We completionists are a funny bunch. We have a tendency to never let anything go. Call it anal retentiveness or obsessive compulsive disorder but we tend to have nightmares about games we failed to finish years ago. I can already see Mega Man 9 hauntings in my future.

A few months ago, completionist.com regular NotSoMuch and I embarked on a journey to finish one the games that has lived in the dungeons of my unfinished dreams for many years, Metal Marines. Most of you are probably unfamiliar with this SNES gem so here’s a quick synopsis.  The world has gone to hell and has been taken over by an intergalactic consortium of human jerks.  You must reclaim the Earth for the Allies.  You do this by conquering 20 levels of real-time strategy battles against the enemy.  

Anyone familiar with early RTSs will be familiar with the formula: You start each level with a predetermined land allocation and some money.  You must build three bases at first and from there begin to build your empire on the grid of land.  The goal is to attack the enemy and destroy their (usually three) bases.  You do this using an arsenal of missles and the eponymous Metal Marines, which are land based combat units.  There’s also the ICBM, which is almost impossible to obtain and even harder to use effectively.  The enemy will obviously also be coming after you with these same weapons and thus you must defend yourself using anti-aircraft missles and anti-troop gun pods.  Resource management is obviously a critical element of the game and buildings such as the Supply HQ and Factory will speed up your ability to generate money and manfacture new buildings.

The other trademark of early RTSs present in the game is the lack of true artificial intelligence in your opponent.  To make up for this fact, your opponent always starts with his level pre-built.  No starting on an even foot in this puppy!  This means that the human player must hack through the already built up defenses of his/her opponent, which are sometimes rebuilt in short order once defeated.  The advantage that the player has is that the opponent always starts with the same layout so if you are forced to restart a level, you’ll already have had a glimpse into the enemy’s design.

Another help, since NotSoMuch and I didn’t feel like bashing our heads into a wall, was the modern convenience known as the internet.  FAQs, especially written by those who know a good lawyer (his dad!), help immensely when you would otherwise feel like giving up.  I know it seems a little like cheating but the point of playing this game wasn’t to win with honour but to enjoy ourselves and finally conquer a game that has eluded us for the last 15 years.  To be fair, we also came up with our own strategies, such as building a ton of wimpy, single missles and launching death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts style attacks or building so many anti-aircraft missles that every incoming attack from the enemy caused the game’s frame rate to drop signifcantly.

I can still remember sitting around playing the game all those years ago.  This time around, it didn’t have quite the same charm; playing the game with a PC controller just made things feels a little off.  Of course the graphics are horribly outdated, the sound is cheesy, and, as mentioned, the A.I. leaves the intelligence part out of the equation, but overall it was an immeasurably fun experience to go back and finish a game, with a friend, that I had so much fun with when I was a kid.  As a completionist, could I ask for anything more?