Then again, a bit of practice reveals that the Metal Slug series isn’t quite the hostile coin-guzzler it first appears to be.

Enemies are wont to attack from all angles and at ferocious speed, and the lack of real estate on the screen means you’re constantly fighting bosses and waves of attack at close-quarters, meaning you have mere fractions of a second to avoid incoming fire or a killer blow. Even with all those weapons, plus your character’s ability to fire in multiple directions as you hop nimbly about the screen, Metal Slug can feel brutally unforgiving for the uninitiated. The relatively large size of the characters, plus the heavily embellished visuals, create an oddly claustrophobic feel in the Metal Slug games, which is something you’ll either find off-putting or part of their manic appeal.

It’s a run-and-gunner in the mould of Rolling Thunder and Contra, but with the action cranked up to an absurd extreme: early games featured great armies of hapless soldiers and super-deformed hardware for the player to either mow down or commandeer, but by Metal Slug 3, the grey-and-brown military palette had expanded to include a broader colour palette and a dazzling array of strange enemies. In many respects, this side-scrolling shooter from SNK, first developed for the Neo-Geo MVS, represents the artform’s pinnacle: the character designs are beautifully rendered and stunningly animated, every frame packed with care, incidental detail and humour.īy 2000, the Metal Slug franchise was already four years old, and Metal Slug 3 continued its comically violent tradition. All of which brings us to Metal Slug 3, an artefact from pixel art’s dying days in the year 2000. Looking back, it’s startling just how quickly pixel graphics evolved from cheerfully blocky Space Invaders to the detailed, anime-style combatants in the Street Fighter II games of the late 90s. Long before virtual reality, way before textured polygons and anisotropic filtering and enhanced subpixel morphological processing, games were largely comprised of big, blocky pixels, each one carefully put in place by hand. A thousand years from now, when we’ve all been uploaded to a giant computer somewhere, archaeologists will term the late 20th century as the BP epoch – Before Polygons.

Metal slug nintendo switch