 Metal Storm is a run and gun styled game with one unique twist. The main selling point of this game is the ability to flip your gravity so you can walk on the floor or the ceiling. The game takes advantage of this by providing some quality level design that lends itself okay to some exploration to find some hidden areas and allows the player to be inventive when disposing of enemies. You can do the usual Rambo style full speed ahead guns blazing, or you can dodge, go around and shoot from other angles. It helps that you can shoot in four directions, which is nice. The only real problem with the gravity flipping mechanic is that sometimes you have no idea what you can and can't walk on or land on. The platforms can be inconsistent, and that gets frustrating because you really have no way of knowing until you fall through and die. Oh, and you will die a lot in this game. One hit deaths, just like Contra. Yeah, classic NES difficulty here, but to be fair there's frequent checkpoints throughout every level, and unlimited continues, so you have no excuse but to keep going ahead. Like any run and gun game, there's a variety of power-ups. P for a power beam, which is an upgrade for your weapon, S for a shield to protect you from projectiles, G for a power-up that allows you to turn into a fireball as you flip from the floor to the ceiling, destroying any enemies in your way, and A for armor that allows you to take extra damage, barely. This is all well and good, but unfortunately you only get one power-up at a time. If you have the shield, you'll lose it if you pick up something else. That's kind of annoying. But yeah, there's seven levels total to plow through, and some of the boss battles are just nuts. I mean, look at this. As for the story, a giant laser gun designed to protect Earth has gone totally haywire, and it's up to you and the M308 gunner mech to stop it. Why wouldn't such a powerful and dangerous weapon have a disengaged or a self-destruct feature? Well, because it's jammed, of course. Yeah, pretty paid-by-numbers story, but who cares? There's one neat little piece of trivia about this game that I like. The NES doesn't really support parallax scrolling, or in other words, you can't layer the background and vary the speed of each layer to give an illusion of depth. The developers of Metal Storm created a workaround by basically animating the backgrounds to give them a different speed than the foreground. You can see this in level 3 and level 5. That just goes to show how much effort the developers put into this game. Not only that, but Metal Storm got a coveted spot on the cover of Nintendo Power after its release in March of 1991, including a huge 12-page feature article. However, the game for whatever reason just didn't catch on that well, and sort of disappeared from the gaming landscape, never getting a sequel, a Super Nintendo follow-up, or even a Game Boy port. And that's really too bad, because this game is a quality piece of work. It has its flaws, like not knowing where you can and can't jump, and only holding one power up at a time, but still, Metal Storm is a difficult but fun play-through that absolutely deserves a spot on the virtual console.