Retro Game Club - Jan 14-31. Let's Play 'Metal Slug'. Leaderboards in first post

[Down by Law]

Here's my offering 👍 what a game this is! Lost two lives climbing the mountain on stage 3 🥴🥴🥴

[MagicalDrop]

@Down by Lawcomfortably topping the leaderboard! 

[megamixer]

@Down by Law That's insane!

 

I also had a playthrough of Metal Slug X this afternoon and completed it with a shambolic 33 continues lol. I actually believe that this is harder than MS2, despite the enhancements and changes it makes. The tomb stage is harder (with the addition of dog mummies, and zombies that spew out killer flies) for one, and there are some rubbish power-ups added into the mix (I'm looking at the Drop Shot and Iron Lizard). I also found the trains in the subway section harder to stop, especially if you run out of power-ups/grenades; then it become near impossible to halt the last two.

 

On the plus side, X does add the Enemy Chaser which is such a life-saver.

 

Has anybody played Metal Slug XX on the PSP? I heard that it was an enhancement of MS7 on the DS (which I also haven't played).

[Yasawas]

15 hours ago, megamixer said:

The tomb stage is harder (with the addition of dog mummies, and zombies that spew out killer flies) for one, and there are some rubbish power-ups added into the mix (I'm looking at the Drop Shot and Iron Lizard).

 

I'd forgotten that stage was even in 2/X. I don't mind it until the boss when it gives you the ideal Slug to defeat it and then I immediately jump out of it by accident, every time for 20-odd years 

[megamixer]

I get worse as I push through the series...

 

First runthrough of MS3 in years and it was a cataclysmic 52 continues!!! 

 

This is clearly Nazca at their artistic and creative peak with all the wild stuff that happens during the game, but the final stage is beyond sadistic, too long, and culminates with a massive bullet sponge of an end boss.

 

It's weird because it's addictive and enjoyable, but it smacks you around badly, like the worst kind of abusive relationship.

 

I've completely forgotten what MS4, 5, and 6 are like (aside from being pale, asset-recycling imitations of the Nazca prequels) so I'm looking forward to continuing the series but I need a rest after 'slug 3's finale.

[megamixer]

Okay, I lied about having a rest and went through MS4 as well. Not a very amazing installment imo. So much asset re-use and pallete-swapped stuff from older games, and the classic sprites do seem to jar with the less detailed backgrounds that Mega Corp came up with. That said, I did spot at least one backdrop from MS2 (a New York-esque skyline) that was sort of layered in behind some new buildings...

 

There doesn't seem to be much finesse in how the enemies are arranged against you either - just a completely random onslaught of bullets, tanks, and other shit that is pretty hard to avoid.

 

Some of the bosses are absolutely hateful too, such as the submarine (with the ridiculous "grid" of missiles to avoid) and the final boss that has too many lasers to deal with.

 

Overall, it just feels soulless with pretty forgettable music to boot, but is still decent-ish fun as far as run 'n guns in general go. I wouldn't play it again over other 'slugs though.

 

36 continues this time which is still disgusting lol

[Yasawas]

Just wanted to get an entry in on the last day but I was losing interest toward the end to be honest. The final mission is a bit too cheap to be fun, to the detriment of the game overall imo. I appreciate it can be 1CC’d (I’ve seen the proof!) and the later titles are much worse in this regard but I can’t help but wish it was conceived as a console game first and foremost.

 

[MagicalDrop]

Added @Yasawas to the leaderboard. 

[MagicalDrop]

On 29/01/2023 at 20:48, megamixer said:

I get worse as I push through the series...

 

First runthrough of MS3 in years and it was a cataclysmic 52 continues!!! 

 

This is clearly Nazca at their artistic and creative peak with all the wild stuff that happens during the game, but the final stage is beyond sadistic, too long, and culminates with a massive bullet sponge of an end boss.

 

Just brute forced my way through MS3, blimey 64 continues. To be fair to myself the game gets so ridiculously hard that I more or less gave up trying to survive and just kept hammering Continue so I could reach the end of the marathon final stage to get it over and done with. 

 

It's pretty spectacular albeit with some stupid repetitive sections. I liked some of the early branching options and the 'hidden' yeti cave and they've put a lot more variety into the gameplay. I do pity anyone who tried to pump coins into this back in the day to get to the end, not least of which because you'd need a sack load of 50ps to hand! 

 

Anyway, took about an hour and 20 mins with non stop continues if anyone else is thinking of seeing the final Mission. 

[megamixer]

5 hours ago, MagicalDrop said:

Anyway, took about an hour and 20 mins with non stop continues if anyone else is thinking of seeing the final Mission. 

 

Yeah, I was playing on PSP, so I could just pause the game and put it into sleep mode when it began dragging on too long!

 

I finished my play-through of MS1-6 yesterday:

 

Metal Slug 5 - big improvement on MS4. Still some asset re-use, but the game feels a lot less hacked-together and is actually one of the fairer games in the series imo. I enjoyed it, and the rock/metal twist on the music. The final boss sucked a lot of continues from me but is one epic mofo for sure. Most importantly, I LOVED the special sliding move which really helps covering distance, getting beneath bullets/bombs quickly, and you can also shoot while sliding! Tragically, this feature wasn't carried over into MS6, speaking of...

 

Metal Slug 6 - Don't know what I think about this one. You can now play as Ralf and Clark from KOF/Ikari Warriors, you can stock 2 power-up weapons and store them/switch between them, and the characters now have unique special abilities and moves. I played as Ralf who could take an extra hit before dying, and also has his Vulcan Punch move from KOF which I found extremely useful up-close to deal big damage quickly to enemies. Unfortunately, it gets too hard and annoying towards the end for my liking. There is a really tiresome and annoying worm boss (which I couldn't figure out how to avoid its attacks consistently), and the final stage almost reminded me of the last part of MS3's - a long gauntlet of aliens and weird creatures that take far too many bullets to kill and spew out so much shit that I couldn'yt help but lose life after life. This was the first MS to not be on the NeoGeo (Atomiswave) and it's pretty fun thanks to experimenting with the characters' different abilities and skills, but not the best.

[megamixer]

Haha, I think I'm addicted to these now.

 

Had another crack at MS1 and fractionally improved my continue score from 16 > 15. I do reasonably well until Mission 5 (all those barricades where you are trapped on both sides by so many bullets/missiles/enemy vehicles) and the final mission (the dual-level bridge with a silly number of soldiers and tanks filling the screen with death)

 

Also tried to improve my MS2 performance and reduced my continue shame from 28 >21. Again, the last two missions are just brutal. Mission 5 with subway is nails imo. Too many of those trams to stop and not enough grenades/high-powered guns to stop the last two. Also, I seem to just keep getting killed by random enemy grenades, no matter how much I try to keep an eye on everything. The following segment with all those exploding mutants is impossible to get through unscathed, especially if you use the cranks to drop power-ups and are a sitting duck for those vital few seconds. Ironically, the boss of Mission 5 is actually not that bad - it's all the stuff before it. Nothing more needs to be said about the final mission other than those screens of endless aliens and their weird, floaty bullets can do one, and the final boss is pure murder with all those random alien saucer bullets leaving you nowhere to go.

 

I may be in the minority but I think I actually prefer playing MS2 to MSX. The only things I like about the X remix are the addressing of MS2's chugging slowdown, and the Enemy Chaser. Otherwise, I prefer MS2 as it's just easier when it comes to the tomb level and the fact that MSX introduces the aliens in their saucers earlier on which also makes it more difficult.

[K]

Is there any way of playing Metal Slug 2 without the slowdown? It seems like something they could have introduced into one of the ports, just as a nice extra - it’d be an interesting exercise to see if it’s playable without the slowdown. Is it possible to overclock any of the Neo Geo emulators?

[Tomdominer]

Well, there is a "patched" version of Metal Slug 2, which fixes a bug to cause the game to slowdown more than intended: https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/4009/

 

Also, on the MiSTer at least, there is an overclocked version of the Neo Geo core, which also supposed to help. I don't have have my mister set-up at the moment to know if its folded into the "official" core release though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJsGYm3bmw4

[spanky debrest]

There's a 'Turbo' hack of MS2 which is exhibits a noticeable improvement apparantly.

 

That, combined with one of the overclocked Neo Geo MiSTer cores (available from the official forum in it's own topic in 18Mhz and 24Mhz variants) is supposed to almost eliminate slowdown. 

 

I haven't tested any of these out myself though.

[Barnard]

4 hours ago, K said:

Is there any way of playing Metal Slug 2 without the slowdown? It seems like something they could have introduced into one of the ports, just as a nice extra - it’d be an interesting exercise to see if it’s playable without the slowdown. Is it possible to overclock any of the Neo Geo emulators?

 

The Retroarch Final Burn cores let you overclock the CPU.

[Tomdominer]

19 hours ago, Tomdominer said:

Well, there is a "patched" version of Metal Slug 2, which fixes a bug to cause the game to slowdown more than intended: https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/4009/

 

18 hours ago, spanky debrest said:

There's a 'Turbo' hack of MS2 which is exhibits a noticeable improvement apparantly.

 

Have you got me on ignore or something?

[spanky debrest]

9 minutes ago, Tomdominer said:

 

 

Have you got me on ignore or something?

 

Whoopsie! I somehow missed / misread your response.

[K]

Thanks all - I found the Metal Slug 2 Turbo ROM pretty easily, and it slots nicely into MAME. I haven't done a side by side comparison, but it seems to play with much less slowdown - it's still there, but it's no worse than the original Metal Slug. Worth downloading, I would say.

[MagicalDrop]

Metal Slug 4 run through done, another devil-may-care continue-fest with 53 continues. As @megamixer observed, it's a bit of a mess of ideas with seemingly random sections featuring yetis and mummies in overwhelming numbers and one or two new vehicles. I might have missed it but was the SV001 even in this game? I actually got on OK with the submarine boss and the grid of missiles but the final boss's lasers seemed impossible to avoid so I just stood in the centre on a grenade dump, shoot, die, continue loop until it was over. 

 

Onwards to MS5! 

[Down by Law]

I only really love the original game and X. The others have too many gimmicks for my liking but worst of all times where you'll be stuck with the pistol for ages through no fault of your own. I swear Metal Slug 3 is trying to give me RSI through mashing the shoot button. The second boss in particular is really guilty of this. The first game has a fabulous balance of difficulty whereas the rest of the series are unashamed credit munchers.

 

I do think MS4 has a superb soundtrack for Neo Geo hardware though. 

[megamixer]

8 hours ago, Down by Law said:

The others have too many gimmicks for my liking but worst of all times where you'll be stuck with the pistol for ages through no fault of your own. I swear Metal Slug 3 is trying to give me RSI through mashing the shoot button. The second boss in particular is really guilty of this. The first game has a fabulous balance of difficulty whereas the rest of the series are unashamed credit munchers.

The PSP collection I am playing has the ability to switch on Auto Fire which helps with that. I am playing through 3 again at the moment and it's nails compared to the first two which only get ridiculous in the last couple of stages.

 

I did manage to reduce my continue quote for MS1 down to 13 the other day which I was pretty chuffed with.

[MagicalDrop]

Metal Slug 5 done, seemed a shorter experience, not least because there's only 5 missions. Two horrible sections, jumping the gaps with the car and the final boss, whose design seemed hugely out of keeping with the whole series. 36 continues. 

[megamixer]

9 hours ago, MagicalDrop said:

Metal Slug 5 done, seemed a shorter experience, not least because there's only 5 missions. Two horrible sections, jumping the gaps with the car and the final boss, whose design seemed hugely out of keeping with the whole series. 36 continues. 

Yeah, that last boss is mental. It has a cool name though! I think it's "The avatar of all evil" or something like that. The car section can go to hell.

[Yasawas]

Is MS7/XX actually good or am I falling into the trap of having played it for ten minutes via emulation and thinking it is because I'd expected a car crash? I think I like it and I'm wishing I didn't collect DS games a bit because MS7 is quite pricy.

[Keyboard Koala]

Nah, I agree. I think MS4 was terrible as in that it's an average action game, but a terrible MS game. MS5 was a bit better but still not very good. With MS6 the series got a new director who put the series back on track, and by the time they got to MS7/ XX the series had become really quite enjoyable again, and better (and less derivative) than both 4 and 5 I reckon. MS7/ XX gave the series the send off it deserved.

 

 

[megamixer]

Has anybody seen or played that mobile Metal Slug? Can't remember the name. Has the typical modern fashion of being in 2D with 3D graphics. The first level I saw looked like a remake of Metal Slug 2's first stage.

[Yasawas]

9 hours ago, Keyboard Koala said:

 With MS6 the series got a new director who put the series back on track

Ah, cool, I’d always skipped that one. In my excitement at discovering Atomiswave a year or so back I got totally sidetracked with Dolphin Blue.