You'll start off with a simple handgun that you can fire in any direction and a handful of grenades, but you'll regularly find high-powered limited-ammo weapons to help you make short work of the opposition. And that's not taking into consideration the massive, screen-filling bosses you'll face at the end of each of the game's five levels. Aside from the fatigue-sporting soldiers in Morden's army, who have a penchant for grenades, bazookas, and what appear to be handmade bottle rockets, you'll battle abominable snowmen, the undead (in both zombie and mummy forms), oversized crustaceans, insects, and plants, as well as a decent cross-section of aliens. As you run, swim, and fly from the left to the right, you'll fight some seriously ridiculous enemies. None of this really comes across in the game, though, which comes across as rather humorous as you send your soldiers up a vicious and nearly endless stream of enemies.
#Arcade metal slug 3 manual#
However, when taking it out of its native arcade environment and bringing it to a home console, SNK has made some specific choices that make this already challenging game difficult to a fault.ĭo not approach Metal Slug 3 unless you are prepared for a serious challenge.Īmazingly, the manual for Metal Slug 3 reveals an absurdly serious backstory concerning a series of wars, alien experiments, and weirdly specific details regarding internal backbiting within military subdivisions. From a technical standpoint, this is a superb version of Metal Slug 3, and in some respects, it's even better than the original. Metal Slug 3, which has just been ported to the Xbox, may be a 4-year-old arcade game, but if you've never experienced the unique Metal Slug brand of frantic side-scrolling action, it's probably one of the freshest, most exciting games to hit the Xbox in a while. While most have traded in their hand-animated sprites and parallax-scrolling environments for rag-doll physics and pixel shaders, SNK has remained a diligent practitioner of 2D gaming and has continued to cultivate a passionate following for it.
#Arcade metal slug 3 portable#
In 2004, it's kind of odd to see a 2D video game that's not being presented on some sort of portable device.