to shoot lots of missiles and deploy lots of mechs called Metal Marines. Hey, that sounds good to me. From there we go to something that looks like SimCity 2000, with an isometric viewpoint, landscapes, a menu on the left hand side, and a cursor to move around, but no, unfortunately this game is not compatible with the SNES mouse. The game prompts you to place three bases, later on you'll find out you'll keep the game going so long as you have at least one of those at the end of the forthcoming battle. So you're screwed around trying to figure out what to do before you get a message. Some jerk is firing missiles at you from another island. Thankfully at this point your anti-aircraft missile launchers, which have already been placed, will take care of these, although occasionally one might slip through just to give you an idea of the kind of firepower you're dealing with. Okay so I want to fire back at this jerk, how do I do that? Press the B button to move over to the menu on the left and press right on the D-pad to access another set of commands. The one with the two swords is the attack prompt as you might guess, and that brings up a different map. You can select missiles or metal marines to send over there, once you make your picks it'll flip you over to a different map with nothing on it. The game kind of plays like battleship in this sense, when your missiles or marines land, that sends data back to you, so you can find out how the AI opponent is set up, so you can plan out your subsequent attacks a little better. At first you'll be attacking mostly with missiles, they deal damage in a 3x3 grid area. You can shoot up to 4 each turn, but they can be shot down by enemy anti-aircraft missiles. You also have your own anti-aircraft missiles, which you saw earlier. Ideally you'd want those near your bases or anything else you want to protect, and you can enhance their range and intelligence with radar units you can place next to them. You also have stuff like gun pots to protect stuff on the ground, and then there's the metal marines themselves. These are mechs that function as ground units and are very strong. One extra wrinkle the game has is that you can eventually switch out the metal marines weapons, which you'll need to do based on where they'll be deployed. For example, if you land in a pit of gun pods, equip the bazooka from the default weapon, and watch stuff go boom. The catch with the metal marines is that they're very expensive. Yup, the SimCity vibe continues beyond the visuals here because you're also tied to certain resources like money and energy. To generate money you build and maintain a supply headquarters, and to generate energy you build and maintain an energy plant. And by maintain, I mean make sure it doesn't go boom. You use your money and energy to build more stuff and launch more attacks until you finally make your enemies submit. There's 20 total missions here, and you can upgrade your missiles and metal marines as you progress through each of them. And you'll also need to make use of some of the other buildings as well, like the decoy units and bases, a factory which allows you to build stuff even faster, and some crazy overpowered thing called an ICBM. I've never been able to actually get one of those myself, however. There's a password system here as well, which helps, especially since this game can get pretty ruthless. As you can see, the action takes place in kind of a pseudo real-time environment. I say pseudo because there are plenty of pauses here and there. But still, there isn't another game quite like this on the Super Nintendo or any other 16-bit console for that matter. The battles are really fun and get more and more nuanced and complex the further you progress. The enemy AI here should be commended because it's surprisingly well done without being cheap. There's plenty of different ways you can build your army. You can go heavy on defenses before attacking. You can be aggressive as hell. It's up to you. And again, that's to the game's credit for being open-ended enough to allow the player that kind of freedom. I should mention this game is one player only, so your only opponent is the computer, but that's okay because, like I said, it's about as well-designed as you could expect for the time. I should also mention the story of Metal Marines. It'd be nice to be able to explain who you're fighting and why, right? A breakthrough in anti-matter technology led to anti-matter weapons being created. One country in particular got an itchy trigger finger and set one off as an act of war, which, of course, cascaded into all sorts of chaos. In this case, it's pretty crazy because you can see parts of countries outright disappearing because, you know, they're anti-matter weapons. They're erasing everything and completely screwing up the planet. Meanwhile, some alien guy shows up and declares himself the Emperor of Earth. Well, I mean, if you ask me, I'd say, sure, go ahead and take it. It's completely destroyed anyway. But the story still has us defending Earth for whatever reason. It's pretty standard stuff. If there's any flaws in Metal Marines, it's what I kind of touched on at the beginning of this video. There's no indication as to what to do or how to do it, or even what's going on at all. Now, I know that wasn't a problem back then because if you bought Metal Marines, it came with the instruction book. There were even some rental places back in the day that gave you a Xeroxed copy of the manual with the game. But if you're gonna play this game on its own today, there's not really any way to find out what you're supposed to be doing just from the game itself. So that kind of sucks. And there's not much information on the internet either other than dryly written walkthroughs on Game Facts. And if you wanna buy the manual with the cartridge, it'll cost you the average price for the combination of the two is usually around $8,200. The best way to play this game today, believe it or not, is through the Wii U Virtual Console. That's right, Metal Marines of all games is available there for $8. If you give Metal Marines a chance though, through some good old fashioned trial and error, this game is a lot of fun and is surprisingly well made. It was developed by Namco of all places. Yeah, that's right, the Pac-Man guys. There was also a PC port of this game as well. There's some minor differences between the two here and there, but it's generally the same game overall. Either way, Metal Marines is a great combination of tactical planning and battle strategy. And it's really satisfying to just utterly obliterate your enemy. It's got some limitations. Don't expect this one to be as huge as even something like an Age of Empires game or something. But for a 16 bit strategy title, Metal Marines is fantastic and well worth playing today.