After scanning through some inlays and bits, Andrew Fisher came across an advert for a new Players game called “Metal Army”. The game was described as follows:
Only one marine stands between the Metal Army and their evil plans of total world domination. That marine is YOU!
The game is a simple flip screen arcade platformer which did actually see the light of day on the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC. The game was fairly well recieved and was good quality for what it was.
However, the C64 version never surfaced even though having a mention in Joe Blade’s C64 inlay. We were positive that we were dealing with a C64 conversion as the faint screenshots (In monochrome print) seemed C64 based due to the Score panel being vastly different to the Spectrum version, a C64 looking sprite and also a C64 looking font on the “Score” text.
However, Anonymous Contributor has rightly pointed out that the screen is actually very close to the CPC edition that was released. See and compare here: https://youtu.be/C3EEcQowF9k?feature=shared&t=185Judging by the score panel, the other screen could well be the ZX edition: https://youtu.be/uBwalolMroQ?feature=shared&t=294
The game is credited to a Mark Haden in the inlay, but he’s also the Spectrum programmer, so did he do a C64 version also? That could mean that David Wright was the C64 graphic artist, but this needs confirming. The collective name for the team was Delos Software who have only seemingly completed one game in total on any machine (Their only link is the ZX Spectrum release of Metal Army).
The question is whether a C64 edition ever existed in the first place and if the inclusion of the advert in the C64 version of Joe Blade was just a red herring?
Contributions: Anonymous Contributor, Andrew Fisher
