Metal Storm on NES is one of my favorite games ever. I had the Nintendo Power poster and I remember seeing the game at the supermarket rental racks before I even knew what a video game was. I didn't play it until I was 19 or so and found a copy at a used game shop. This was before it was a grail-tier collector's item.
Last year I was able to get a copy of the Famicom version of the game. Like a lot of FC/NES conversions, it's got some differences! The ones I knew about were the intro (it's got one, with lots of unique graphics and text) and the in-game sprite (it's white, like the art, instead of the NES version's non-sequitur orange).
I didn't know about the text changes at the end! First, there's some neat stuff during the final boss.
Background: in Metal Storm, a giant computer has gone rogue and commandeered a superweapon inside a planetoid. After everything else fails, you get sent out to the planetoid in an experimental gravity-manipulating mech so you can put a stop to the computer before it turns the Earth into space dust. Or something like that, look, it's been a while since I read the manual.
Anyway, in the final stage you face a boss rush, and then the final boss itself is a simple, but cinematic sequence where you have to blow up a series of target on a giant mechanism as it slowly advances toward the left side of the screen. I have never failed to destroy this boss before the time limit is up, but I assume it results in the weapon firing and your death. Well, in the Famicom version, the boss talks to you as it advances! This is pretty neat, and surprising, because there's no in-game text otherwise beyond the screens that tell you what stage you're in and how many lives you have. Here's my translation of the boss' dialogue - it advances each time another segment of the machine pops into view.
Then the whole thing explodes, roll credits. Now here's where there's another deviation between versions. Here's the NES version's ending text:
I'd like to know why the Earth nation leaders have the ability to bestow eternal life. What did they actually do? Download me into a computer? Who knows. This ending has always stuck with me because of how hyperbolic it is. Plus, it's funny that they twist the story to aim outward at the end. Aliens didn't do this! WE built the damn superweapon, and the corrupt computer! Hang tough, and kill aliens, I guess.
But check out how hard the localizers swerved from the Japanese ending:
Whoa. And I didn't translate that or anything, this all rolls in English. The flavor of this really does remind me of a lot of the politically charged mech anime I've seen, driving home that this is really all our fault and all the cool gravity-altering mecha in the universe won't save us from wiping ourselves out. No hang tough here, no rah rah kill the aliens, no immortality. Just, "better not keep fucking this up, mankind." That's quite a lot to load into a 30-second Nintendo game ending!
So, yeah, I like Metal Storm. What do you think? Does the pilot survive the game, or does he blow up with the computer? Maybe the "immortality" is a backhanded way of saying the government, like, built a statue out of you made of everlasting metal or something.
Last year I was able to get a copy of the Famicom version of the game. Like a lot of FC/NES conversions, it's got some differences! The ones I knew about were the intro (it's got one, with lots of unique graphics and text) and the in-game sprite (it's white, like the art, instead of the NES version's non-sequitur orange).
I didn't know about the text changes at the end! First, there's some neat stuff during the final boss.
Background: in Metal Storm, a giant computer has gone rogue and commandeered a superweapon inside a planetoid. After everything else fails, you get sent out to the planetoid in an experimental gravity-manipulating mech so you can put a stop to the computer before it turns the Earth into space dust. Or something like that, look, it's been a while since I read the manual.
Anyway, in the final stage you face a boss rush, and then the final boss itself is a simple, but cinematic sequence where you have to blow up a series of target on a giant mechanism as it slowly advances toward the left side of the screen. I have never failed to destroy this boss before the time limit is up, but I assume it results in the weapon firing and your death. Well, in the Famicom version, the boss talks to you as it advances! This is pretty neat, and surprising, because there's no in-game text otherwise beyond the screens that tell you what stage you're in and how many lives you have. Here's my translation of the boss' dialogue - it advances each time another segment of the machine pops into view.
Then the whole thing explodes, roll credits. Now here's where there's another deviation between versions. Here's the NES version's ending text:
I'd like to know why the Earth nation leaders have the ability to bestow eternal life. What did they actually do? Download me into a computer? Who knows. This ending has always stuck with me because of how hyperbolic it is. Plus, it's funny that they twist the story to aim outward at the end. Aliens didn't do this! WE built the damn superweapon, and the corrupt computer! Hang tough, and kill aliens, I guess.
But check out how hard the localizers swerved from the Japanese ending:
Whoa. And I didn't translate that or anything, this all rolls in English. The flavor of this really does remind me of a lot of the politically charged mech anime I've seen, driving home that this is really all our fault and all the cool gravity-altering mecha in the universe won't save us from wiping ourselves out. No hang tough here, no rah rah kill the aliens, no immortality. Just, "better not keep fucking this up, mankind." That's quite a lot to load into a 30-second Nintendo game ending!
So, yeah, I like Metal Storm. What do you think? Does the pilot survive the game, or does he blow up with the computer? Maybe the "immortality" is a backhanded way of saying the government, like, built a statue out of you made of everlasting metal or something.
