Title: Metal Dragon/Life on Mars
System: Evercade
Price: $19.99
Release Date: Late 2024
Prelude
Many years ago, while watching retro gaming Youtubers, I kept seeing Genesis and MSX games from the same company get promoted as the next big homebrew titles for retro gamers to keep an eye out on. Kai Magazine, a publisher who focused on fairly impressive eye candy, would put out multiple Genesis games in a variety of genres, and got a lot of accolades from the retro Youtuber crowd as a result of it all, some of which even got me hyped up for a bit.
Anyhow, in recent years, the company has been accused of lifting a bunch of assets from all over the place, and their most recent titles have been alleged to use heavy amounts of AI Slop. My eyes indicate that assessment is likely true, but luckily these two games are from the pre AI era, yet that doesn’t mean they’re free from stolen assets…
Nevertheless, they were popular once upon a time for a reason, but how are their games when you go to actually play them? Joining in the same club as Witch n Wiz, Alwa’s Awakening, and Astebros being Double Cart experiences, this cart has just two Kai Magazine titles, including the decently acclaimed Life on Mars, and as a metroidvania surely that’s at least fine enough?
Maybe Retro Tubers should spend more time actually playing video games.
Presentation
With only two games on offer here, both from the Genesis, the emulation is the usual top notch quality Evercade is used to offering by now. No offkey sound or weirdness, just ordinary, normal sounding Genesis audio. Unfortunately, neither Metal Dragon or Life on Mars has anything I’d consider a “good soundtrack”. At best, you get some perfectly serviceable background noise, and nothing worth writing home about.
No, it was the visuals that often caught the eye of retro youtubers and gaming blogs. Despite being on the Sega Genesis, they looked just as good as professional Genesis/GBA games! And that’s because a lot of these assets are lifted from games from the era, just redesigned or disguised very cleverly.
Life on Mars looks atmospheric and has a lot of cool looking enemies and background details, but I noticed more than one examples taken from Contra or Metroid titles, including a pretty damn blatant copy of the running tutorial bird from Super Metroid. If nobody had told me stuff was heavily lifted from other games, I’d be able to notice a good chunk of stolen stuff, because they’re just that blatant. It’s not like the assets are super out of place looking and a big scrambled mess either; in the setting of “abandoned space lab”, yes, a lot of space-adjacent things from Metroid and Contra would make sense blended together, and there’s probably more assets from games I can’t quite name at the top of my head, but that still isn’t getting over the fact a lot of assets in Life on Mars are based on elements ripped from other places, with little that are fully original.
Already off to a rough spot with boring audio and copypasta’d assets, but that’s just the secret behind Life on Mars’ illusion. It looks good in screenshots or quick gameplay clips, the kind a person who’d unbox the game, play for 10 minutes for a video, and shove back into a Genesis case to collect dust, but the more you play, the more you analyze these assets, and especially the deeper into the game you get, the more lackluster the presentation becomes as its illusion wears off.
But how about Metal Dragon? That was an earlier game, so maybe stuff isn’t as plagiarized here? While it sure looks less blatant, that doesn’t mean the presentation is any better after some initial eyecandy during a dialogue scene. Being a top-down action game ala Commando, it pretty much looks like a cookie cuter entry in the genre, somehow looking uglier than Mercs during the actual gameplay. Of course, the game does add some MGS adjacent dialogue scenes with some character portraits, but I can’t help but ponder if these might be lifted from other places too.
What definitely counts as stolen are some of the voice samples; I’m fairly certain a compressed/edited version of the death voice from Shock Troopers is present whenever you take out an enemy soldier, and a bunch of these sounds are pretty much “been there, done that”. Not as blatant as Life on Mars, but still a bit too unoriginal of a presentation for my liking.
Gameplay
Just two games this time around, not unlike some of Evercade’s best cartridges. That means Kai Magazine has a lot of heavy lifting to do, and when games like Alwa’s Awakening and Goodboy Galaxy are your competition, I’m not sure they manage to pull it off…
Metal Dragon: FUCK!!! SHIT!!! ASS!!!
I hope you like HARDCORE CURSING since this game goes overboard on it, to the point of absurdity, if you ask me. This is a top-down shooter akin to Commando/Mercs, as I noted before, and between the stages, bosses and some key moments you have dialogue scenes consisting of your hero and whoever he’s chatting with on the intercom with a lot of “humor”.
This “humor” primarily consists of some of the worst jokes I’ve ever read, references that make next to no sense whatsoever, and a lot of cursing that doesn’t feel like it enhances the situation or offers any justifiable reason to exist at all. Now, I’m a guy who’s easily amused by Youtube Poop remixes on the internet, with some of the dumbest shit imaginable within them, and yet a lot of Metal Dragon’s attempts to come off as funny just fall flat, or get up to the point of “wow isn’t that trope funny? aha”. It literally reminds me of YIIK, but without the heart that game had.
Speaking of no heart, the gameplay design in Metal Dragon is somehow a giant mess, despite being based off a template that’s worked as far back as the early eighties. You have your normal shots, a button to stay in place and change your aim, and a grenade shot, and your main goal in each stage is to just get to the end, beat a boss and carry on, while shooting down enemies along the way. NES Commando got this right, and yet somehow Metal Dragon does not.
There are multiple difficulties available in Metal Dragon, and the biggest change between them is the size of your HP bar. You can take multiple hits before dying, and on the easiest setting you can take an absurd amount. The enemies also seem more aggressive on the two hardest settings, but I found unless I was playing on the Nuts difficulty, I could still do a cardinal sin for any overhead shooter, one that shouldn’t even be possible under any circumstances; outrunning the enemy bullets.
Yep. Forget fighting the enemies, or taking the stage into account, and having to pay attention to level design aspects; there’s hardly any level design in Metal Dragon at all, with most stages being done before in better games. The bulk of the game just reminds me of a lesser Mercs, if I may be frank, and that got an incredible Genesis version. In Mercs or NES Commando, outrunning the enemies and their bullets is beyond tricky to pull off, and even if you do manage to run past a few foes, you’ll inevitably hit something that’ll stop you in your tracks and make it more practical to fight back instead of outrunning everything.
In Metal Dragon? Nah, Easy or Normal and sometimes even Hard mode, you can just outrun everyone! Very easily, with hardly any effort, and no punishment for doing so. Stand and fight, and you’ll have a tougher time, but considering how dull the level design in this game is, I honestly just preferred running past everything once I got the needed weapons and ammo I needed, and just rushing to the end of the level. Nuts at least tries to band-aid over this issue by flooding the screen with more enemies and lowering your health by a lot, but that still doesn’t fix the lackluster level design and lame humor.
All in all, this is just a very dull, boring and uninspired game, and the best thing I can say about it is that at least the game isn’t as abusive as NES Ikari Warriors, but that’s because Metal Dragon goes in a completely opposite direction, one of pure boredom.
Life on Mars: So we had a generic as can be Commando like. How about a generic as can be Metroid like? This one is where a lot of asset theft takes place as I noted above, but even a safe Metroidvania tends to be a few decent hours of action. I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve beaten dozens upon dozens of Metroidvanias, and tend to have fun with most of them. Even the ones that seem as boring as possible can be surprisingly fun to speedrun or break in a variety of ways, and the genre offers a lot of potential for replay value.
Unfortunately, Life on Mars is not that way. It manages to avoid being close to the worst Metroidvania I’ve ever played by just being aggressively OK, but boy does this feel like the most cookie cutter Metroidvania in existence. Walk and shoot enemies. Collect some kind of currency to stockpile or grind if needed. Get upgrades that can make your weapon cooldown or health bar bigger, or add new weapons/mechanics to go to a new area. You get the drill, and Life on Mars doesn’t offer much new or exciting in this structure, nor anything creative in the map design. You don’t have some crazy power that’s the main gimmick of the game like Axiom Verge, nor a lot of memorable areas that are distinct enough to leave an impression on you ala Symphony of the Night; just the most boring, cookie-cutter and safest Metroidvania design imaginable.
On the bright side, that means Life on Mars isn’t a trainwreck, per se. Rather the game is just beyond generic and the heavy asset lifting makes for an experience you could throw onto any theming imaginable. With some tweaking and plot rewriting, you could easily see this map being suitable in a random military facility in a desert on earth, or some really big house, or a castle, or whatever other planet in the universe you chose; there really isn’t much here to impress, and I’ve played Gamejolt metroidvanias more exciting with their map designs than Life on Mars.
By the end of my note taking experience, (because I just wanna put this game on the shelf myself and leave it there after this review) Life on Mars just felt and looked like “Exploring Space Station: The Video Game“. And when Super Metroid is right there as a Metroidvania with a similar theming worth playing, or, if just comparing Evercade games, Cathedral with a bigger variety of memorable rooms, areas, powerups, etc, Life on Mars is just really bland in comparison.
Conclusion
Ultimately, it took me longer than I’d like to admit for me to snag a copy of this cartridge. It took a good amount of time waiting for restocks to happen for one to finally come up, me to throw it in with an order of much more enticing carts, and even with me cautiously optimistic for Life on Mars, (since even a dull metroidvania is decent enough to fully play through for me, provided it isn’t crazy long) this cart was rather disappointing.
Compared to the bulk of the Evercade dual carts that exist, neither Metal Dragon nor Life on Mars are particularly great games. Metal Dragon is outright miserable and easy to shatter into pieces, while Life on Mars has to be the most boring, checkbox filling Metroidvania I’ve ever encountered. Sure, it’s a decent way to kill time and I guess 100%ing it could be fun to do once, but when one of the other dual carts contain some of the best metroidvanias on Evercade, with one of the two (Alwa’s Awakening) I argue as the best in the genre for the entire NES, this dual cart is by far the weakest out of the bunch, no contest.
It would be bad enough if these two were just more filler games akin to a lot of what we deal with going through Indie Heroes collections (and believe me, we’ll get there), but at least I can say a lot of the weakest IH games have heart to them, and leave a good impression despite how amateurish some of them are. Neither Metal Dragon nor Life on Mars feel impactful, and I genuinely now consider this to be the worst cart on all of Evercade.
At least Piko Arcade 1 had a fun tennis game and Legend of Silkroad in the midst of all of its plagiarism, and said plagiarism happened back in the 90s in more isolated countries, pre-internet! Kai Magazine just has no excuse for the lack of originality, and considering how much worse they’ve gotten with AI slops since then, I think it’s for the best if these two were all we got for the Evercade.
I give a Metal Dragon/Life on Mars a 3 out of 10.