What went wrong?
Metal Slug 4
Angel Price
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Landon Mitchell
people will bitch about reused sprites, but imo the level design is just not good.
Gavin Johnson
It's an official fan-game. Some random company in Korea landed on the rights to Metal Slug when SNK had its first bankruptcy so they made a new game without any of the experience, talent, or passion that went into 1, 2, X, 3, or even the Pocket Color spinoffs.
>Tarma & Eri made into NPCs
>Trevor is OC Donut Steel as fuck
>Nadia is just bland waifubait that's not even as good as the blatant waifubait in Metal Slug Attack
>Bosses have enemies all over the place to make them harder instead of having more involved patterns
>Allen & Morden wasted on early bosses that suck; "Mecha-Allen" was done poorly
>Much more aggressive sprite reuse than the previous games because of worse sprite artists being available
>Music is only good because it was outsourced, and even then it doesn't sound at all like the sound the previous games went with
>Final Boss is a blatant Dr. Wily ripoff in static, unmoving machines with bland patterns
>Instead of letting you be relieved that you beat the final boss, they tack on an "escape" sequence that takes like 30 seconds to cheapen the end of the game even further
5, 6, 7, & XX shit on it. Advance is better too. MS3D might be worse though, never played it.
Adrian Cruz
metal slug 4 was made during that messy period of SNK where they were struggling to keep shit together. after the merger everyone involved with the first 3 games had retired or left the company all together, leaving 4 to be designed in korea. the cats who made metal slug got their start on R-TYPE 2 so i'm sure they were tired of this sort of thing
they quickly got shit together again with metal slug 5
Sebastian Campbell
3 was intended to be the last Metal Slug game.
Daniel Baker
The director of Metal Slug 1 actually retired after that game, but the rest of the team worked on 2, X, & 3. That group of guys stuck together for most of the 90s between Irem, Nazca (their short-lived dev that was bought by SNK during the development of Metal Slug 1) & SNK themselves.
I'd recommend In The Hunt to anybody who wants something that sort of scratches that MS itch. It's a shmup where you play as a submarine and the screen scroll is controlled by your movement. Really simple, really quick, really fun and unique, great sprite work.
Easton Bell
>The director of Metal Slug 1 actually retired after that game, but the rest of the team worked on 2, X, & 3.
you're about half right. metal slug doesn't really have a "director". akio, meeher, susumu were all there for the original trilogy. i have not seen any of these men credited in anything since then
kujo still does shit
Jose Bennett
I'm basing this on a video about the history of the series I watched a while back; there was definitely somebody there for the Irem days and Metal Slug 1 that left before 2. Maybe my memory or the video were wrong though.
Benjamin Long
I don't remember anything about Metal Slug 4, It felt like a blur to me. The only part I can slightly recall was Allen still in it.
Man post 3 Metal Slug games were all kinda shit.
Parker King
>they quickly got shit together again with metal slug 5
They sure did. 5 had some rough edges but it was a really good game, and unused data suggests that with more time it could've been even better. Also listen to this shit:
youtube.com
Dominic Hernandez
Bullshit level design and bosses. The final boss is awful.
Parker Miller
5 was very good and only held back by being put out without everything in the plans being put in. 6 was a step forward mechanically and added Ralf & Clark without removing the OG quartet. 7 had some issues but I liked the idea that the whole game is storming a single island so every stage leads directly to the next, and XX fixes it up.
Sebastian Anderson
Geo Storm is pretty great too if you basically want Metal Slug 0.
Robert Turner
I don't remember a lot about 5 either besides the final boss. And I liked the OST.
I never actually played 6 so I don't have a comment on it. I did play 7 but it wasn't the XX version. But I thought it was alright in the end even if I prefer the original 3 MS games
John Hernandez
that's because the people that make those videos don't know dick, but i'll give you the benefit of the doubt since a lot of this tends to get purple monkey dishwashered when youtubers start diluting information into digestible video formats
there were interviews in the metal slug collection on ps2/wii and kazuma kujo is pretty in-depth about his role at irem and the nazca days. also i wanted to fund new r-type but im gay and poor so there's that
Gavin Cook
5 is weird. It's weird and hard to describe but it just feels empty. And yes I know it was very rushed but it's not even that, it feels like it needs more enemies or set pieces.
Bitching soundtrack though, and I like the ptolemaic army mooks
Justin Lopez
I wish Attack was good
Cameron Torres
I liked the skyscraper level (especially the route on the outside of it), the bipedal slug that punches the fuck out of shit, the gigantic crawler slug in the subway section, and those cultist enemies that just got up from being shot/blown up after a few seconds to show that you were dealing with some supernatural shit (they're a nice contrast to Martians who were just as vulnerable to bullets as Earthlings but had way better weapons).
Evan Adams
SNK went bankrupt
Brayden Hernandez
The bipedal slug is great but underutilized, and it never appears again in any other game.
I also like this motherfucker, but it just appears as an easily missed midboss and never comes back. Would have been cool to use one.
Jayden Torres
5's slide move is annoying as fuck
Carter Williams
I'd recommend anybody who hasn't yet to play 1st Mission & 2nd Mission on the Neo Geo Pocket Color. Being made for handhelds that had 8-bit sprites changed a lot about the way the level design was done, but it still feels like Metal Slug and above all feels really fresh. The way alternate routes work isn't just taking another way through the same level, but going to different levels entirely; my favorite aspect is that most levels with Slugs branch if it stays intact or not, with the game putting you on a completely different path if your vehicle is destroyed (in 1st Mission losing the Slug Tank puts you in a Prison Camp stealth section where you only have melee and in 2nd Mission there's jetpack/boat levels specifically for losing Slug Flyer/Sub). 2nd Mission also has two characters that have completely different campaigns besides their start and finish, crossing at one point because the story has them passing intel off to each other. There's even codec-style calls to flesh out their personalities between levels. Red Eye is fucking CUTE.
7/XX has that giant mecha section at least. Also I'm pretty sure that slug miniboss was reused in some way in Advance.
Gabriel Martinez
>Also I'm pretty sure that slug miniboss was reused in some way in Advance.
Yeah it's an unlockable slug. But Advance is kinda shit so.
Oliver Foster