Metal Slug 7 (DS)

If you don’t know Metal Slug yet, I’d suggest getting acquainted with it right now.  The games are basically like those wonderful B-movies that should be horrible, and you know they should be horrible, and you feel horrible because you enjoy them so damn much.  As much as you want to tell yourself that this is mindless and low-culture, you are just having too much of a good time to care.  The game is just too charmingly self-aware to get mad at it for any of its faults.  I mean, the soldiers’ screams are hilarious, and the violence is so ridiculously over-the-top that it’s more funny than gruesome to blow apart enemies with a shotgun.

Metal Slug 7 lives with Contra in the platformer/shooter vein of games, and like Contra, the one-hit KO is present for you, the good guy.  The difficulty of the game lies in taking on legions of soldiers without getting hit by anything.  Sure, the soldiers are mostly one-hit KO pushovers like you are, but the sheer amount of them mean that a few are bound to get a lucky shot or 5.  This really didn’t bother me until I realized the sheer amount of lives I was losing due to these small deaths.  This of course, led me to be nice juicy prey for Metal Slug’s ridiculous boss fights.  At the end of each level, you fight a boss, and the difficulty ranges from appropriate to I want to kick a puppy.  The level four boss’s nickname may as well be game over.

Metal Slug 7 brings a couple of changes to the series, one bad and a couple good.  I don’t know why they decided to leave two-player co-op out of the final product; I loved playing the game with someone alongside me.  But to compensate for this, SNK gave each soldier a unique ability.  Fio carries a heavy machine gun always, Eri gets extra grenades, Tarma is the best person in a metal slug, etc.  In addition, you can carry two special weapons in addition to your standard handgun.  This helps level out some of the difficulty, but as I said, some things just cannot stop those bosses.  As far as porting it to the DS goes, the only noticeable difference lies in the smaller screen; some of the wonderful detail is admittedly lost from the game.  It is very easy to overlook this, though, when the character is moving

I love the Metal Slug series, and here I got to play it anywhere I went.  That alone gives this more than a recommendation from me.