Original Release: Megatech, MS-DOS, 1993
Metal and Lace is loosely based on an FM Towns game from the previous year called Ningyo Tsukai, but is a wholly new game that has you in a giant mech tournament in which the losers have to strip down.
Metal and Lace (PC, Megatech, 1993)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: MS-DOS Emulation Guide
Review by: Master-B
The best description I can give you for Metal & Lace is that it’s like One Must Fall: 2097 but with terrible gameplay and with anime girls getting undressed in still shots after you win matches. IF you win matches, a big “if” given the control is so clunky and terrible.
Above is the bar, which basically serves as the main menu of the game. Since this came out in 1993 you’ll note the obvious Street Fighter references here but the interesting part is the chick on the right who appears to be a Tifa Lockheart clone, even though this came out four full years before Final Fantasy 7! Then again, maybe there are just a lot of busty girls with tank tops and cutoffs in Japanese bars … better get a plane ticket and investigate!
OK, I have to maintain journalistic integrity here and tell you that my copy of the game was fucked up or something, where clicking on everything in the bar just made the game say “Wish I could have another cold one, but I gotta run!” or something like that. This meant that there was no way to get into the fighting mode or do anything else, basically locking it up. I actually played this before but it was like over a decade ago on my old Pentium 100 system, and I recall not playing very much of it because it was so bad. I need a cold one just trying to get this game to run! So anyway, the rest of the shots from here on out I took from this video of the official demo.
Here you see battle mode, in as much as I can recall this was complete bullshit. If you were around for the shareware fighting game scene that cropped up on PCs in the early 1990s after SF2 hit the arcades, you’ll know what I mean when I say this is like the absolute worst of those games. Poor hit blocks and collision detection, clunky movement, crazy uncontrolled jumping, the whole shebang that you expect from a quick and poorly made fighting game.
In between battles, from the bar, you could upgrade your armor by visiting this substitute teacher’s store, and then there was some sleazy old man who sold items too. The pillar in the middle of the bar with the posters on it serves to get you into fighting mode, it has pics of all the Robo Babes that you can fight, you click on one to look at them and then again to challenge them. As you beat them, they get more and more undressed gradually, but the difficulty supposedly goes up after each win. I never could verify that because I couldn’t even spam my way through the opening matches, the difficulty starts out pretty crazy, I can’t imagine it escalating from there.
Hmm, what else … oh yeah, there was some Scottish pisspot or something in the bar that if you clicked on it like 100 times in a row, I think it gave you some uber armor and a pile of cash or something.
While some of the high-res shots are actually pretty good for DOS games in 1993, the battle sprites and backgrounds look like almost no time was put into them at all. Also, I don’t know what it is in Japan with torturing yourself with bad and tedious gameplay to look at a few generic anime nudes, but it sure seems to be a giant market over there. Sound/music is stock hentai/anime computer game stuff that actually isn’t terrible but isn’t memorable either.
There’s totally nothing nasty about this. Even the most revealing shots are the definition of softcore and since it’s robots fighting, there isn’t even any blood or real violence technically.
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