What do we think of the Metal Slug series? How would you rank them in terms of quality and difficulty?
What do we think of the Metal Slug series? How would you rank them in terms of quality and difficulty?
What do we think of the Metal Slug series? How would you rank them in terms of quality and difficulty?
They are pretty good
S: Slug X, Slug 1, Slug 2
A: Gun Force 2, Slug 3
B: Slug 5, NGP Duo
C: Slug 4, Slug 7
D: Slug 6
F: Slug Advance
I can't disagree. I could see why you like 5 over 4 but I would swap 4&5.
I think this is a good tier list.
Slug 4 and 7 are where they start to lose soul and they have almost no charm.
too right m8 too bloody right
They are literally all the same
best spritework of all time
insane.
Quality (no slowdown):
2 > 1 > In The Hunt > 4 > X > GunForce 2 > 5 > 3
Difficulty deathless (no slowdown):
2 > 4 > In The Hunt > X > 5 > 3 > 1 > GunForce 2
They are pretty awful. Mind-numbingly repetitive years after Contra games have shown that run and gun and gameplay variety aren't mutually exclusive
Contra-schizo begone. Both are good.
Hard Corps and Shitter Shattered Soldier are the only good ones. The only thing they have going for them over MS is 60fps, which admittedly is big, but the gameplay, enemies, grafx, music, etc all suck major ass compared to MS.
Ironically it's only moronic monkeys that think this. They mindlessly credit feed and don't have the brain capacity to see how different every stage is, never actually engaging with the level design and enemy layouts.
Never got the appeal besides nice graphics. There are games that do pewpewpew AND platforming AND other shit so why should I play a game that only has pewpewpew?
Metal Slug has great gameplay and design as well, try actually playing the games. You probably shill some Trashure shit.
No it's really just shooting. You have to be a monkey to like them
3 > 2nd Mission > 2 = X > 1 > 5 > 1st Mission > 6 > XX > 4 > Advance > 7
Please play 2nd Mission.
I really don't know why people put Slug 3 on such a pedestal.
Stage 1 is an absolute pushover with the most braindead boss in the whole series
Stage 2 is just Slug 2's respective stage except with a flat, boring design and HP sponge enemies where you only ever just stand in place and shoot, boss is decent though.
Stage 3 and especially 4 are both good.
Stage 5 is bloated gimmicky bullshit with a bunch of shitty on-rails sections. The initial on-foot section inside the mothership is a little better, but still is filled with bullet sponges, and the section with the clones and the door section are both dogshit, and it's outright absurd with how spongy the enemies there are. Final Boss is okay; while there is some depth to it, just repeatedly jumping from Slug to the tiny safespot ad nauseam gets annoying fast, and if you lose your bombs/flame shot, the boss has such an absurdly fricking large health pool. Also the safe spot should be clearly hinted, because it's just arbitrarily there (almost feels like a bug but clearly isn't), and is basically impossible to do deathless without using it.
The issue is that stage 1 and 5 are literally 70% of the game, and are fricking terrible. Even beyond that, enemies are absurdly spongy, the fat gimmick is annoying bullshit, the alternate paths are poorly balanced and give zero incentive for taking them, and not routing weapons (or dying at all) means bosses have absurd amounts of HP.
>I really don't know why people put Slug 3 on such a pedestal.
It's fun and over the top. You have to be abnormal to view these games through a competitive-oriented lens sperging out over numbers and mechanics. It's a videogame, not a job.
It's *not* fun though, it's full of annoying enemies with massive HP bars and boring gimmick sections that aren't fun past the first time playing. Metal Slug has always been a game with solid gameplay and design beneath its flashy visuals, but Slug 3 is just a bloated, annoying mess underneath its spectacle. If the whole game was like stages 3 and 4, it would be solid, but that's only like 20% of the game.
slug 3 sucks. this moron says videogames not job but slug is exactly like job. drags on and on. meaningless schmup segments. terrible setpieces. if you want good slug you play slug 1. now thats a great game. no bullshit!
This is the most ape-like ESL post I've ever seen.
Either way MS3 is fun.
>enemies with massive HP bars
Have you fricking played 2?
2 doesn't have that at all outside maybe the final boss, which is much easier with the proper strategy along with routing bombs and farming a laser
If you're talking about the underground section, you should always be playing with autofire, that's been the standard for over 30 years
>autofire
You didn't beat the game.
Just shut the frick up shitter. It's not a debate
I'm more skilled at Metal Slug than you'll ever be.
First you have to no-miss every Slug game then maybe
Nah the other ones aren't worth it. Also you haven't done that for any game in the series and never will.
CMON BOI
> doesn't have that at all
>only firing 50% of the time
>takes longer to die
Woah... no way
Now show rootmars without grenades or flameshot, it's like a five minute fight. Or the clones at the doors at the end of stage 5.
I have never used autofire. I also like that it makes me change what I am doing. Tatatatatatata for like two 20second sessions feels like minutes and gets intense when the train starts to gain on you. Autofire makes it feel like ... nothing.
>Autofire makes it feel like...
...not developing carpal tunnel and wearing down your controller.
>wearing down your controller
the buttons in stock MVS cabs and AES controllers, despite how light/cheap they feel compared to modern fight sticks, can easily handle years of mashing. It's pretty amazing how AES sticks 30+ years old are still tight and the buttons all responsive
A lot of players nowadays use controller/keyboard, and mashing is shit for your hands/wrist regardless. Just accept autofire like 99% of Japanese players have, it's been 30 fricking years.
last real snk metal slug
imo stage 1 atmospere and stage 2 music and blood vomit was the best of the series
>stage 1 atmosphere
>literally just hold right and shoot the entire stage, standing in place once or twice for bullet sponges
I know stage 1 is supposed to be easy, but that doesn't mean it should be completely one-dimensional and braindead. And even as early as stage 1, you have the totally unbalanced routes, where the route through the facility is both faster and easier, while also giving you the best Slug for the boss. It's funny that the Stage 1 boss is the gif that always gets posted praising Metal Slug's pixel-art animation, when it's the absolute worst boss fight in the whole series.
Are you trying to pistol only the bosses?
What are you even talking about..? Stage 1 boss you have a Slug.
3>2-X>1>4>5>6>7-XX
X>2>3>1>5>4
Why were they such massive downgrades after 3? Were there huge layoffs at SNK or something?
Snk went bankrupt in 2001
4 is great, 5 is decent, 6 is good. 3 was bloated garbage.
4 was made by some korean company and reused a shit ton of assets from previous games, the new art was trash
i think 5 was as well, and 5 was unfinished garbage
they both had really good soundtracks though because some god tier composer made them
6 was nu-SNK and actually decent
5 was nu-SNK too. It's a shame it wasn't completely finished, a lot of stuff went unused.
5 being only a step or two down from the original trilogy in quality while being at most 80% of the game that was planned is pretty crazy. Wish a completed edition of 5 could come out some day.
MS4 is basically an official fangame, it's fascinating to look at through that lens.
>Massive reuse of assets from prior games
>Two brand new OCs (cooler dude and quirky girl) playable over Tarma & Eri
>Select screen does away with the goofy caricature portraits for more standard pixel art
>Don't know how to design boss patterns, have enemies spawn during them to give them challenge
>Morden is fought early in the game, as is Allen rather than them appearing near the end of the game
>Allen palette swap as a separate boss
>Final boss is a fanfic tier twist (what if the old businessman was EVIL because his hair looks like Dr. Wily? And we put him in a robot that looks like a bootleg Wily Machine?)
>Escape sequence because those are in other games the devs like
>OST that doesn't sound much like the prior games' but is still extremely good just because the guy they got to do it like the series
Slug 4 has great boss design, and this is coming from someone who did it deathless. Boss 2 is especially interesting with the stacked pieces and all the different strategies you can use. The final boss thematically is a bit boring, but gameplay wise is fun and varied. All the bosses are very competent and I like the larger scale and varied attacks.
5's bosses are fricking abysmal, the worst in the series, and clearly inferior to Slug 4
I wouldn't call 4's bosses outright bad on the whole but the idea that the bosses themselves don't actually do that much and so they summon enemies to patch the holes in their patterns is what irks me. Maybe if the ads were unique to the fight it wouldn't have even been an issue for me. It's just part of what makes the game feel like a cheap fan project.
It's the only one that hasn't been ported to oblivion, that's about it. Atomiswave is harder to emulate & port than Neo Geo, and XX is on modern systems.
>MS4 is basically an official fangame, it's fascinating to look at through that lens.
I thought of it that way too. It feels like a MUGEN game.
6 is actually good as frick, I'm always a little butthurt people sleep on it so much.
That and the XX are the last ones I need to no death clear. Initial impressions are positive but the game is ugly compared to the NeoGeo games, and the game doesn't run as well, but gameplay wise I think I will like it. Levels and bosses seem varied and it almost seems like a less bloated/gimmicky Slug 3, but I will have to see
3 was the last game made by the original Nazca devs, which then disbanded afterwards and vanished into the crowd since most of them went by pseudonyms.
Akio stayed in SNK for a long time before resigning, his last work there being Marco's art for that SNK shooter
They were made by SNK Playmore which for whatever reason whose quality of releases varied greatly. They did not have the resources to expend like Pre-2001 SNK had.
I don't understand how they could produce something like Metal Slug 6, and then turn around and make KOF 13.
>I don't understand how they could produce something like Metal Slug 6, and then turn around and make KOF 13.
MS6 was on new arcade hardware built more for 3D games, and IIRC it was also not the same team did that 5. Even Capcom fresh off of CPS3's insane sprite work went to Naomi boards and made Marvel 2, a game with a ton of cut animation frames & generic 3D assets.
KOFXII & XIII were also insane money sinks for SNK, hail mary risks that didn't pay off. The style they utilized involved fully modeling and animating every character and THEN rotoscoping high-res detailed sprites over those animations while having the color palettes be editable and a pretty forward-thinking lighting engine for a sprite-based game. XII has a miniscule roster compared to 2002 & XI, omitting staples like Mai, and XIII's roster is still on the small end with its DLC being exclusively asset flips of base roster characters. Those games were in no small part a factor in SNK's second bankruptcy.
KoF13 is a pretty sad project for how much they poured into it. That's the death and apex of 2D spritework right there, at least when it could actually push the market and not as a faux-indie "feature".
>KoF13 is a pretty sad project for how much they poured into it
Yes SNK missed a massive window to ride SF4's fighting-game revival wave when it released. I get the impression that the game was barely marketed in the west which is criminal, since that was literally the only reason, at least I can see, why the game flopped.
Literally the perfect opportunity and they completely snuffed it.
...This franchise has 13 main games alone?
yea the kof games were like sports games in that they made yearly releases, with tweaks to the engine and design. When fighting games became a niche thing and the mainstream interest in them died, they switched to infrequent releases every few years.
15 mainline (with some having updated editions like 98UM & 2002UM) alongside a few spinoffs like Maximum Impact, Neowave, & SNK Heroines, & EX. That's all fighting games too.
theyre all fun
i dunno if its just my Dreamcast but the atomiswave fan port runs like shit
the neopocket arent pictured in OP photo but are worth checking out too, i like them more than the advance games
slug collection with all the javaphone & mobile shitware ports included for autisms sake when???
X > 3 > 2 > 6 > 1 > garbage
I've never played a Metal Slug game before. They look fun.
Demon front -> Metal Slug 2 -> Metal Slug -> rest sucked ass
I've been waiting for a Metal Slug sequel with new animations and a fresh new engine ever since the first game. Never happened. They rehashed the concept a million times without any substantial updates. And even right now the Black Finger Jet, its just another rehash of the very same thing. One trick ponies =(
I rank them in terms of how creative the devs were with the games
3 > 2 = X = 5 > 6 > 1 >>>>> XX >>> whatever else has the brand name on it
>What do we think
Ah yes, the thing I hate the most in boards.
>what do I think about
>what do we think about
It's like people are unable to think by themselves and need the hivemind to help them.
The real monkeys are the morons franchise-warring as if that's worth something. No one cares.
3=X>2>1>5>4>XX>6>2nd Mission>Advance>1st Mission>3D
3 is only hated by autistic speed runner people in my experience. Slug just isn’t a good series for autistic people in general due to some of the random elements
This series really lost the plot quickly. The first game is a masterpiece because it was all designed around the titular vehicle. The later games still having absolutely no extends while also only giving you the slug once in a blue moon is cheap and poorly thought out.
The autofire gay is here. Thread's dead.
The worst part about 4 is how they pull out the old "let's make them fight 2 helicopters" gag like 10,000 times
GET SOME NEW ENCOUNTER DESIGN
4 is actually really good. You should try playing it instead of just regurgitating online opinions
Regurgitate like they did with the assets from the old games? MS4 is almost bad, it has its qualities because I imagine some designers still worked on it, but the game wears your patience out.
Slug 3 just shat out all these assets without putting most of them to good use. Reserved for an alternate path that no one takes or window dressing for some gimmicky on-rails section.
4 has some of the best level and boss design and is really well paced with minimal gimmicks, bullet sponges, or other annoying bullshit.
70% of Slug 3 (stages 1 and 5) is shit, and stage 2 is basically a reskin of the same stage from Slug 2 but with much less interesting level design and way spongier enemies.
Stages 3 and 4 from Slug 3 edge out over Metal Slug 4, but as an overall package, 4 easily takes it.
4 is for gays
the new characters are stupid and the enemies are blander than MS1.
I played all of the arcade & handheld releases back to back in the span of a couple days for the first time some years ago because I never encountered them before and I wanted to correct that, knowing only that the original team did 1/2/X/3 and 4 was the clear weakest with the sole exception of Advance. Barring superficial issues like the insane asset reuse and how much Trevor & Nadia come off as fan OCs, there is a lack of originality in the encounter design, some moments of really weak level design (I always think back to the bit on the boat with death pits broken up by small bits of platform that due to the awkward perspective had bits on them you could see but not land on), bosses that use adds to complete their patterns because they didn't have enough sprites to do a full suite of attacks, a half-assed escape sequence, etc. The thing is that the weakest Metal Slug is still a good game, I'd argue that due to still mostly having the aesthetic right on top of an OST that holds up the quality while having a different style from the prior games it's a 7/10 (Advance I'd hesitate to give a 7 because it has even more design issues, final mission the most blatant), and when played after the very grandiose MS3 4's shortcomings stick out a lot more than they would played in a vacuum. 3's HP balancing and pacing issues are very much known but I don't really care because no matter what the moment to moment in that game is a blast and the various branching paths give me reason to go back more than any other game in the series; of course 2/X is probably the best balance of spectacle to design while 1 is the tightest experience, but I'd say the differences across the original trilogy in these ways isn't a huge gulf.
5 being better than 4 is something that I can't really put as much substance towards since it is clearly unfinished despite having more new assets, I just like it. 1M, 2M, 6 & XX are their own beast due to the obvious graphical & mechanical changes.
>I played all of the arcade & handheld releases back to back in the span of a couple days
>played
Meaningless. How about you actually CLEAR those games? One credit, no continues, preferably no-miss. Until then your opinion is irrelevant and you're just a secondary poser homosexual basedfacing over spectacle rather than actual design. Not reading the rest of your post
>a half-assed escape sequence,
The game is already over by that point (it literally says ALL OVER), that is just a silly segment that lasts less than a minute for a joke ending.
>always think back to the bit on the boat with death pits broken up by small bits of platform that due to the awkward perspective had bits on them you could see but not land on
Wow, a five second platforming segment where you learn the hitboxes after one death and then it's not a problem ever again.
>bosses that use adds to complete their patterns because they didn't have enough sprites to do a full suite of attacks
???? The bosses literally have more attacks than previous games even without the ads.
This is why you just ignore secondaries. They're poser shitters who have nothing of value to add and their "opinions", if you can even call them that, are based on a limited, surface level, and amateurish view of the game.
Meanwhile Slug 3 has massive fundamental errors in every area of the game that is just glossed over. Metal Slug 5's final boss literally has TWO (2) attacks, one of which is impossible to ever get hit by if you have a reaction time less than 3 seconds, and that adds NOTHING to the boss fight as it's completely isolated by like 20 seconds of animations, and serves no purpose beyond wasting your time. Or the """"new"""" enemies in Slug 5, such as the new tank that is just an objectively weaker version of the green tank and adds absolutely nothing to the game whatsoever. Or how about the shitty fricking RNG patterns in two different bosses that require literal pixel perfect dodging if you don't use quick kill strats. Slug 5 literally only has one boss that isn't trash and even then it spends half the time off screen with only one weapon drop that can hit it (Heavy MG with diagonal shot) and no way to move between floors.
>Meanwhile Slug 3 has massive fundamental errors in every area of the game
such as? it looks a like more difficult than previous games but otherwise basically the same
>such as? it looks a like more difficult than previous games
it looks? IT LOOKS? HOW ABOUT YOU PLAY THE FRICKING GAME moron
I can't stand you stupid fricking moronic secondaries who have played a collective total of like 10 minutes in a Slug game and come in here and shit up the thread. FRICK OFF
1 > 3 > 6 > 2/X > 7 > NGP > 5 > 4 > Advance
Ban the MS-schizo, ruiner of threads
How does it feel ruining threads like a pest? Fricking dumbass.
Is Metal Slug 3D any good?
Mediocre at least, but not MMX7 level of bad.
A little clumsy but it's a fine arcadey TPS. It was made by some of the same devs that made 4-6 which meant they kind of had an idea of what Metal Slug is but not 3D games. One of those games where it's not bad but it pales in comparison to the rest of its series. Doesn't help that it did the "reboot name is just the name of the franchise" thing.
it's the perfect encapsulation of SNK in general.
fantastic games with fantastic art that 95% of people who play video games have never even heard of, let alone played.
anyway, i have softest spot for 3 since its the one i played most with my bro.
looking forward to the tactics game if it ever comes out.
>fantastic games with fantastic art that 95% of people who play video games have never even heard of, let alone played.
Why is this the case?
don't know but ask people who play street fighter if they've ever heard of king of fighters and a lot will say no, same with contra and metal slug.
weirdly enough I've met more people who know fatal fury than kof.
maybe they're more popular in America and Japan ?
at least in europe it's quite rare to find a gaymer who knows what SNK is or a series they made.
maybe they just didn't advertise their shit effectively enough.
There are two kinds of regions:
>The close #2 behind Street Fighter was Mortal Kombat
>The close #2 behind Street Fighter was King of Fighters
USA, Canada, Japan & most of Europe are the former (though France's #2 might've been Soul Calibur based on what I've heard). China, SK, Mexico, LatAm, and South America are the latter. Japan is probably the latter too but mostly because KOF is Japanese and MK releases in Japan were sparse before being essentially banned and even then there was a period where #2 might've been Vampire. All the regions where KOF was big aren't in the anglosphere so it feels like it wasn't ever big.
Also regions where SNK was hot took advantage of how easy it was to bootleg Neo Geo cabinets so there's that too.
can tell you assuredly that bongland belongs to #1 then.
fighting game hierarchy went:
Street fighter > Mortal Kombat > Fatal Fury > Everything else.
americans really don't know how well they had it in the 90's and early 00's, even if you didn't get all the cool shit you still got some of it whereas being a euro meant you were cut out of most the cool shit from nipponland outside of emulating it.
SNK isn't big here, that's all i can say.
Metal Slug was super popular my dude, if any place had an arcade machine there was a good chance it was a Metal Slug one.
i think it depends on your country, arcades aren't / weren't super popular here so nobody grew up being exposed to games like metal slug.
its all Fifa man, nothing but Fifa and GTA.
>fantastic games with fantastic art that 95% of people who play video games have never even heard of, let alone played.
Maybe I just have a narrow 30+ boomer perspective, but like every pizza place I ever knew as a kid had a metal slug cabinet in there.
What do we think of the Shock Troopers games? How do they compare to Metal Slug?
The original Shock Troopers is an absolute classic, played it on a whim one day and was shocked to see how much variety and polish there was for how little it gets discussed compared to even other SNK games in a similar style like Ikari Warriors. Super replayable because of the routing system and having 8 distinct characters. The sequel, meh, it's the kind of game that would be pretty good in a vacuum but as a followup it's clearly worse than the first one.
Big Mama should've gotten into KOF.
Love it. Also those death animations are top notch, one of my favorites.
Pretty good. The controls are great and the core gameplay is satisfying, with the weapons being very satisfying to use. But the lack of enemy variety and copy-pasted boss designs definitely hold it back from being on the same tier as something like Metal Slug. Also a minor complaint, but the characters don't have a whole lot to differentiate them, and the grenades are almost worthless and barely deal any additional DPS over just shooting (some grenade types might even be a damage down)
>CLEARS???
This expression indicates a schizo's moronation and lack of social activity. When confronted with something he cannot understand or respond to when it comes to playing good videogames like Metal Slug 3 for fun, schizos mumble, "muh clears" or "post clears, shitter". This is usually followed by dubious claims of clears the schizo refuses to post proof of when prompted.
>Ctrl + F "clears"
>4 results found
>literally all of them in your post
meds, NOW
There you are