Metal Slug 3 coming to Playstation 3/4 and Vita

[Hagane]

Well it's 2, but some areas were re-coloured poorly, others were chopped and changed, it was made much longer and turned into a tedious slog through 70 areas each containing 70 aliens by the end.

Um, no. X is a playable 2, without slowdown, much better level design, more enemies and weapons, usually well placed for the section you get them at. It's not really longer either, mostly because you can actually deal damage with the new weapons. It's a huge improvement over 2, and it boggles my mind anyone would say otherwise.

[boagman]

Well it's 2, but some areas were re-coloured poorly, others were chopped and changed, it was made much longer and turned into a tedious slog through 70 areas each containing 70 aliens by the end.

Um, no. X is a playable 2, without slowdown, much better level design, more enemies and weapons, usually well placed for the section you get them at. It's not really longer either, mostly because you can actually deal damage with the new weapons. It's a huge improvement over 2, and it boggles my mind anyone would say otherwise.

It is in no way an improvement over 2 (with the possible exception of slowdown), and it's one of the laziest "games" I've ever seen released.

I remember being physically *angry* at them when they put that out. Such an atrocity. Absolute garbage. When 3 was released, some of that anger was dissipated, but not all of it.

X sucked then, and it sucks now. It will *always* suck. In fact, I'll put it this way: X puts the "X" in "SUX".

[Marc]

It still baffles me that folk hold 3 in such high regard. It was the first Neo home cart I ever bought new, but after weeks of trying to convince myself I enjoyed it I had to concede defeat, and admit that they'd taken a perfectly paced, joyous run and gun, stuffed it full of unnecessary shit, and ended up with a stop-start, laborious and unwieldy bag of crap. I've not played a Slug properly since.

[BIL]

Always surprises me how violent people seem to get about the first 3.5 Metal Slugs. Anyone else alternate between MS1's crisp brevity and MS3's towering excess depending on mood? I like all three. :/

My heart was pounding like a motherfucker when I finally one-lifed MS3, thereby performing the greatest sidescrolling science fiction/war movie ever. But I used all easy routes so there's still stuff to go back to.

[boagman]

Always surprises me how violent people seem to get about the first 3.5 Metal Slugs. Anyone else alternate between MS1's crisp brevity and MS3's towering excess depending on mood? I like all three. :/

My heart was pounding like a motherfucker when I finally one-lifed MS3, thereby performing the greatest sidescrolling science fiction/war movie ever. But I used all easy routes so there's still stuff to go back to.

I like all three...except X. X is unredemptive.

[Skykid]

It still baffles me that folk hold 3 in such high regard. It was the first Neo home cart I ever bought new, but after weeks of trying to convince myself I enjoyed it I had to concede defeat, and admit that they'd taken a perfectly paced, joyous run and gun, stuffed it full of unnecessary shit, and ended up with a stop-start, laborious and unwieldy bag of crap. I've not played a Slug properly since.

3 is that kind of initial turn off because it's uncompromisingly difficult even by normal MS standards. I was in the exact same boat as you, that cart cost me £350 - but over the years the game mellowed the more my abilities hardened.

MS3 is a bit like Ibara: expert grade that can easily turn you off if you throw credits at it. Learn the game and it becomes highly satisfying in the way all good arcade games should.

BIL is the man to ask. I never managed to clear the final zombie apocalypse but I imagine it's a hella triumphant feeling if you do.

[BIL]

I've never shared the typical complaint of MS3's frequently stopping the player to fight off armies of enemies, but I do understand them. I fucking looove shooting, stabbing, exploding, burning and generally tearing the shit out of enemies in these games. The sense of feedback and one-man (or cooperative) annihilation is goddamn catnip. So MS3's frequent onslaughts suit me fine. But the frequency and scale of them does border on pornographic. ^__^

About the difficulty, some of MS3's optional routes also vary wildly in challenge - in particular, you can avoid a ton of grief in Mission 4 by heading upward at every opportunity. Lost Imperial Japanese Army unit area = fucking hell. I always found Mission 3's lowest route (the submarine corridor accessed by heading down the pipe after destroying the first gunwall) much simpler than the upper and middle routes, too.

To be honest, and this is where the game's pacing lets it down entirely apart from crowd onslaughts, I'd expect anyone going for a 1CC/1LC to still be grappling with Final Mission long after having nailed down Missions 1-4. The second half has several very difficult setpieces to master, altogether easily as tough as the very worst of 1-4, and unfortunately you've got to get through three long, endurance-testing STG stages beforehand every time. I can't hate it (that last mission feels like the apocalyptic climax of an entire genre, let alone series), but it's a legitimate issue for sure.

[trap15]

MS3 is great... if you forget that there is a final stage. What a fucking load. The last stage is literally half of the game, full of copy-pasted, time-wasting garbage. If there was no last stage, it'd be my #1. For now, X is the gold medal.

[BIL]

X? X?! BWAAARRRRR HOW CAN YOU LIKE THAT CORGI-BUMMING ATROCITY

It's my favourite too. ^__^ Happy medium between MS1's graceful efficiency and MS3's lunatic hammering down of the series' epitaph under a million tons of dead meat and scorched metal.

[Squire Grooktook]

To be honest, the final stage in MS3 is pretty varied and fun...if you ignore that shmup section. I think just cutting that one section out would have gotten the best of both worlds between what Bill is talking about and the complaints of being too long.

[iconoclast]

Yeah, I think MSX is the best as well. I like how it places more emphasis on Slugless action than MS1 and it's not as bloated as MS3. MS3 would probably be my favorite if the vertical scrolling stages didn't exist, though. I love everything else about it, but those sections are just tedious.

[Squire Grooktook]

Since we've already gone a bit off topic with the rest of the series, what's everyone's feelings on the post 3 Metal Slugs (4-7?). The only word I've heard on them is from the typical non-arcade players who are always like "oh there are no new innovations and the spritework isn't as cool so it's stale and boring" without delving into anything like level design or pacing or whatnot.

[BIL]

Of those, I've only played MS4 and MS5.

MS4's more or less a decent quality licensed ROMhack. Artistically, stylistically, atmospherically, it's utterly beneath the SNK games. A pastiche at the very best of times. But it does have some fast-paced and rather tough stages to nail down (it's a much more consistently difficult game than MS1-3), making it far from a bad game. Basically if you love the MS engine and can accept 4's hacky nature, it can be fun.

MS5 has much more polished presentation (though the redrawn enemies all wear masks - bad move), but I think the stage design took a dive. Rather bare, spaced-out feeling stages in comparison to the previous four's dense, enemy-packed battlegrounds. An exception is the opening of Mission 4, a rather excellent dockyard firefight that's everything the rest of the game should've been. I agreed with Mike Uyama's assessment at the time that while MS4 at least has some fast and hard shooting action, MS5 is the weakest game of the series.

[system11]

I wish someone with the skills would try to work out if there's something really fundamental and fixably wrong in 2 that causes all the slowdown. I read somewhere once (and can't find it) that someone found the main loop was doing something 60 times a second instead of 30, but I forget where.

[BIL]

I think Xian Xi over at the NG forums had a similar statement in his sig, at some point. The description in this MS2 video from Jamma Nation X says that it was a software issue mostly correctable by overclocking, though there'll still be some slowdown due to the chips used.

[Drum]

corgi-bumming atrocity

[Mortificator]

You can eliminate the slowdown in Metal Slug 2 by overclocking MAME, but the game seems to have been designed around it to at least some degree. Like, the missiles in the final stage come out really fast in a slowdown-free 2, while in X they're comparable to slo-mo 2 even though X doesn't slowdown there.

Since we've already gone a bit off topic with the rest of the series, what's everyone's feelings on the post 3 Metal Slugs (4-7?).

I think Metal Slug 4's game design is pretty good, the problem is just that the graphics are rehashed and cobbled together. It's the opposite of Metal Slug 3, where you had amazing artwork on top of poor design.

Metal Slug 5 feels like it was rushed out the door. There are various problems here: too much stop & go in the levels, lame bosses, a slide that doesn't work so well.

Metal Slug 6 has very uneven difficulty, with very tough sections nestled between snoozefests. Character abilities are more of an annoyance than a boon. If I ever replay the game, it'll be on the Asia-exclusive standalone PS2 version.

Metal Slug XX doesn't amaze me as much as the early games, but I'd say it's the most solid game overall since then.

[mastermx]

I agree with everyone on here regarding 4 and 5. I never played 6 much so I can't say. But msxx is one of my favourite run and guns. The challenge and mayhem was perfect. It deserved to have an arcade release.

[Pretas]

If you want to play a flawlessly ported no-slowdown version of Metal Slug 2, M2's Neo-Geo Station has you covered.

Of course, there's not much reason to when MSX exists.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

I recall seeing the original MS (running on a multi-slot MVS setup) at my local Tilt! arcade hangout back in 1996...the only thing was, I didn't have any quarters to try it out. All I could do was watch the cool opening intro and some of the stage demo runs to get a simple idea/gist of how it played. It wasn't until a bit later, with the appropiate quarters on hand, it was definitely a "quarter muncher" indeed. Makes me wonder if Nazca did manage to survive, how their take on Metal Slug 2 would've turned out? Hmmm.....

Good to learn/know that the PSP MS Anthology works great on the ol' 1st-gen Vita for a slick OLED screen presentation.

The 360 port of Metal Slug XX (aka Metal Slug 7 on the NDS platform) has support for two-player co-op from the get-go and much needed dedicated arcade controls (a HRAP is great/comes in handy).

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[iconoclast]

I've been under the impression that most (if not all) of the original team worked on MS2, X, and 3 before SNK declared bankruptcy and let everyone go.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

Here's a cool non-scale MS tank all pre-painted & assembled for the hard-core MS fan to preorder. Fully realized in the 3rd dimension at last (compared to the earlier released MS tank plastic model kit version offered by a different company):

http://www.ncsx.com/2014/090914/ncs0909u.htm

http://www.shopncsx.com/metalslugsv-001tank.aspx

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[jepjepjep]

Been playing some Metal Slug X and really enjoying it. It's kind of like a Metal Slug 2: Black Label.

Metal Slug 2 is a great game but it's plagued by immense slowdown. This is due to the game logic being updated twice per cycle and the graphics events only once per cycle.

That's interesting. I wonder if it would be a semi-easy hack job to modify the program roms.

[Hagane]

I remember being physically *angry* at them when they put that out. Such an atrocity. Absolute garbage. When 3 was released, some of that anger was dissipated, but not all of it.

X sucked then, and it sucks now. It will *always* suck. In fact, I'll put it this way: X puts the "X" in "SUX".

There's absolutely nothing about X that is worse than 2. It's really silly to say otherwise and I wonder if you just didn't play either game too much or are just trolling. Level design is leagues better in X (particularly from stage 4 and onwards... stage 4 in 2 is bloody awful, only normal soldiers come out for most of it, with no motorcicles, no missiles, no aliens, no nothing...), it has more weapons that are designed for the parts they appear, there are extra enemies that bring more variety, there's much more ammo that makes the game much more fluid (you get the heavy machinegun at best for most of the game in 2) and existing weapons have higher damage outputs... really, it's leagues better. Less slowdown to make it actually playable is the icing on the cake, but the whole game is a huge step forward.

Iconoclast, do you have any strategies to beat the last boss in MSX consistently? I've managed to clear the game (https://www.mediafire.com/?sm0wx554m1fqxey), and I can no miss it easily except for the last boss that gives me a really hard time due to random weapon drops and input reading UFOs. I'd like to 1LC it and that part is the only that prevents me from doing so.

[iconoclast]

The last boss is a bit of a crap shoot, but I'd say my method works most of the time, unless you get really unlucky.

First, it's important to collect all of the grenade pickups throughout the stage and conserve as many of them as possible until you reach the boss. For the first phase, only attack him with the handgun until the timer reaches 47* seconds, since that's the only way to get a consistent feel for damage. If his health gets too low, he'll spawn some black UFOs that can be hard to deal with if you don't kill them instantly, so it's best to avoid that. Once the timer's at 47, stop shooting and wait for him to spawn some UFOs. Use grenades to kill them and hope they drop a weapon (chaser, rocket, and HMG are best imo). Once you get something you're happy with, hop on the roof of the building and spam grenades until he dies. You can also use some of your weapon's ammo on him a if you want to try and conserve grenades (try saving at least 25 for the next phase; 30+ is ideal).

*The time will probably vary depending on how fast you can mash the fire button or if you're using autofire.

The second phase is mostly luck imo, but it's manageable if you have a good weapon. As soon as the UFO spawns, jump towards it from the platform and spam as many grenades as you can (it takes 4 or 5 to kill one). Once you land, start jumping back toward the platform and get ready to grenade the next UFO as soon as it becomes vulnerable. You can kill all three of them by doing this if you get lucky, but chances are at least one of them will get away. I could never figure out how they'll move after they spawn; sometimes they come down and move toward the right, sometimes they fly straight up, sometimes they go left, etc. The one to watch out for is when they fly straight up, since you'll probably only be able to hit it with two or three grenades before it moves out of range. You can try to finish it with your weapon or jump back on the platform to grenade the next UFO, but if you get unlucky here you might jump straight into a laser. If the very first UFO gets away, I'd say to just risk it and ignore him because the last thing you want is to have all three of them shooting lasers at you. If you can get through that, just repeat the same strategy for the next wave of UFOs. The Metal Slug will probably be available before the third one spawns, so you're pretty much home free once you hop into it. (If you want to finish the stage inside the Slug for the end bonus, you might want to clear out the UFOs first. Otherwise they can overwhelm you and force into jumping in and out of the Slug for the invincibility)


That's about all I can say about that fight. Luck is a major factor, you just have to try and work around it.

[Hagane]

Thanks for the tips. I've seen a replay that uses your grenade strat, but I always failed it since I wasn't able to correctly tell how much energy the boss had left and I got in trouble with the black UFOs or run out of ammo trying to kill them. The timer bit will really help.

As for the second part, if I get with lots of ammo I generally can hold till I get the slug, but if I don't I tend to get very unlucky and have to face countless UFOs with the handgun, which is really annoying. Hopefully with that strategy I'll be able to maximize my luck. Thanks!

[boagman]

There's absolutely nothing about X that is worse than 2.

It's in-freaking-credibly lazy. It's probably one of the biggest gaming disappointments I've ever had.

Look: you can argue with me about this until you're blue in the face, and I'll find that quite funny! Looking at 3, which is an absolute symphony of a game, it's positively retarded to view X as anything but sheer laziness. I really liked 2, and yes: there was slowdown. I didn't really care that much about said slowdown "problem", but I'll grant that it's there. X not only looks like a placeholder, it *feels* like one. It's as if they *had to* have a Slug game that came out every year, and because 3 was such a monumental undertaking, they had to take 2, slightly (and poorly, IMHO) rework some stages, eliminate some slowdown, and throw it out the door, just to be "doing their jobs".

It plays like an unwanted stepchild, too. I love both the original and 3, and have a nice place in my heart for 2 as well. X is not acceptable. 4, 5, and 6 are not acceptable. 7 and XX are semi-reasonable.

X is just, just awful, though. Tell you what: you love it *for* me. If you want mine, you can have it...not that I'd ever own it in the first place, because its existence should never have really happened.

So stinking lazy.

[Squire Grooktook]

Honestly, you're not giving any reasons to dislike it other than "it's lazy" (what the does that even mean?)

It's a fucking re-release, of course it's lazy. It's not there to be a new game, it's there to make a few tweaks and revisions to a game that was already complete. If it was done today it'd be a patch or a black label. Maybe back when it came out, expecting people to pay full price for a few tweaks and recolored backgrounds would be kind of a dick move, but in this age of emulators and being able to freely purchase either title which has been out for years, that is largely irrelevant.

The question is, is it better designed than the original? Hagane has made several compelling arguments for why it's better paced, more varied, and more playable than the original. You haven't given any kind of rebuttal besides a vague "I don't like it" and "It's lazy" which speaks more to production qualities than it does actual design (aka the important thing).

I know some people out there care about "originality" in these kind of games. Personally I don't share that feeling at all. I'll take Mega Man Zero 4 with its vastly superior level design and enemy placement over the more "original" Mega Man Zero 1 and its boring, samey level layouts.