One minute you’re zipping along, chucking grenades and bouncing over soldiers with reckless abandon, and the next, the pace drops as you slowly sink in a miniature submarine having to pause every now and again to avoid giant conga eels called Helen and Linda (even I couldn’t make this stuff up).
This may not seem like a huge change – it’s not exactly Metroid Prime’s shift into 3D – but in a hectic shooter like this, it does alter the dynamic significantly. Whilst previous Metal Slug games have seen the player moving predominantly from the left to right, the third iteration has the player going up, down, diagonally and from right to left. Certain genres don’t need dramatic changes to keep gamers excited, just a little rouge here and lipstick there is all it needs to keep the old slapper fresh, and SNK have done just that with Metal Slug 3. If this all sounds a little familiar, it’s because it is, not that that’s necessarily a bad thing of course.
#METAL SLUG 3 XBOX SERIES#
The Slugs themselves have long been a hugely enjoyable part of the series and Metal Slug 3 doesn’t disappoint, giving you access to miniature helicopters, submarines, tanks and planes not to mention robot suits, camels, elephants and the aforementioned ostriches. You can also climb into one of the vehicular Metal Slugs – that have been scattered around the levels – and wreak havoc on a slightly more violent, if a little uncontrolled, scale. Enemies are both multiple and bizarre (ranging from bog standard foot soldiers to giant crabs) and can be dispatched with your knife, a grenade or with a quick blast from your rather diverse arsenal. The actual gameplay unfolds over a series of five varied and, at times, excruciatingly difficult levels, the object of each being to reach the enormous and highly improbable end of level boss, rescuing hostages, turning into a zombie and blowing anything that gets in your way to kingdom come in the process.
#METAL SLUG 3 XBOX MANUAL#
The manual tells a hilariously serious back-story, going into almost Tolkeinian detail about coup d’etats, aliens and the lives of the Metal Slug heroes, however in-game evidence of this ridiculous tale is pretty tough to come by. Sometimes it’s just nice to pick up a game that has instantly recognisable controls and gameplay and constantly makes you smile as uzi-toting monkeys and ostriches packing plasma cannons run riot among evil crabs and Egyptian mummies. Partly, it’s SNK Playmore’s laudable unwillingness to buckle under the weight of an industry that wants ragdoll physics for breakfast with pixel shaders for lunch, and partly it’s just that they’re bloody good fun. The run and gun mechanics of a Metal Slug game are just about the oldest old boy from the old school of arcade gaming around, but there are reasons why they’re still going. So bless Patrick Moore’s shining head and wonky eye that someone’s finally got round to porting a game from this series onto a mainstream console that can handle it (no the Saturn wasn’t mainstream and no the PSone couldn’t handle it). The AES may well have played host to some of the best and brightest arcade style games ever coded, but I remember as a boy (and I have a photographic memory), each game cost the equivalent of a developed nation’s space program and the system itself was only obtainable if you owned at least three properties in Monaco.
Are you rich? Do you lie on a mattress stuffed with fifty-pound notes each night? Do you light the most expensive Cuban tobacco wrapped up in torn-off strips of Picasso’s early sketches, lit from a perpetual fire fuelled by your own private oil well? Do you employ legions of specially bred Russian supermodels to dictate your correspondence to you through the medium of dance and/or Pictionary (whichever tickles your whimsy)? Do you think that poor people were invented by the same criminal Labour government that put fluoride in the water? I mean, they can’t really exist, can they?Īnswer yes to all of these questions and the chances are you could already own a copy of Metal Slug 3 on your Neo Geo AES.
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