Update #40 - Metal Arms was Surprisingly Hard (Patreon)

Afternoon!

I've beaten Metal Arms Glitch in the System and I've started on getting the video files all cleaned up and named and begun the editing process. This was one that a lot of you had been recommending me over the years as a fairly forgotten console shooter, and now that I've beaten it I understand why.

This game is hard. It's also cryptic at points.

While the lack of story/characters was also a big contributing factor to why it likely faded away, the most shocking thing to me was how much of a challenge the game still was even when not cranked up to the hardest setting (named "Nuts of Steel" and it's not fucking around). Between enemies that resurrect themselves and knock you off ledges, lots of ambushing enemies with explosive weapons, fast moving flying enemies, and several areas and boss fights that could be a mystery to comprehend it's no surprise this one filtered out a lot of players from beating it. Even after tweeting about it, I had a lot of people replying with sentiments like "Yeah I had that, or my friend had it, and we loved multiplayer but we didn't know anyone who had actually beaten it". This makes it extra cruel for the fact that unlocking new multiplayer levels comes from finding secret chip items scattered throughout the single player levels, so you have to progress in those to get all the multiplayer maps. I was at first worried I wouldn't have a ton to talk about in the video due to how simple the game appeared to be at first, but that's definitely not a problem now. God damn.

In other news, I'm still looking for suggestions on some shorter Halloween/spooky games to cover for October. Elite Dangerous will be before those, and I have two games in mind including Sunless Skies but I'm still curious just in case I end up having some extra time. Still going through some ancient email playing catch up so there could be some of your suggestions buried there still for me to unearth.]

As for Pathologic 2 and Ice-Pick Lodge there has been some good news coming out from them. A doom and gloom article was recently making the rounds about them being downsized to a skeleton staff and progress slowing down dramatically, but developers have said that this interview was actually conducted a long time ago and the situation has improved since then with a pretty full staff still actively working. There will likely be some official Pathologic news from them in the next week or two. 

Also, I was interviewed by an actual publication again!  It is in French though, and mine is bad enough that I'm relying on machine translation and it appears to be mostly what I said. I think.

As for video questions, those are being collected in a separate post imminently following this one if you're in the tier for that. Don't worry if you're not, there are no other secrets there. Those will always be with these posts. 

Thanks as always for all your support!