 When it came to stuff like movies, TV shows and cartoons getting video games, there was a certain resentment there because as we saw in the Atari 2600 and the NES eras, all you had to do was throw together a bunch of crap, throw a license on it, and people would buy it just based on the name alone. The thing is though part of the reason that was the case is because studios and publishers and the like demanded that games be made for content that didn't necessarily lend itself all that well to a game. Meanwhile overseas in Japan, they had tons and tons of content in manga and anime that did lend itself well to games. Well, I guess that's just how it goes when so much of your popular culture revolves around mechs and robots and giant monsters and stuff. But unfortunately, sometimes that just isn't enough. Yup, Japan has their fair share of licensed stuff that disappoints. Like here we have Kiko Keisatsu Metaljack, or Armored Police Metaljack, a Super Famicom game made in 1992 by Atlas. Yes, THAT Atlas, and it's based on the TV series of the same name. It's your run of the mill, side-scrolling beat em up, and there's three different characters you can choose from. The red guy, the silver guy, and the blue guy. And yes, that says Jack on. I guess that's a thing from the show. Really, the only differences between the three characters are the weapons. Redjack has a gun, Silverjack has a lightsaber thing, and Bluejack just has extra armor, I guess. You're gonna want to pick redjack, like 10 times out of 10 in this one because of the way the enemy design is laid out here. These guys just slide their way onto the screen, stop abruptly to lure at you, then do a throat chop. Get too close, and you take damage every time. Yup, this is one of those games. So in other words, if you're stuck with a melee weapon, this one's not gonna be fun at all. At least with the red character, you can collect ammo here and there that helps you take some of these guys out. But when you inevitably run out, you just want to keep moving forward and do a jumping attack as often as you can. At least the blue guy here gets extra hit points so you can afford to get hit if you go this method. But yeah, each character has a health meter and three lives to get through six levels on zero continues. I will say one thing that kinda makes this game stand out a bit are the boss fights because your character is able to utilize its full mech form, complete with a short little scene here. You can hold the Y button to charge for a special attack, and to be fair, some of the bosses in this game do look pretty cool. It's just getting to the bosses that's not only boring and tedious, but poorly designed. These knife guys here are twice as fast as I am. I'm completely out of ammo, so I don't have much choice here, but to take damage and keep moving, that's pretty dumb. You also get these mini bosses that you can't even get close to, like shirtless Johnny Bravo, and then a few minutes later you face the exact same character, only after he laid in a tanning bed for like three hours. There's really only about 10 or 12 enemy types in this entire game, not including the bosses, and they all have really simple patterns, which are all much quicker than you can react. From a visual standpoint, this game does at least have some highlights, like some of the backgrounds look pretty cool, but then there's levels like this. I mean, come on, what is this? An Atari 5200 game? This looks downright ugly. One interesting factoid about Armored Police Metal Jack is that it was all set for a US release in late 1992. Magazines like GamePro and EGM wrote about it, and there was even a front and back cover designed. The localized ROM can be found if you search for it on SNESCentral.com, but it's pretty much the exact same game. They only changed the settings from Tokyo to Los Angeles, they changed the character's names to super cool names like Ken Stryker and Billy Crash, and they also changed the Jack-on soundbite to... Oh no! What, did they get Andre the Giant for that line read? The US release ended up getting canceled without the publisher Atlus listing a reason why, but I think it's pretty clear why. This game is dull as dishwater. It's slow, the gameplay doesn't do anything new or unique, the enemy design is terrible. I mean, even if you have a gun, you can't fire fast enough to hit some enemies, that's how fast they are. And hey, I'm sorry, not every one of these forgotten games are gonna be great, or even good, or even halfway decent. I just wanted to show off that even Japan and the Super Famicom had its fair share of lousy licensed games. All right, I wanna thank you for watching and I hope you have a great rest of your day.