| paleface [sys=PCB; cat=Platformer; reg=JPN] |
| | | Incredibly intense run-n-gun horizontal shooter type of thing, supposedly by a team that then left Irem, took the name "Nazca," and went on to make the Metal Slug games for SNK. In fact, stringing together a mention on klov.com, This same bunch may have also been responsible for the submarine horizontal shooter "In the Hunt" published a year earlier by Irem, running on the same arcade board. The Metal Slugs have submarine stages... hmmm!
Anyway, once you've seen it there's no denying that Geo Storm is the direct precursor to Metal Slug--the baroque mechanical designs and insane amount of sprite animation bear the same distinct style, only in Geo Storm the human characters are realistically proportioned rather than super-deformed and this, along with perhaps a little more horsepower in the Irem board than in the MVS (although it must be admitted that there is a lot of slowdown with two players), and just general ass-kicking, makes for a game that outdoes its descendant Slugs as far as mad shooting action is concerned! Oh, and you also rescue hostages here, although instead of Slug's skinny half-naked beared guys, they are skinny half-naked young women (no beards). No complaint there.
Let's focus on the "ass-kicking" part. You have just two buttons, jump and shoot--none of that namby-pamby Slug grenade tossing here! The player characters hold a gun in each hand, not just one, and can aim them around the screen in any direction. Playable vehicles abound and you will appreciate their firepower when it comes to dealing with the ceaseless onslaughts of enemy troops and vehicles that come at you again and again from all directions to the accompaniment of a short but remarkably hard-driving rock soundtrack. Blow stuff up! Again and again and again! And it rocks, and of course massive boss battles punctuate the wreckage-strewn stages.
It's almost as though the designers sat down and made of list of the coolest shooting scenarios they could think of (on motorcyles, dangling with one hand from a wire, zipping along on a crumbling freight-train, piloting a Gundam-style mechanical suit, going co-op with an Army half-track with driver and gunner, etc) and then went and put them all in to one game. |
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