Retrospective: Steel Battalion

But for those willing to take on the challenge there was a real sense of accomplishment at the end of those 10 initial missions. You really had to work to get there. By taking down the Juggernaut VT you'd gone from a rookie who had to keep checking the manual to a fully fledged mech pilot who knew their own capabilities. It was like passing an automotive test and in the end that's part of the appeal, because if you take the controller away Steel Battalion is a poorly designed game with terrible production values. With it, the game offers an unrivalled level of mech immersion.

The decision to make Steel Battalion a solitary experience meant the final challenge after completion was either getting a good trade-in price or finding somewhere inconspicuous to store it. But when the promised expansion did eventually arrive a year later, it felt as though Capcom had taken something hardcore and made it even more exclusive. Steel Battalion: Line of Contact was one of the first Xbox games to be "Xbox Live-only", and arrived at a time when online console gaming wasn't nearly as popular as it is today.

Nonetheless, if you were privileged enough to own the expensive controller and a large telly, in addition to having an Xbox Live account with a decent broadband connection, the opportunity was there to battle other VT pilots in the online campaign mode. And this in itself was an interesting proposition, as players had to enlist with a faction, each with a different range of VTs, before fighting for territorial control of a fictional island. But despite claims of 5v5 matches the netcode often struggled unless all players had a flawless connection. Something which didn't happen often.

With Line of Contact also supporting System Link a lag-free game was still technically possible. The largest LAN session I ever participated in was with three other players all crammed into a small living room, each with their own Xbox, TV and Steel Battalion controller. Amazing scenes. Despite taking ages to sort out the effort paid off, as with the unlock code enabled we were able to play 2v2 matches with access to all 31 VTs. Needless to say, knocking out an unsuspecting friend with the Gauss emitter from a third-generation Earthshaker doesn't get old quickly.

So then, Steel Battalion. The game that came with an Allen key. Its style of mecha is less anime and more military with a colossal sense of scale and ambition, and although those initial photos of the unfathomable controller never went on to fulfil all our dreams, the end product was at least better than many gave credit. A sequel seems extraordinarily unlikely, but with thousands of controllers collecting dust all around the world I'll never give up hope. I'm just not going to cry about it.