METAL SLUG

Super Vehicle - 001!

I specifically bought the first one for nostalgia, but ended up returning it. I don't know if it's just me, the game didn't feel as smooth as it should have been, like jumping and whatnot(wonder if that's the input lag mentioned in other reviews). The game itself, of course hands down, is awesome, hence the positive review.

I love METAL SLUG, especially the first one and second one. The art is stellar, the gameplay is great, it's sounds are iconic and bosses memorable. The Stage 1 OST of METAL SLUG 1 is engrained into my brain, that's how many times I listened to it (for both good and bad reasons). ...this port is just okay though. You'd be probably better off just emulating it with MAME for a more authentic (and less laggy) experience.

Çocukluğumun en iyi oyun serisi.

Ich kenne das spiel eigentlich schon seit 30 Jahren aus den Arcade-Automaten meiner Urlaubsdestination bei Oma in Spanien, von daher ein richtiger Profi seit klein auf ;) und froh, das man hier nicht Unmengen an Peseten reinbuttern muss um das Endlevel zu erreichen. Ich hatte bisher alle Teile immer auf der Nintendo Switch gespielt, da diese aber bei den Kiddies ist, hab ichs mir hier noch geholt. Top Sidescroller Run&Gun. Kann ich durchweg empfehlen auch für Challenges.

Probably one of the most memorable run-and-gun shooters from the golden era of arcades. The game is chock-full of personality, with expressive animation and detail packed into nearly every character and object, giving it a distinct look and feel. Its fast-paced gameplay, chaotic action, and varied weapons still hold up today. Unfortunately, the emulation in this port is quite subpar, with the input lag being especially noticeable. It’s a 10/10 game being held hostage by a 0/10 emulator. The Hamster arcade ports on Xbox and PlayStation are far superior.

OK

Poor man’s Contra with a slew of gameplay differences that made it difficult for me to understand how to succeed at the game. I’m giving this a thumbs-up for two reasons: it’s a faithful presentation of the arcade game, and its extras are so much better done than the arcade port I just played before this from the same developer, Double Dragon Trilogy. That port was so poorly done that, by comparison, this is the greatest arcade port ever. As a port, the menus are responsive, the controller settings work well, and they give you the option of playing any mission with the mission select or playing the arcade game with the option to select how many credits you get. I didn’t play SNK games in the arcade (they were always pretty expensive and had that multiple-games-in-one-machine unit), so I don’t have the nostalgia for them like I do the TMNT and X-Men games, for example. Therefore, I just played through it to have the experience with the freeplay on (I took about 27 credits), and I was done. I enjoyed the ability to play a game I never played in the arcade, and I miss the days when you just mindlessly shoot things for a while. I enjoyed my time overall, but I was frustrated due to how different this game is from the Contra controls that I am familiar with. The Positives: -The game is fast, colorful, and always keeps you moving and shooting. There is never a dull moment on screen. -The game plays, as far as I know (since I didn’t play it in the arcades back in the day), just like the arcade experience. -It basically does everything that the Double Dragon Trilogy port sucked at, from responsive menus to the freeplay option to the game actually looking and feeling like the original. (I’m not sure how they could mess that up so badly and then do something like this with none of those issues, but it is what it is) -I like the differences from Contra or similar games with different motifs where this is more of a fictional one-man-army military game. -I miss games that are short and sweet. There’s not much to do other than run, point, and shoot, so it doesn’t overstay its welcome that I got about 45 minutes out of it from booting up the game to completion. The Negatives: -There are so many things different from the Contra control scheme that most run-and-gun games use that I kept dying from those differences. For example, I couldn’t down-jump to drop to the floor below me; you had to find a gap to fall through. Boom—dead from jumping instead of dropping. Things on the screen also have random invincibility animations where you can’t hit them, like the end helicopter that shoots homing missiles that you can’t hit while they’re shooting toward/away from the screen. Boom, dead from not hitting the thing I shot because it was invincible. I also found that I couldn’t seem to hit certain things without dying, like I never could hit the mid-level helicopters’ bombs. Boom, dead. Therefore, I just learned to shoot the front or back and never try to shoot the bombs. But, the most difficult thing was the fact that there was not diagonal shooting like Contra has, so I had to keep jumping and shooting up and right or up and left to hit anything at an angle. And the tank was the weirdest thing to control. I just died so often from clunky controls that all I could do was miss Contra and wish that this game was a twin-stick shooter instead (which would’ve allowed me to be infinitely better with more precise controls over my shooting and dropping off ledges). -Things really just come from everywhere, and you can get “camped” (can’t believe I’m using a 2000s+ term for a 90s arcade game) by the enemy. In one spot, I would die, respawn right on top of the enemy, and die as soon as my initial invincibility wore off. I lost more lives there than anywhere because there were enemies above, below, and on both sides of you, so I just kept shooting until I died. -Shooting downward was annoying since you had to jump, and there were a lot of enemies situated below you. In combination with the inability to drop off ledges, you were stuck in plenty of weird situations. This was made worse by power-ups (e.g., the POWs) that were situated in place you couldn’t reach, so I would scroll them out and not be able to walk back once I got to their level—I’m guessing that you were supposed to shoot them from above and then maybe they would run to the right and you wouldn’t scroll them out, but if that’s not the case then I have no idea how to get through the environment to get them. Most of my game was spent figuring out how to traverse platforms, what could kill you, how to get an attack to go in the direction you wanted (especially inside the tank), and how to reach things. It was just so weird, and I played through the whole game and never really go the hang of it. -While I appreciate that this port wasn’t complete garbage like the Double Dragon Trilogy, it would be nice if they spent some time to enhance the game like having instructions, a list of weapon power-ups and enemies, and other things in the menu. This would basically be like how the old arcade cabinets used to have instructions and items and things described on the cabinet frame so you could learn while watching others play. I feel like the old way of supplementing the game with cool graphics and text is a lost art. Oh, well. The game is the most important thing, but since it probably doesn’t take long to port a game since free emulators make all of these things playable, it would be nice if they did more than just the bare minimum (though I appreciate that this does work and I had no issues with it). Overall, I had a fun time with it. I like to quickly play some of the classics that I missed due to being more expensive than I could afford in the arcades as a kid. I gladly paid the $1-$2 you can get for this on sale. It’s totally worth it, like buying an hour-long episode of a TV show on iTunes. While I wish the game had better controls and this version of it had cooler extras, after the disaster that was Double Dragon Trilogy, I am thrilled that I got a Free Play option and a game that felt like it played the way the original arcade game did.