Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrowing our laser focus to one game per week (at least). Be sure to check out the Case File Repository for more details and a full list of games/links!

Extra Note: We've entered Shelftember! In this much-vaunted month, we will be processing one of the second round entries every day. I'll be spending one hour apiece with each game - inspired by DanielKempster's backlog-clearing series "An Hour With..." - and determining its fate from there.

We're twenty-five games into the second round, prior to today's update, and presently those games can be handily separated into two groups: games I never got around to and am giving them due process here rather than unjustly dismissing them sight-unseen, and games that I didn't remember quite well enough to pass a from-the-hip verdict one way or the other. Everything else was either eliminated in the first round or sent ahead to the final deliberations. However, there is also one small category of games, to which Metal Arms: Glitch in the System belongs, that I've dubbed "Maybe I Was Wrong". These are games that I really didn't care for back when they were new and would've been eliminated with the rest but for the fact that, in the years since, I've heard a lot of positive comments from others that suggests I'm either playing a lesser port or I simply couldn't see what they see. To grant them the benefit of the doubt, these games have been given a second chance to prove themselves in this round before I cut them out of the running.

A light-hearted third-person shooter in the vein of a Jet Force Gemini or Ratchet & Clank, the player assumes the role of Glitch: a broken-down droid that is restored to operational status to bolster the flagging droid Resistance against the megalomaniacal military robot General Corrosive. Glitch is covered in mysterious symbols and proves surprisingly adaptive in combat, and the game's back story (provided in a WW2/Fallout-style old-timey propaganda newsreel for some reason) would seem to suggest that Glitch is in some way related to the alien race that created the droids and purportedly still exist somewhere in the planet's core. Progression tends to involve running around stages, occasionally getting involved with some platforming and environmental puzzles of the "destroy this thing to make a path forward" variation, and a whole lot of shooting the bad droids that were created by General Corrosive and his machines of war. Glitch starts with his trusty but weak mining laser, which operates on a regenerating cooldown rather than ammo, and finds other weapons through exploration and scavenging fallen enemies. Fairly standard stuff.

What's less standard is just how much I dislike this game on every imaginable front. The level design is dark and repetitive, making it difficult to tell where you're going. The combat's tiresome because the enemies become bullet sponges with the default weapon and leave their bottom halves running around in a "hilarious" alternative to total destruction which actually results in a lot of visual confusion as you attempt to aim at a pair of legs instead of the fully operational hostile right behind them. The enemies themselves are generic, unfunny with their handful of repeated quips, and shriek constantly; if I wanted to fight enemies like that, I'd boot up Halo and take on its Grunts. They also show up in huge numbers, forcing you to strafe-shoot for up to ten minutes per encounter, which is as dull as it sounds when there's no other strategy than to literally run around in circles. The game's attempts at humor in general are fairly hit and miss also: calling your two doomed buddies who tutorialize the controls during the initial stages of the game "Screwed" and "Hosed" is a Hot Shots!-era goof, and the constantly swearing "doctor" mechanic is too much of an non-entity in the story to really justify why there's a swearing doctor. Are bleeped swears just inherently funny, perhaps? It also checkpoints poorly, the double-jump gives you no air control which screws you if you misjudged it slightly, the melee attack does negligible damage and thus seems pointless when you have an infinitely recharging default gun, and a feature where you can gain control of enemy droids would be more fun if every other enemy droid in the vicinity didn't immediately know when one of their own had been compromised. Let's just summarize here and say I have some issues with this game.

I could imagine Metal Arms engendering a positive reputation on the GameCube where it didn't have quite as many rivals doing the same thing but way better, but after playing it for the requisite hour I couldn't wait to be done with it. It's not the worst game I've played for this catch-up round, but it's certainly one of the least likeable.

Result: Eliminated.

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