Metal Slug Anthology

There is a small joke buried in this collection's menu: Metal Slug 2 and Metal Slug X sit next to each other, and X exists almost entirely because 2 ran so badly. SNK's 1998 sequel was gorgeous and technically overreaching, and the Neo Geo hardware answered by grinding to a crawl every time three grenades and a rebel tank shared the screen. X was the apology, a rebuilt version with retuned enemy placement and a stable frame rate. Having both here lets you watch a studio correct its own homework.

The seven games span 1996 to 2006, and the arc is legible if you play them in order. The first is compact and mean, built around the conceit that a giant metal tank is a disposable pickup rather than a reward. By 3 the branching routes, mid-mission mutations and absurd twenty-minute final stage had turned the series into something closer to an endurance test with jokes. 4 and 5 are the weaker middle, made after the original Nazca team had largely scattered, and 5 in particular feels cut short. 6 came from Atomiswave hardware and brought back Ralf and Clark from Ikari Warriors, along with a weapon-swapping system that finally admitted players wanted to hold onto the heavy machine gun.

What still holds is the animation. Every soldier dies differently, every explosion is drawn rather than simulated, and the frames-per-sprite budget on these games remains absurd by any generation's standards. The hostages still salute. The prisoners still hand you sunglasses.

The PS2 conversion is the compromised one. Load times between missions are longer than they have any business being on a disc-based system emulating cartridge games, and the compilation carries over the arcade habit of dumping you back to a menu rather than flowing between titles. Two players can share a screen locally, which is the correct way to play any of these, though it also means both of you burning through the infinite continues that strip out whatever difficulty curve the coin-op original had.

As an archive object it does the essential job: it puts the whole run in one place at a moment when most of these titles were otherwise locked to hardware nobody owned. As a way to actually play Metal Slug, it asks you to wait a lot for something that was designed to start in three seconds and take your quarter in ninety.