Of Mice and Sand (3DS)

 I first became aware of this game when it was originally released in Japanese as Sabaku no Nezumi Dan, and though it looked interesting, I just assumed it would never get an English release of any kind and forgot about it. More recently, though, I was browsing 3DS releases, and found that it not only has an English release since I last saw it, but also a bunch of ports to different formats! Despite that though, I haven't seen anyone talking about any version of it, so I guess I'll do it.

 

The game's set in a post-apocalyptic desert world inhabited by anthropomorphic animals (mainly mice, though you do encounter cats and just regular old humans, so there are presumably others out there, too), and you take charge of a small group of mice journeying in search of the mythical paradise of El Dorado. it's a big journey, too: I've been playing for several hours at the time of writing, and I'm not even half way across the world map. They do this in a big armoured vehicle that starts out looking a lot like a Mad Max tour bus, and gradually gets bigger and more formidable. You control any of them directly, though, you just move a cursor round, giving them orders. Build this room, craft this item, drive to the next town, and so on. 

 

At the basic level, Of Mice and Sand follows a classically compelling formula: get the ingredients to craft the items to build the rooms to get more ingredients to craft more items and build new rooms. Unfortunately, there's not much more than that. The problem coms in the way that new locations are added to your vehicle's navigational computer. When you get to a town for the first time, you can pay to hear rumours, which includes rumours of nearby undiscovered locations. The problem is that the prices of these rumours increases pretty quickly, and your main source of income is fulfilling requests for crafted items. So you spend a lot of time driving back and forth between towns gathering resources or parked up next to towns waiting for your mice to craft the items you need.

 

I'm not too disappointed with Of Mice and Sand. I'm not sure I'll have the patience to continue playing all the way to the end, but like I said, I have had hours of play over the past week or so since I got it, so it's not like it's totally worthless. Maybe a kind of Cookie Clicker-esque version that let you just set things up and have travelling and crafting happen while you're away would be more palatable? Maybe if it ever gets a sequel, that's how it'll go? As it is, it's no classic, but it's worth a look, at least.

Metamorphic Force (Arcade)

 Two unfair criticisms that are often aimed a beat em ups as a genre are that they're unfair quarter munchers, and that they're repetitive to the point of mindlessness. This might sound a little too harsh to some of you, but I think the blame for both of these can be laid at the feet of Konami's licensed beat em ups of the late eighties and early nineties: Turtles in Time, The Simpsons, X-Men, etc. I know a lot of people have a lot of nostalgia for those games, and I do too, but they definitely live up to those stereotypes more than the average beat em up (especially the western versions, which were made more difficult to squeeze those few extra coins out of players), and the popularity and ubiquitousness in the past means they're the games that a lot of people think of first when it comes to the genre. It's really a shame that the best entries Konami made in the genre came out just as it was waning in popularity: Violent Storm was one of them, and Metamorphic Force was the other.

 

I think most people already know about Violent Storm, with it's bizarre soundtrack and wide array of bone-crunching throws, but Metamorphic Force seems to have slipped under a lot of people's radar for some reason. The simplest way to describe it would be as a combination of SEGA's Altered Beast and Konami's X-Men beat em up. You pick one of four guys, each of whom has been granted the ability to transform into a different werebeast by the Earth goddess, and you walk across various fantasy landscapes beating up monsters until they explode into glowing goo. Each playable character has their own beast form, as opposed to each stage having a beast form ala Altered Beast, and they mostly just make you bigger, stranger, faster, and a slightly expanded movelist. Interestingly, a lot of the enemies you face are also werebeasts: lizardmen, elephantmen, hedgehogmen, and so on.

 

The X-Men similarities are a little more vague and difficult to describe than the obvious conceptual similarities to Altered Beast. Basically, it just really feels like the X-Men game, but with a bit more polish, and a bit more balance. It's especially evident in the boss fights: I'm sure a lot of you remember the fight against The Blob in X-Men, where the player characters can basically just pummel his to death in a few seconds? The bossfights in this, in the early part of the game, at least, are a lot like that. Still manages to be satisfying, though, the way you can beat your foes, throw them around, and even continue beating them while they're lying on the ground (especially when you play as Ban, the martial artist Minotaur, who literally dances on his enemies' prone bodies with his hooves!), Transformation occurs through collecting a goddess statue, and there's no time limit to it: you stay transformed until it's beaten out of you. Collect another goddess statue while already transformed, and you'll do a fullscreen dashing attack, a lot like Nightcrawler's super in X-Men.

 

The game's presentation is excellent all round. You can see in the screnshots how colourful it is, how big the sprites are, and how interesting the world and the monsters in it are, but the soundtrack is also high quality. Feeling in some parts like the music you'd hear in the background of a really great fantasy cartoon, and in others the  same kind of bombastic chiptune metal heard in the likes of Thunderforce IV on the Mega Drive. There was, according to legend, a soundtrack CD was released under the title Konami Amusement Sounds '93: Autumn Edition, but I can't find a single picture of it, a copy of it for sale, or any reference to it existing other than ones apparently copied from Wikipedia (which I think was itself copied from the old MAME history.dat). I'm sure it does exist, somewhere, but it must have been printed in very small quantities.

 

Metamorphic Force is a game I definitely recommend playing. If you do, though, the old rule of Konami beat em ups does still apply: play the Japanese version of the ROM and you'll have a much better time. It's never had any kind of home port, but I'm hoping that Hamster Corp. put it out as part of the Arcade Archive series at some point. They've released other nineties Konami games, so it could happen, maybe! If it ever does, it'll be a day one purchase for me.