https://noahsbarks.com/video-games/metal-combat-falcons-revenge/

I recommend reading this review at my site, linked above, for proper formatting and images.

At last, it’s here! Released only slightly over a year later, Metal Combat: Falcon’s Revenge (MC) is the sequel to Battle Clash (BC), an SNES Super Scope game. Once again, you partner with Standing Tank pilot Mike Anderson as his trusty gunner to participate in the latest Battle Game. The competition to determine a post-apocalyptic Earth’s ruler is at risk of being won by Anubis, the revived villainous emperor from the first game—and then things start to get crazy! In addition to Anubis and other Battle Game participants, you and Mike must fight off an alien invasion conducted by the Eltorian race! Wow! Mondays, am I right?

Production I tried to find information on how the production of MC changed from BC. BC’s two directors were replaced with an entirely new single director, Toshitaka Muramatsu. Muramatsu was one of two artists credited on BC, and he interestingly reprises that tole in BC as well, albeit also in a solo fashion. Yuka Tsujiyoko, fortunately, returns as the audio composer. Gunpei Yokoi remains as producer, and Intelligent Systems and Nintendo resume as developer and publisher, respectively. Overall, Team Battle Clash appear solid about one year out from their formation. Stephen Peringer even returns as the cover artist for the game’s western release.

Though that statement may be redundant in the case of MC: despite being a Japanese production, Metal Combat was never released in Japan. To be frank, I don’t know why. I discovered that the Super Scope’s western release predated the Japanese release within a one year window, which is interesting. The NES’s own light gun, the Zapper, was pre-packaged with the console during its first manufacturing run. To many westerners, the NES’s brand was intrinsically tied to the Zapper and its companion game, Duck Hunt.

The Super Scope’s destined failure From here, we can logically deduce a possible explanation for all of this. Nintendo seemed to consider the Zapper a success in the western market. Though anecdotal, this makes sense to me. ROB was similarly packaged with the console, but appeared to have no lasting consumer legacy. I knew multiple people growing up who had inherited a Zapper and Duck Hunt from their parents. I have never in my life seen a ROB in person.

The two peripherals were eventually released separately to make room for a less expensive standalone NES product, and this would have allowed them to track individual sales numbers. Nintendo could definitively tell which product most needed to piggyback off of the NES itself. It seems that market demand suggested it was ROB being carried by the NES, and not the other way around. Perhaps the peripherals’ respective libraries speak for themselves. The Zapper would end up supporting 19 games (not counting rereleases). It was mandatory for some of them, and an optional method of play in others. Whatever that ratio ended up being is irrelevant to the point I’m making however, because ROB only supported two games. ROB’s entire existence was captured in the one year of 1985. The Zapper ran from 1985 until 1992. That’s the same year the Super Scope released on the SNES. That’s an undeniably impressive lifespan, and it demonstrates how confident developers were that NES households would also have a Zapper.

Well, maybe it’s slightly less impressive when you consider that the final game to support the Zapper was Day Dreamin’ Davey.

The Zapper’s success relative to ROB was perhaps inevitable. It’s a lot easier to come up with uses for a gun than an immobile robot. That’s why we have more of them! Anyway, I imagine Nintendo thought the market for the Zapper would continue onto the Super Scope. That did not seem to be the case. The Super Scope library spanned from 1992 to until 1994. Pretty damn dire. Nintendo seemed to read the writing on the wall, as the Super Scope’s delayed Japanese release in 1993 was a limited production run.

What led to such a difference in success? We can only speculate. If you ask me, it’s a mix of a few things. One: the Super Scope is not a gun. It’s some weird-ass Space Bazooka. Its functionality is less intuitive both in its appearance and in its practicality, with its over-the-shoulder positioning and fire button being located on the top of the Scope. People were already familiar with and enjoyed shooting a gun. Selling them on a simulator should have been easy. Most people don’t fantasize about firing bazookas. I do, but I’m not most people.

Two: the novelty. Pretty simple reasoning. A home shooting gallery is probably something a lot of households didn’t consider owning until the NES’s marketing pushed it in their face and demonstrated unprecedented immersion with its raised standards for graphics. Back then, the future was now. Now, the future was old. Nintendo was selling the same technology, and the prospect of a larger gun and 16-bit graphics was seemingly not enough to convince players they were getting a significantly different experience from the Zapper.

Three: demographics. This kind of ties into the second reason. I suspect a large quantity of Duck Hunt fans were not regular video game players. I believe this is because, again, the Zapper was selling an experience many non-gamers were familiar with: shooting/hunting. Dads and uncles could easily understand it, and it was a product niche they hadn’t owned before. Many of these people may have eventually, if they did at all, brought the Zapper out to play Duck Hunt just once or twice a week. If the peripheral came with their kid’s NES, it was just a nice bonus. If they bought it separately, it’s because it was novel. Was that casual audience going to see buying a whole new console and an exclusively separate peripheral as a good financial decision?

Do you remember ever asking your parents for a new console, only to be told “what’s wrong with the old one?” To you, the answers to that question are numerous and obvious. But that’s genuinely how a lot of non-gamers perceived video games, and we’re talking about the early 90s, here. Non-gamers are not a loyal audience. You have to dazzle them with each new platform’s technology, and that’s far easier said than done. We saw this behavior repeat itself with the Wii and Wii U. Many older demographics either kept playing their Wii, or saw no point in buying a successor to something they now barely use. People in nursing homes around the world were totally fine with playing Wii Sports until they died.

So, Nintendo’s faith in the west’s love of firearms was a bit misplaced, and the Super Scope came and went as a result. I can only assume the Scope’s Japanese market was even more dire if they considered not releasing a fully completed sequel in their home country. That’s not to suggest that they demonstrated much optimism for the west, either, considering the game’s name change. According to Wikipedia, the game was originally titled Battle Clash II, only for that name to be changed shortly before launch. They cite a Swedish Nintendo-focused magazine, and I looked up a scan of it. Although I can’t read Swedish, trademarks are still in English. The section for Metal Combat is clearly labelled with the game’s final name, and a heading above the title contains the text “Battle Clash II.” It’s possibly a note acknowledging the name change to avoid confusion, as the magazine might have referred to Battle Clash II in previous issues.

As for the name change itself, I think it was a desperate last resort to distance the branding from the Super Scope’s underwhelming launch and Battle Clash‘s mixed reception. Think of it as a sort of Hail Mary pass, or even a reboot. They barely had an audience for which the name Battle Clash would hold any meaning, so why not drop the relation and lose the risk of alienating an unfamiliar audience? After all, that was the audience they needed to appeal to for the Super Scope to continue.

I don’t think it worked.

I also don’t know who Falcon is or why they’re seeking revenge.

The game I’m not going to go into too much detail regarding Metal Combat‘s gameplay, because it’s nearly identical to the original game. If you want a more in-depth explanation of Metal Combat‘s… combat, check out my review for Battle Clash.

There are a few changes, of course. One big change is that you can now charge your laser shots up to three levels. The highest level stuns your enemy and temporarily exposes their weak point. This gives you just enough time to charge up a level one laser shot to fire at it for massive damage. I postulated in my BC review that constantly waiting for your laser shot to charge broke the action’s pacing.

I ultimately suggested that the charging mechanic provided a dynamic mix of spread fire and concentrated aiming techniques in the player’s shooting, and that the game would have felt more mindless and repetitive without it. Metal Combat, however, toes the line of balancing that dynamic with the incentive to charge your shots for even longer. Battles can potentially become the previous game’s mix of evading while you charge your shot, then aiming to do a big chunk of damage. Only this time, the “evasion” sequences are even longer due to the other charge levels.

However, even that burst of damage pales in comparison to that which your rapid fire outputs. Yes: in the biggest change from Battle Clash, your rapid fire now actually damages the enemy. No special conditions needed or anything of the sort. So, we kind of get our answer on whether or not BC benefitted from having the rapid fire only be used for intercepting enemy attacks.

And the answer is “oh yeah.” Well, maybe. It’s complicated. Yes, the rapid fire makes your charged shots borderline irrelevant, which is a blatant imbalance between the firing types that isn’t present in BC, but that’s not all. See, rapid fire bullets are capable of stunning the enemy. It’s this design choice that breaks the game past the point of recovery. You can fire on your enemy immediately as the battle starts then continue firing so they’re unable to move as they’re pelted to death in mere seconds. They can’t move. They can’t attack. They’re helpless. By exploiting this, I managed to defeat every opponent in the game in about 30 seconds each. There were only three opponents in the game that could not be stunlocked, but because Metal Combat retains the general low difficulty of Battle Clash, I still took care of them with minimal effort.

I don’t really know what to say. That’s really bad. I didn’t even get to see most enemy attack patterns because of this, and nearly every battle played out the same way. No threat, and no action. Yet, reading reviews of MC, it seems this is almost universally considered superior to BC. I don’t get it. To me, this level of non-involvement in the gameplay immediately disqualifies MC from that accolade. People don’t just consider it better, but more difficult as well. BC’s low difficulty was a common point of criticism, but in my experience, they lowered the difficulty.

I straight up don’t know what those critics are talking about. I’m in such a minority that I can’t help but assume that something has gone wrong. An obvious potential explanation could be my use of an emulator. As much as I wish I could, I’m not capable of playing either Battle Clash or Metal Combat as intended. I’m using a mouse to aim, which I imagine is far easier than aiming a physical peripheral some distance away from the screen. You have to account for depth, the weight of your peripheral, and so on.

But… is that really all it is? BC was certainly very easy, and when I read that critics had the same reaction, I assumed that I had approximated enough of the original experience. Was my playthrough of BC even easier than those critics’? And was it easier enough to be a significant difference? I don’t know, because I don’t have a proper Super Scope experience to draw a comparison. Even still, would it be that difficult to stunlock an enemy in MC on actual hardware? You only need to aim for the first shot, and you can get into position before the battle even begins. From there, it’s just holding the Scope in the same position. That doesn’t sound difficult.

Could it be that many critics neglected the machine gun fire due to its limited functionality in BC? Maybe some of them didn’t even notice it could do damage or stun the enemy. Maybe they saw the small amount of damage rapid fire did, and then gave up on it as a strategy. I have no idea. I feel like there’s something I’m overlooking in the experience, because I’m not satisfied by these presumptuous explanations. It is technically possible that I’m one of the few people to immediately discover this exploit, but I seriously doubt that. It’s not even an obscure interaction; it’s one of your only two basic attacks. I genuinely don’t know. Please comment below if you can provide some insight.

Anyway, there’s only two new items I remember seeing: the neutron beam, which is a super powerful attack that replaces the plasma bomb, and an item that restores all of your health (as if you’ll ever need it.) You can now hold multiple bombs at a time without using inventory space, allowing you to carry more items into battle—making the game even easier.

All of these changes are intended to be improvements, but I feel they actually end up hurting the game. They make the game so trivial that the player requires less effort to win, and the action is necessarily less intense and exciting as a result. I will say, one inarguably cool addition to the gameplay is that you can now target and destroy specific parts of your enemy’s ST. If you’re a sadist, you can pick off all of their mechanical limbs and leave only their cockpit rolling around on the ground. It’s pretty cool. But, of course, by targeting an enemy’s strongest weapons, you can get rid of their offense very early in a battle. The only disincentive to not do this is the fact you have an even more game-breaking strategy that takes even less effort. After all, they can’t use their weapons if they’re stunned the entire fight.

Yuka Tsujiyoko’s music is still great at least, and the graphics are decently. I didn’t have BC’s issue of the enemies sometimes blending into the background due to an indiscriminate color palette. The translation quality is much more professional, even if there’s still barely any text. MC is about 1.5 times the length of its predecessor, so the short game length criticism is slightly addressed. There’s now a relatively lengthy training stage that teaches you how to play the game, but its completion is required upon starting a new playthrough. That’s especially annoying for me, since I already knew how to play from the previous game. An option to either skip the tutorial or get the cliff notes of the mechanical changes would have been appreciated.

Post-game bonuses include a “Real Mode”, whatever the fuck that means. I didn’t check it out, but I’m assuming it’s just a higher difficulty setting. Interestingly, you also unlock a new playable character and ST. In exchange for less defense than the default ST, this one can store up to ten charged shots. Not exactly reinventing the wheel, here. I can’t imagine it changes the experience that much, so I put off trying it for now.

Time Trial mode returns, and I’m tempted repeat myself as it commits the same mistakes as BC. MC yet again does not save your high scores, despite being a short, arcade-style game. Shameful. 2 Player mode also returns, now with its own Time Trial mode and a newly added “Battle” mode, which is a good addition. Generally, Metal Combat‘s interface suffers the same issues that Battle Clash did.

NOTE: I’m adding this note while in the process of revising this very old review. I apparently neglected to explain what “Battle” mode is, and I can’t remember now because I played this game over a decade ago. Sorry! I’ll figure it out and adjust the review someday.

Metal Combat earnestly attempts to be an improvement over its predecessor, but some truly baffling design choices result in a sequel that, while flashier, is less balanced and not as engaging. I still had some degree of fun with Metal Combat, but I’d have to characterize the game as a misfire.

And who the fuck is “Falcon”? I don’t remember that word being anywhere other than the title screen. Maybe it’s a mystery saved for the third installment of the series. Nah, I think a real-life post-apocalypse is more likely to occur before that happens.