135. Metal Black (Taito, Arcade (PS2), 1990)

The late 80s and early 90s was a kind of transitional period for scrolling shooters between the older style with a slow, large ship and the newer bullet hell style with a faster ship with a tiny hit box and screen-covering shot patterns. Metal Black leans a little more toward the earlier style of arcade shooter, though (like game #60 Grid Seeker, another Taito shooter) it also introduces an interesting central mechanic.

Whereas most shooters have separate resources for your main shot power and powerful screen clearing bomb attacks, Metal Black does away with this and uses a single resource (an omniprenent colorful molecule-looking thing) as both your shot power as well as your super powerful laser shot. The catch is, anytime you use the powerful shot, it completely drains your resources, meaning you also take your shot power down to the lowest level.

On the one hand, this is pretty interesting, but on the other hand, the game is quite difficult, especially after the first few stages, so deciding between using your weapon or keeping your shot power becomes less of a concern in later stages, as there are just less resources on average.

Lots of the backgrounds have a very impressive for the time pseudo 3D effect. The explosion effect when bosses die is one of the coolest visuals I've seen in a video game, it's abstract as heck. There is also just lots of nice parallax scrolling as well. Metal Black asl features a coule weird bonus stages that are pseudo first person and just wildly scrolling, though mechanically they are pretty simple as you are just locking on to enemies. The whole game is just a visual treat.

4/5, a mechanically interesting, gorgeous shooter that's a bit slow and difficult