Metal Storm is a game I truly love, but I have a hard time talking about it. It’s perfectly polished and looks fantastic, but it’s still just an NES platformer. To anyone without the context of the console’s usual limitations, or the common design pitfalls of its time, it would seem about half as impressive as it really is. The smoothness of the animations is better than even the majority of SNES games, and the difficulty is perfectly tuned to be satisfying but not time-wasting, unlike its “Nintendo Hard” contemporaries. But, if you remove the reference points from that evaluation and only judge it by a modern standard, all you’re left with is “it looks fine, and it isn’t frustrating”. While it may not stand out much compared to the NES throwbacks of today, it doesn’t change how the developers broke past the limitations of their time to create a game that’s still highly enjoyable over thirty years later. The fact that it can be compared at all to the NES throwback games, with their advantages of decades of retrospect and technological improvements, is a marvel in itself. Even if you do end up finding it half as impressive as I do, it will still be well worth your time.