|
|
4.0 out of 5 stars
Pretty good game overall, Jul 16 2003
"Huh? What's wrong with this game? How come the characters are all so smooth -- where's the edges, the corners, the aliasing? Hey, where are the polygons? How do I control the camera? What, you mean I don't control the camera? I don't need to? Weird."
We can understand a certain degree of confusion on the part of the modern gamer, when exposed to Metal Slug X. It's a near-perfect evolution (graphically speaking, anyway) of a genre already extinct, side-scrolling shooters having fallen by the wayside years ago when some videogame Illuminatus declared that The Future Will Be Owned By Polygons. Heavy sigh. Well, Agetec seems unwilling to let the genre slip away quite yet. The PlayStation version of SNK's superior sequel is now available in the US, and it behooves all fans of classic action gameplay to pick up a copy as soon as possible. It's short, it's simple, and it's not quite the equal of the Neo Geo original, but it's still as sweet a shooter as dollars can buy nowadays. Even if you don't want to make it part of your collection, it's one of the best rental values around. That's because, despite its brilliance, Metal Slug X is a little bit on the shortish side. The five or six levels can be blazed through in a long evening. Every second is packed with action, though, and if you actually want to build your skills and beat the game on one credit, instead of abusing the continues like a weak wimpy girly-mon, you could be playing through the game dozens of times. And that is the appropriate spirit in which to play a classic 2D shooter, of which genre Slug X is one of the premier specimens. The Slug style is far more straightforward than something like the better Contras or Gunstar Heroes -- the emphasis is on hectic action and visual gosh-wow rather than complex patterns and original enemy designs -- but it makes up for what some might consider a dearth of invention with a seemingly unending parade of enemies, weapons, and special vehicles to destroy and destroy with. If you go more than, say, 20 seconds without blowing up something really big in this game, you must be doing something wrong. Even if you get a little tired of the weapons selection (heavy machineguns, shotguns, flamethrowers, lasers, rocket launchers, a strange remote-controlled toy, and more), there's always a Slug to hop into, be it the Slugnoid, Slug Flyer, Camel Slug, or original Metal Slug tank. The vehicles are all of them very cute, and they provide a pleasant change from just running back and forth. The vulcan cannons mow down the bad guys like nobody's business, and the sight of a hopping prehensile-treaded tank remains terribly amusing. The animation in Metal Slug X is better than the PlayStation has any right to produce. The system's RAM limitations necessarily mean a loss of animation frames in comparison to the ridiculous Neo Geo version of the game, but it's still an opulent work of 2D art, with motion and personality packed into every corner possible. Your little SD commando is agile and fluid, and the four different characters have all their own animations. Even the hordes of faceless minions have several different expressions -- they charge forward purposefully, flee in terror screaming, belly-laugh over fallen enemies and then jump with surprise when you pop in another credit and reappear. The backgrounds don't employ quite so much parallax scroll as some recent side-scrollers, but they're spiked with plenty of little bits of animation, and there's more than enough going on in the foreground to grab your attention. Even the smallest bosses fill half the screen, clanking and steaming as they spew fire at you. If this is not the best-looking hand-drawn game ever (which it probably isn't anyway, since there's a Metal Slug 3 on the Neo), it's very possibly the best one to hit the States, given how many of the Saturn's best 2D games remained in Japan. Metal Slug's not likely to wow you with its music tracks, but the riotous effects suite plays a perfect harmony with the graphics. The sound sampling is weaker than the PlayStation is capable of (these are likely the same sounds as the Neo ROM version -- SNK gave up on recompressing audio for its CD titles late in the system's life) but the imperfections are drowned out soon enough by the boom of shotguns, the chatter of heavy machineguns, the scream of knifed baddies, and the explosions echoing here, there, and everywhere.
|
Teen
