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was never good
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Dec 15th, 2006, 08:06 PM
Metal Slug Anthology
I thought I'd crosspost my review here since we have some Slug enthusiasts.
Quote:
Metal Slug Anthology
30 Minute Review / Eric
Rating: 2.5/5
This game had me worried right from the start, when I was greeted by jumbo-sized arial text on the Disc channel's preview animation. From here you dive right in, are shown a ridiculously poor intro, and then are unceremoniously dumped at a screen showing the logo for Metal Slug 1 with no explanation, naked and cold as the day you were born. Flipping through the menus, you have Metal Slug 1-6 and X, a scoreboard, and an options screen. Every control scheme you can choose has absolutely no legend for its controls (Except for the Gamecube option. But uh, I thought the point of this console was its controller?). Default controls are fine aside from having to shake the controller to throw grenades - a function that really should have been on the A button as it's right there, but that button is reserved for Metal Slug 6. The other control schemes range from passable to literally non-functional, with the best one being the aforementioned 'Cube controller. 'Nunchuk and control stick' seems like it would be decent enough at first as you'll use the nunchuk analog to move and the B trigger to fire your gun, but for some reason - even with all those buttons there - they will still make you shake the remote to toss a grenade. The other ones are even worse and not worth mentioning in detail, though getting the 'Tilt Wii remote' scheme to work is a puzzle as timeless as the Rubik's Cube and could probably be considered a game all by itself. You'll want to turn the music up and the effects down while you're here in the options, because otherwise the soundtrack sounds like ambient noise coming from your character's invisible headphones. The development team then goes on to release the worst Metal Slug game ever conceived (with the possible exception of that 3D one. Did that ever come out?) and dick up the resolution in all the other games for an encore.
For those of you who haven't played Metal Slug before, definitely check out 3 and 5. For the rest of us, here's a brief overview of 6. MS6 is to the Metal Slug series what Monkey Island 3 was for its franchise, only without any of the originality. The backgrounds are now rendered in a completely different art style, with all your old favorite sprites (and a few new ones) overlayed in a semi-cohesive fashion. To help these sprites jive with the new style, the camera is zoomed out further than in other Slug games, which gives a blur effect to all of the foreground graphics. Cutscenes are handled with what are I suppose the rudimentary concepts behind previous efforts, only now they're deathly silent and more awkward than breakfast the morning after walking in on your parents. There are a few new game mechanics - Holding in B while attacking will force you into a melee animation (uh?), you can now hold 2 special items and hit A to toggle between them and your pistol, and there are some meters that light up when you shoot things that don't seem to do anything. Throwing grenades is relegated to shaking the remote in the default control scheme, which would be delightfully stupid enough on its own if all the other Metal Slug games on the disc didn't also use this mechanic and just flat out disable the A button from doing anything. Two new characters are added to the classic cast of 4 - Ralf Jones, who only has two lives to serve for mother England (per life, making him the best character in the game), and Clark Still, who allows the player to pretend they're playing a videogame adaption of Ernest Goes To Jail. It should also be noted that all of the characters have stats now, which also don't appear to have any significant effect. Eni will also begin each life with a heavy machinegun in her inventory, which is sorta random. Enemies in general take more hits to kill, with your average goons on level 2 taking a few rounds to drop, each. Bosses are bigger than ever (well, actually, the same size as before, only now everything else is smaller), but helpfully do not acknowledge when you're doing damage to them, a feature that is further augmented by the fact that they now take forever to kill. In the money shot on this beloved franchise's broken and dispirited body, they replaced the voices of the prisoners and the trademark Metal Slug announcer with who I can only assume was the only other guy in the office the week this game was made.
Okay, it isn't all bad. At least there's a save feature for all of the original games, although Metal Slug games are traditionally things you play through in one sitting. The 6th game is also definitely the hardest Slug game to date and hey, it's still Metal Slug so it's still possible to have fun while playing it. Games 1-5 are all good games, meaning that for your $40 you do get 6 solid arcade games (Including X). However, these games have been re-released already on last-gen consoles and SNK/Playmore should have the hang of doing this crap by now - No one should have to force people to use a Gamecube controller to get decent control of one of the simplest games ever made.
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Linear Mode
