Disc Station MSX #02

Time for another DS post! It's been a while since the last proper one, thanks to the crapness of the DS98 series. Let's get on with it, then!
Disk one contains demos. First up is a strange playable demo of Xevious: Fardraut saga. Strange because although it's a playable demo, if you don't press anything for more than a second, the ship will start moving and firing on its own. I wonder if this was so that players could play the demo, and shop owners could have a rolling demo to put on display, without having to use up space on two seperate demos? That's the only explanation I can come up with, anyway.
Then again, the other two demos on the disk are a playable demo of the action RPG Golvellious, plus another non-interactive advert for Golvellious. The playable demo contains the opening dungeon up to the top-down boss fight. Oddly, the advert doesn't loop, so the previous "shop display" theory is out of the window.
Disk two only has two items of interest, along with the usual magzine text features. The first is a short christmas themed animation. Santa Claus is decorating a giant christmas tree while also preventing a bearded character from chopping it down. Not particularly entertaining or impressive, but it's nice, I guess.
The second item is a full game (yaay!). It's called Swing, and in it, you play the part of a guy who crawls over the sides of tall buildings, cleaning windows and avoiding the various weird creatures that are also crawling all over the buildings. Except for the creatures that are flashing different colours, collect hem for points, and also temporary invincibility and enemy-smiting power for every third one you collect. It's a fairly amusing and inoffensive game from that long-forgotten era when regular jobs could be made into videogames.
All in all, this is a pretty good volume of Disc Station MSX, though of course it doesn't meet the crazy generosity of the introductory volumes.

Metal Law (Amiga)

Despite the name, this game doesn't feature the members of Manowar running about in underpants slaying posers with axes. It's actually about a futuristic cop of some kind who, rather than fighting crime, goes about the place shooting monsters.
The intro claims the game is set in the future, in a place called "Neo York". Is that a futuristic version of New York, or a futuristic version of York? Since the first couple of stages take place in a kind of castley, dungeony setting, I guess it must be York. But then the second set of stages are in a Giger-esque bio-world, so who knows? Or cares?
The two most immediate things that become obvious when you start to play Metal Law are the controls (because it commits the heinous, and all-too common Amiga platformer crime of having jump mapped to up on the d-pad), and the fact that the makers were obviously big SEGA fans.
The main character and the nonsensical plot are obviously based on SEGA's game ESWAT, and the game itself plays a fair bit like Shinobi, and the player's character can even crawl on his knees in the exact same manner as Joe Musashi.
Anyway, it's not a massively complex game: you go right, shoot the (impressively ugly) monsters and try not to fall down any bottomless pits. And there are lots of bottomless pits. And to make things even worse, Metal Law commits another grave platform game crime by having a lot of leaps of faith. You do start to recognise them after a couple of goes, but the situation isn't helped at all by fake-helpful arrows that lead to an unseen pit, nor by power ups that seem to have been placed to lure players to an annoying and cheap death.
Despite it's flaws, which are both numerous and large, Metal Law is still a lot of fun to play. Jumping around the stages, collecting power-ups, and shooting enemies are all enjoyable actiities in this game. It is just a shame about the stupid mistakes the makers made. There are definitely much worse Amiga platformers, though, so it's strange that this one seems to have been so forgotten.