It's a random Thursday and I've had a long day, so that means that it's time for another Useless Obscure Video Game!
Today's game is RAD: Robot Alchemic Drive, a PS2 game that I don't think anyone has managed to replicate in the many years since it released. The basic premise is fairly normal. In an anime themed modern day (Well, modern for the time), you are the scion of a now disgraced rich family. Humanity is humming along, when the unthinkable happens: Aliens attack. Previously thought impossible due to something known as the Nectar Barrier, which has prevented humanity from going into space by killing anything biological passing through earth's atmosphere, giant monsters have started showing up. It is revealed that your family spent its fortune preparing for this exact moment, developing giant robots to fight the invaders! And thus it falls to you to fight back as best you can.

What made RAD unique for its time was two things. Firstly, it had something of a branching narrative. Every "Level" was played like an episode in a bad late 90s anime, and depending on what buildings got destroyed and how well you fought the story could go down several paths, as well as you having several characters and robots to choose from. More importantly, however, was the control system. See, while you were controlling a giant robot to fight the aliens... you weren't IN the robot. Instead, you had to control your teenage kid with jetboots and a remote control, and operate the robot remotely, requiring you to find good vantage points to watch and operate things from (And not get stepped on yourself), and dealing with the difficult controls. This wasn't quite QWOP, but it was pretty close. And since you had to constantly reposition to get the right kind of view, it was a lot easier to misjudge distances and aiming. It's hard enough to aim a laser when you're holding it, imagine having to do it from somewhere else!
RAD wasn't exactly GOOD but it enjoyed a cult success with the people who knew of it, and it fully embraced its concept, right down to the then-common dubbing. Since then, we've had a lot of giant robot games, but very few have done the third person view style, so it still remains pretty unique. It also remains really rare, I don't think I've seen a copy in the wild ever, and copies on ebay and the like can go for hundreds of bucks. So... not cheap. But still, another one of the many ps2 era games that went criminally underexposed. That really was something of a wild time....

#videogames #obscuregames

Anyone know this #Machintosh game where you'd play as a bear with a shield and a sword, top view (classic zelda-esc), everything being very square, and I feel like the colors was mostly earthy... quite possibly a homebrew. I played it on a #system7

#vintageApple #vintagegaming #retrogaming #obscuregames

10 - Woof: The Metal Dogs

When I first saw this on sale on Steam, I thought it was some kind of joke. Some fanwork being sold to capitalize on the name for the few people who remember that it existed. But no, it turns out that this was a real thing! Metal Dogs, a game focusing around the series mascot, Pochi. This was a complete disconnect from what we'd seen before. It wasn't a turn based RPG, or even an ATB based on. It was an action-roguelike. It started out as an Early Access title in 2022, in the standard process of using the dev time to refine what they had before they finally hit a "Full" release in 2023. If you've ever played an action roguelike, then you probably know how this goes. Select your dog, of which you can choose from several breeds, a first since Saga, and go into dungeons to find cash and loot, which you take back to your base, run by a now mostly cyborgized Dr Mince, also responsible for zapping you back to life if you happen to bite it in the dungeons. You can equip multiple weapons at a time, and your loadout matters, since while you don't really have ammunition limits this time, you do still have to reload, and getting caught with your metaphorical pants down is never a good time. Still, the quests are fairly standardized, and enough practice, levelling, and a few nice new guns can make anything work.

As far as the game's vitals go, the graphics are clean, using the "Xeno Reborn" style of visuals, and there's nothing particularly wrong with it overall. Some time after its release it got a couple of DLCS that added new dogs to play as and a handful of new quests, but these are pricey and thus I haven't tried them. Overall, solid if unoriginal. This was developed and published by 24Frame, the same group responsible for Xeno Reborn, and is so far the last we've seen of the series.
So what's left? Not that much. Kadokawa games, the owner of the Metal Max IP sold it to Cygames, of Granblue fame in late 2022 and while there was talk of a new title, there's been nothing heard since. I can hope that in a new set of hands we see something new out of the series, and given that it has gone long periods without so much as a peep, we can hope that one day we get to visit the wasteland again, and drive a giant tank with a cannon that can shoot god.

Writing all this was an interesting exercise, I got to do some research and learned a few things more I didn't know before. Those who saw it, any input? Thoughts? I am tempted to find some more series and do a few more of these. I already have a few more obscure games I wanna try looking into.

#rpg #obscuregames #metalmax #videogames

9- Metal Max Xeno and a failed Rebirth

After Metal Max 4 in 2013, we have another slow period. The last two mobile titles are released in this interim, but we don't see anything again until 2018, when the last of the mainline titles comes out; Metal Max Xeno, for the PS4 and Vita. That's right, it skipped an entire generation. The setting is grim. It posits a future where the Great Destruction happened and Noah was somehow stopped, but humanity still lost the war, with the SoN (Sons of Noah), a set of homicidal robots created by it, were nigh-successful in wiping out almost all of human civilization. We join Talis, an angry young man with an artificial arm, as he finds what might be the last bastion of humanity in the world, Iron Base. His goal? Destroy as many SoNs as he can, no matter what. It starts you out with a tank, and a very basic goal: Destroy the SoNs, specifically the Catastropus, an octopus-shaped tank made of guns that was a direct threat to Iron Base, while looking for survivors in Distokio, all that's left of humanity. This game, to be honest, is /bleak/, even for this series. The total number of named characters does not make it to double-digits. It's also fairly plain, all things considered. There is only one "Town", your home base. You don't have an overworld - just an interconnected series of areas that loosely follow a path, and not much opportunity to go off said path. It retains the class system from prior games, with the ability to actually actively change a character's given class at any time so you could spread around useful skills. It was also /hard/. While Metal Max games had never been that easy, Xeno feels like it had made things harder - action economy and the art of firing multiple weapons of once is now key. Overall, the game was, while competent, unsatisfying. The madness was not over, however.

Not quite two years after its release. Metal Max Xeno got a re-release, Metal Max Xeno Reborn. And it... well, it wasn't good! They cut something like three quarters of the ALREADY very barebones story and dialogue out, including any and all jokes about repopulating the human race. They changed the art style to a "Dark and gritty" style, and redid the entire UI and gameplay mechanic, going from a turn based system to an ATB based system. Action economy becomes even more important, and difficulty has been jacked up even more - you are going to die, over and over, until you can scrape together enough weaponry to actually make a dent in your targets. The job system has been abandoned in favor of a character based skill tree. To add insult to injury, when Reborn was released, for reasons unknown they decided to remove the original, delisting it from storefronts entirely. As a result, the only way to play the original Xeno is if you were one of the few (Hi there!) who bought a physical copy when they could. In total, it feels like the remake was... lesser, in every way, I feel. What was there was tighter, certainly, but it was not really a Metal Max game in anything but name. I once tried to explain to someone that it felt like "Probably a better game mechanically, but not a metal max game" and I feel that I can stand by that. With all that, however, we now are at the end of the mainline metal max games. Or are we? Well, not quite....

#rpg #obscuregames #PS4 #metalmax #videogames

8 - Metal Max - The GOOD DS ones

While the first Metal Max DS game was a complete disaster by most standards, the next three, all on the DS, were actually pretty good. For the original DS, we get Metal Max 3. By this point, the trademark problems that had caused the series to go under the Metal Saga name for a while had more or less been worked out, allowing them to release the first numbered title in the series in 17 years, although given the fact that most of the games are standalone this is more for convenience than anything else. You play as a young man who is revived by Dr Minch, but suffering from a bad case of amnesia. You opt to take on the job of a hunter so you can figure out what got you and recover your memories. This is probably one of the better uses of the "Explore the wasteland" open world setup the game thrives on - you are actively encouraged to go searching because that's exactly what you'd need to do, to find things out. MM3 also started to introduce a character creation system. While your hero is fixed, your other party members were mercenaries, hired from the bar, dragon quest style, and leaning heavily on that new skill system. Soldiers for on foot combat, mechanics for tanks, and a few others. It also introduced the very first Bio-Tank, a tank that CAN get XP and level up. Overall, MM3 made just over 91k sales or so. While it would only be downhill from here, it was a solid entry.

Surprising absolutely nobody, a year later we saw another DS game, "Metal Max 2 ReLoaded". It was another remake of 2, using the engine of 3. Same game, but using all the system updates that had been made so far. You could choose your hero's gender, there was create-able mercenary companions as well as the story related ones, updated graphics and the skill/class system, and some new gameplay additions in quests and bosses. Overall, a much better show than 2's previous outing. At this point, however, the sales seemed to be on a down, hitting just around 57k, and they wouldn't see an improvement.

2014, we saw the last of the handheld games, Metal Max 4: Moonlight Diva for the 3DS. As the 3DS was NOT import friendly, unlike its predecessor, this was a title I never got to play. From what I can tell, it took everything 3 had, and built on it. It had voice acting! A new, reworked engine! Its story covered a entirely new villain. 50 years after the great catastrophe that Noah caused, the player is living with their foster family when the villains swoop in and kidnap their father. The hero is informed by his foster sister, in fact an android, that he and his dad were "Heat Seeds", cryogenically frozen humans meant to help rebuild the world. The enemy wants them so they can take control of an ancient war weapon. Cue a world spanning adventure to rescue your dad and stop some lunatic from getting their hands on a Great Destruction class weapon. It received one of the best ratings of any game in the Metal Max series, but sold just under 40k titles. After this, we only have one, technically two, titles left, and they have their own problems, as you will eventually see.

#rpg #obscuregames #DS #3DS #metalmax #videogames

7 - Metal Mobile and the Import Problem

Normally, I try to make a point of not discussing a game that I've not done research on or, preferably, at least played. So far, every game I've mentioned in this series of articles is one I've actually played. Here I must break my streak, however, because we need to cover something that I never got to try and absolutely wouldn't have even if I could. As with any series that gets enough popularity, (And an alarming number that don't), Metal Max has also had several mobile games. In 2007 just after the DS title, we had Metal Saga Mobile. In 2010, there was "Metal Saga: New Frontier" which was some sort of browser based thing. In 2015, Metal Max Fireworks was another phone game. All of these were tied to various Japanese phone services, none of which would be available in the west. From what little I can find online, the majority of them looked like standard gacha fare, just with a metal max skin. Very little data exists, even on YouTube, outside of a video here and there. None of them seemed to get much press, nor last very long, and what little I CAN find regarding them does not paint them in anything close to a rosy picture.

This is in fact one of the biggest problems of loving a series like this. Because western releases were so sporadic, easily obtained information is shockingly hard to come by. A lot of the data I used in writing some of this had to come from Wikipedia, which is at least backed up with its own sources by way of citations from Famitsu Magazine in the east. So far, I have found exactly -one- good wiki for the Metal series, and it's entirely in Japanese. It isn't even exhaustive, and does not translate well. Beyond that, I've had to rely on GameFAQs for the original games and a few individual sites and fragments here and there. Stuff like the DS game? Nada. There is not a single FAQ or walkthrough available for this game. Even the most modern releases don't have full walkthroughs, at best they have single entry notes. Of course, this is also not helped by the fact that for many of these, the opportunity to play them wasn't there; phone games are a flash in the pan and best for stuff like this. For the DS games.... 3 and 4, which we'll get to, did have one guide each, but that's it. In short, this stuff is hard to come by and I can see exactly why it doesn't pick up a greater view in the west, not when it has this little coverage as it is. Either way after the first of the mobile games, we wouldn't see another metal max game again till 2010.

#rpg #obscuregames #metalmax #videogames

6 - Metal Saga... DS!

Metal Saga DS: "Season of Steel"
Not long after its PS2 outing, Metal Saga saw the second game released under that branding, this time on the DS. This is also one of the only Metal games to actually bill itself as a direct sequel. Many years after the original Metal Max, the Hunter, now known as "Lebanner" (Or Rebanna? Translations are not clear. This continues to be A Thing) is raising some orphans and trying to keep safe the "Noah Seed", a small computer core that is all that's left of Noah after it was destroyed previously. Unfortunately, the seed has proven completely indestructible and could theoretically be used to revive the angry homicidal supercomputer. So when deadly robots show up to steal the seed and fatally wound Lebanner, it falls to you, his son, to try and prevent Noah's revival.

Saga DS comes from that particular school of DS where they wanted to experiment with game dev ideas that a series has previously not touched, and also the school of thought where "Buttons are for dinguses, touchscreen only!" As you might guess, I absolutely didn't have time for this one. Putting aside the fact that my Japanese is, to put it lightly, absolutely terrible, it had problems. The story was actually... a story, but neat premise aside, this game really, really didn't work for me. Touchscreen controls alone were a terrible choice. The world map was reduced to a point-to-point "Choose your location" menu, taking out all the fun of exploration. Combat was cut well back - a max of three party members, Pochi included, and by and large just one tank at a time. Instead, both humans operate the same tank, firing separate weapons. If the tank goes kablooey, you're out of luck. You can theoretically tow a second tank, but the insanely small party size and the constantly rotating selection of second party members from a list of about five doesn't help.
Did it do anything right? Sort of. Saga DS took the idea of skills and started codifying them. Character classes had always existed, sort of, with the Hunter/Mechanic/Soldier set, but this added a few more new character archetypes, each with their own unique skills. With no MP, your abilities came in dungeons and dragons styled charges - a fixed number of uses before needing a rest. Later games would use this system as well. Surprising probably nobody, it managed around 21-26k sales. Not a good outing, but still not the last we'd see of the series.

#rpg #obscuregames #DS #metalmax #videogames

5 - Metal Saga

2005, and we're up to the first major 3d release of a metal max game, on the PS2. Metal Saga (Subtitle "Chain of Sandstorm"). There had been rumors of other metal max games in the interim - A cancelled Dreamcast game, but nothing released. As the publisher of the first couple of games, Data East, had gone bust by this point, there had been some trademark issues. As a result, the "Metal Saga" name had been adopted to work around that in the interim by its current devs, Success, and so we ended up here. Metal Saga was, more or less, my own entry point into the series. I'd always known about it - Being even tangentially involved in the translation scene meant I'd known about the original and its ilk for a while, but one cannot underestimate the benefit of a game in one's native language.

Unfortunately, Saga is not a game I can in retrospect call good. It had all the aspects of the Metal Max series we had seen up until now, but its utter slapdash assembly meant that none of these disparate elements managed to come together. There was a story, in theory involving your character deciding to go out and become a Hunter after meeting a famous hunter, eventually evolving into an attempt to stop a second nuclear disaster, but as with most Metal games this was more or less a secondary excuse to explore the waste. Making this less entertaining was the fact that this game was also a completionist's nightmare. Most major bosses gave you exactly one shot at fighting them. Lose, and the game would continue... but any and all plotlines would usually get completely halted. There are two bosses that are directly locked out if you choose specific, actually empathic choices. Moreover, certain gameplay mechanics were extremely poorly explained, and a few were completely broken - One of the best examples was the "Big Medal" collectable. Like in Dragon Quest, one could find medallions as a collectable item, and turn them in to a weird guy with a rabbit head. He shows up in every town, though in most cases he'll just spout a non sequitur and leave. You can give him, in one place, those medals you've been finding. Only.... don't bother. It is completely impossible to give him enough medals, as there does not seem to be enough spawning in the game - picking up one completely makes another disappear. There's no reward for turning any number of them in, as far as I know, and apocryphal information claims there was never a reward in data-mined information.

With all those negatives, did Metal Saga do anything right? Yes, in fact. It did manage several neat ideas as well. You had a choice of party members - You could pick from two different mechanic characters, two different soldiers, and a secret third soldier, and each of them had slightly different skillsets. Pochi got several new breeds of dog you could choose from, each of which had its own set of default skills. Even better, skills became a thing. Each 'class' gets a set of skills they can learn which are tailored to their strength. Instead of MP, these skills directly cost G, so overuse is going to leave you broke pretty fast, and not all of the skills have too much use, but the groundwork was made here for when the skill system would really come into its own. Overall, however, Metal Saga was a very disjointed showing that had promise, but just didn't quite get there in a lot of ways. It apparently managed about 100k sales. Was the next one going to be better? ... well, there's going to be more of these, so you can probably guess.

#rpg #obscuregames #PS2 #metalmax #videogames

4 - Metal Max 2

Metal Max 1 did respectably for the time, ostensibly selling about 120-150k copies(So claims Wikipedia, at least), so clearly a sequel was needed. Two years later in 1993, we got it in the form of Metal Max 2. Set in the same post-apocalyptic setting, your character this time is a young rookie with a team of hunters, whose home town is set upon by the local bandit group, the Grapplers, led by flamethrower-wielding psycho Ted Broiler. Nearly everyone in the town is brutally burned to death, including your mentor, and you set out to destroy the Grapplers before things get any worse. It had a more focused story, but still had all the exploration, including some fun weird bits, like the LOVE machine, a device that could have different effects depending on what chips you used to make it. By and large, there wasn't that many changes to the basic setup of the series. Wanted Monsters, Tanks, it's all there. What Metal Max 2 added to the series was polish, with the addition of minigames in certain casinos, and one very important addition: Pochi, the cannon dog. Pochi was a canine friend who started showing up from Metal Max 2 onward, who become something of a pseudo-mascot for the series. A peppy little shiba-inu with a giant cannon strapped to his back, you generally couldn't control Pochi, but he has his own party slot and provided mostly helpful AI support, and at worst, another warm body for the monstrous hordes to target. Pochi would go on to show up in just about every other game in the series, in some capacity, later getting his own game.

Beyond all of this, Metal Max 2 was a good example of "If it's not broke don't fix it", and went on to nearly double the sales of its predecessor. From here, things started to get a little weird with the releases. 1995 saw the release of Metal Max Returns, a remake of 1 with updated graphics and sound but not that much else, and then nothing for about eight years, when Metal Max 2 Kai was released for the GBA. I don't quite know the story on this, but by all accounts, Kai was a bomb. It sold somewhere between 9.5-20k titles and was by far one of the worst received titles in the series. Not surprisingly, any plans for the Metal Max Returns GBA remake were immediately ejected. Fortunately, the series wasn't done yet, but things were going to get even weirder from here, as two years later, we saw the next Metal Max game, dubbed "Metal Saga", and the first game to be released in the west. This was not, however, the good thing it seemed to be, as we will soon find out.

#rpg #obscuregames #snes #metalmax #videogames