Iron Soldier: The Greatest Video Game You Never Heard Of
When I was about sixteen, I wandered into my local toy store to find in the clearance rack dozens and dozens of boxes of the Atari Jaguar game console system. It was on sale for $30, KA-CHING!!! That’s mine now! You all know the real reason I bought this console if you were into gaming back then; I thought I had a chance to get a copy of Alien vs. Predator, which at that time was only available on the Atari Jaguar. I spent months looking for a copy of Alien vs. Predator… all hopeless efforts as it seemed Atari had no interest in making money and I was left with just mediocre $10 games from the clearance bin.
But then I found it, the greatest game I never knew about: Iron Soldier. What is Iron Soldier? It’s was an Atari Jaguar game about a giant robot that walked around cities and destroyed them, and you played as this robot. Before I bought this game there wasn’t a hair on my body, after I played Iron Soldier I had a chest full of hair, a lumberjack beard, and I smelled like diesel fuel. Naturally that is how much testosterone this awesome game injected into me.
The game’s plot? Not important.
Moving on to weapons, you start off with an assault rifle, I was going to say a basic assault rifle but there is nothing basic about it being the size of a school bus. Uh oh, so I just ran out of ammo with the assault weapon what do I do? Punch sh*t is what you do. Punching buildings and stepping over tanks as they explode beneath your feet of awesome steel. And just when Bank of America thinks they’re safe behind a reinforced skyscraper, that’s when you get an upgrade; a gawd damn chain saw to replace your fists. Time for some spending cuts Bank of America… to your face.
The weapon upgrades get even better: mini-Cooper sized hand grenades, a Gatling gun, rocket launchers, rail-cannon, and a cruise missile that you pilot around to crash into buildings and stuff. Oh, there’s also a stupid shield that I would never use because that’s for p*****s. I really wish they replaced this item with a flamethrower because then Iron Soldier would have been the greatest game ever made.
What the hell happened to games like this? Why are so many things off limits in game titles these days? Oh see those beautifully rendered buildings and scenery we blew half our game budget on? Yeah, you can’t touch those even if you’re a super soldier robot, the Hulk, or Satan. Iron Soldier had some lame graphics when looking back on it, but the focus of the game wasn’t to look pretty, it was to blow stuff up (actually everything up). I wish more game studios in 2013 would learn a thing or two from Iron Soldier. Maybe gamers don’t care about how realistic you make a dog peeing in the park, maybe we just want to set that dog on fire.
