Steel Battalion.
You know, the one that came with the huge controller designed specifically for the game. So huge you had to assemble it yourself with an allan key. The huge controller with 40 buttons (all of which lit up as they had LEDs underneath them), two full size sticks, a gear stick with light-up gear indicators, several switches, a dial for radio communications, a set of pedals, and a special red eject button with little plastic cover you have to flip open if you want to press the special red eject button.
I bought this when I worked at Game in Portsmouth, so it wasn’t £120 – more like £90 after staff discount. Travelling home to Southampton on the train was the first problem – The box was massive, and the train was reasonably busy. Then, when I got home, both Jane and my Mum went mad at such an extravagant purchase. Eventually I decided that in order to restore peace within the family, and to regain the £90 which would’ve been more useful spent elsewhere, I’d return it, then buy it back with £90’s worth of my old games. So, the next day I went back to work with a slip of paper with the barcode written on it (yeah, like I was hefting that massive damn box to Portsmouth and back to Southampton again), and a pile of games to trade in against it.
Wait, it gets better. A little later, it transpired that the guy who put the transaction through messed it up so bad (he put the stuff I’d brought in to trade against it through the system as returns) I actually got sacked from Game for the pig’s ear he made of it. Well, that and the fact the item wasn’t in the store when I returned and re-bought it, but I thought that was a little short-sighted of Game’s Loss Prevention team considering the size and weight of the damn thing, and the distance I had to traverse with it. The rest of the staff were also sacked – they were abusing the trade-in system – and this particular transaction was flagged up as “part of that”, when in fact, it wasn’t. But they didn’t see it that way.
Put off by the bad memories it had caused, I never touched it for months and months. Late one night I finally decided to take the plunge and see what all the fuss was about. I moved the Xbox down to the big TV in the lounge. I unpacked the box, located all the screws and put the controller together. I moved the coffee table nearer to the TV and put the controller on it – it was too wide to sit nicely on my lap on the armchair. I moved the armchair around and put the pedals in front of it. I turned off all the lights, booted up the game, and within half an hour I was thinking “This is shit”.
Two hours later and I was still no closer to liking it.
It was far too much a simulation for my liking – I found it hard keeping my bipedal tank upright, just turning a corner made me topple over, and I don’t think that even after four hours with it, I’d even seen an enemy. With that, I decided it wasn’t for me.
Really, I shouldn’t have bothered with the fucking thing. In the end I sold it to ex-Gamesradar moderator and founder of Gamufi (the ill-fated videogame, music and film website), Cobra for £150 – which was £60 more than I paid for it.
At least one good thing came of it then.
