/vr/ - Retro Games

>>10473817
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.