And that's not taking into consideration the massive, screen-filling bosses you'll face at the end of each of the game's five levels. Aside from the fatigue-sporting soldiers in Morden's army, who have a penchant for grenades, bazookas, and what appear to be handmade bottle rockets, you'll battle abominable snowmen, the undead (in both zombie and mummy forms), oversized crustaceans, insects, and plants, as well as a decent cross-section of aliens. As you run, swim, and fly from the left to the right, you'll fight some seriously ridiculous enemies. None of this really comes across in the game, though, which comes across as rather humorous as you send your soldiers up a vicious and nearly endless stream of enemies. However, when taking it out of its native arcade environment and bringing it to a home console, SNK has made some specific choices that make this already challenging game difficult to a fault.ĭo not approach Metal Slug 3 unless you are prepared for a serious challenge.Īmazingly, the manual for Metal Slug 3 reveals an absurdly serious backstory concerning a series of wars, alien experiments, and weirdly specific details regarding internal backbiting within military subdivisions. From a technical standpoint, this is a superb version of Metal Slug 3, and in some respects, it's even better than the original. Metal Slug 3, which has just been ported to the Xbox, may be a 4-year-old arcade game, but if you've never experienced the unique Metal Slug brand of frantic side-scrolling action, it's probably one of the freshest, most exciting games to hit the Xbox in a while. While most have traded in their hand-animated sprites and parallax-scrolling environments for rag-doll physics and pixel shaders, SNK has remained a diligent practitioner of 2D gaming and has continued to cultivate a passionate following for it. Oh, and you can upload your scores to Xbox Live.In 2004, it's kind of odd to see a 2D video game that's not being presented on some sort of portable device. You can try and collect all the extras (Japanese radish and Chinese cabbage are all there for the taking), but there's no getting away from the fact that there's not enough in here to warrant shelling out full whack, no matter how perfect a slice of arcade action it may be. Two-player spins it out for a while, and there are Hard and Very Hard modes, but at £15 if you shop around Metal Slug 3 arguably transcends the usual rental recommendation. Extras come in the form of levels called Storming the Mothership and Fat Island (during the arcade game, some food bonuses cause your character to pork up - the extra level plays on this), and a movie for King of Fighter: Maximum Impact. You'll probably manage this in about four or five hours. Once you've beaten a level in arcade mode, you can start at the beginning of the next level in an attempt to finish it. Humour is tightly locked down throughout the entire game. The second level, a zombie-themed stroke of genius, contains animations and a special attack consisting of a rending stream of blood that's especially awesome. The attention to detail and sprite animations will make those at ease with the old school squeal with delight. Sometimes they explode, sometimes they just die, and most of the time they shoot back. And the boss battles, although not always sublime, do a fair job of drawing a tear delicately in the corner of the eye. It's you against the alien threat, it turns out. You rescue hostages as you go along which give you machine guns, rocket launchers, flamethrowers and missiles. You pick up teddy bears, apples, pigs and bananas as bonuses. Throughout the levels you ride armoured camels and use tanks, mechs, submarines, helicopters, planes and an awesome rocket/spaceship, all by just jumping on them. You fight soldiers, exploding ninjas and huge plants that spit spores in the air, depending on how you kill them. But it's nowhere near as simple as it sounds. You do this for five levels and an "ending" level, and it stops. Then you run from left to right, shooting everything. In MS3, there are four to choose from, all with slightly differing jumps, speeds and so on. As with the rest in the revered set of games, you control a character with a gun. Metal Slug 3 is an exemplary piece of 2D shooting, however short. You free it, and it runs around with a gun. Halfway through a level there's a cage with a monkey in it. And it all starts with a monkey and a gun. Given that playing Metal Slug 3 involves punching a piece of plastic as quickly as possible while 2D space globes swirl on a screen protected by alien squid and what sounds like a camp, Teutonic man wailing, "Rocket lowncher!" at you every four seconds, it's appropriate that a sense of the ridiculous has been honed for the latest in SNK's seminal shooter series.
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