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Review : Metal Slug Anthology for Wii
For the past two weeks I have been rocking out to SNK Playmore's Metal Slug Anthology for Wii. It is a pixel perfect collection of all the Metal Slug arcade games in one Nintendo Wii disk.
It's got Metal Slug 1, 2, X, 3,4,5 that were made for the original NeoGeo hardware and this collection is the only US way to play Metal Slug 6 that was developed using the newer Atomiswave arcade hardware developed by Sega/Sammy. It is awesome to see that MSG 6 really took advantage of the more powerful processors, bigger color pallet and more RAM than the now classic but really old NeoGeo hardware. This collection has all the Metal Slug games with the exception of Metal Slug Mission 1 and 2 for NeoGeo Pocket and Metal Slug Advance for Gameboy Advance.
For those of you who do not know Metal Slug is a series of side scrolling 2d combat game like Konami's Contra but with insane comical sprite art and manic action that blows across the screen. This collection is rated T for Teen and I was overjoyed to see that all the blood is still red and all the gratuitous death animations are still there. The jackboots still wave their arms in the air and cry out as they get roasted with our hero's flamethrower. When one of the little guys are shot they scream and slump over in an elaborate animation with spurting blood. It is a pleasant but sadistic departure from the old games where the bad guys would just flash and disappear when shot. Metal Slug is one of the best 2 player cooperation games out there.
On six of the games you can save your progress at any time and the loading time is minimal and quick. There is a gallery containing music, Art collection and an interview with the artists that can be unlocked with tokens earned from beating the games. I was glad to see that there was unlimited credits enabled so you can put in virtual quarter after virtual quarter in order to keep playing after your little dudes get blown away. I know that seams like a little thing but arcade collections for home console can suck if they don't allow you to put in unlimited money. I mean I bought the cart and that should give me the right to use as many damn coins to continue as I want damn it! There was no option to use progressive scan but it looked great at 480i and I have to hit "Aspect" on my HDTV to get the screen back to 4:3 aspect so the sprite graphics do not display stretched out.
Now most of the Metal Slug games use a regular joystick with three to four buttons so there is a wide variety of control schemes to play it on the Wii. The Wiimote has a control pad and two sets of two buttons (A and B vs 1 and 2) but rather than allowing you customize and tweak all the controls they have a number of preset control layouts. The hardest part was throwing grenades by flicking the controller. I would have rather had the option of using a Z button on the nunchuk or the A,B,1 or 2 button on the Wiimote. The tilt control option was pretty much useless. However the best method of playing the game is by connecting a Gamecube controller and using it. Unfortunately they only let you use the analog joystick on the Gamecube pad so you can't use the SNES style Hori Gameboy Player gamepad with the game. That is lame. But my biggest complaint with the controls is that you can't use the Nintendo Wii Classic Controller with this game. I mean what the hell??!?! This game would be absolutely perfect for the Classic controller. The Gamecube controller is the only method of playing the games that was passable and all good Wii players should have at least two Gamecube pads around for playing Soul Calibur 2 or Godzilla : Destroy All Monsters Melee so it should not be a problem.
If we were lucky SNK Playmore will use the research and technology that they developed for this title and release collections of NeoGeo games. I would love to see compilation of King of Monsters, Samurai Showdown, Magician Lord, and King of Fighters on the Wii.
This is an awesome collection of seven modern classics of 2D gaming for a reasonable price of 40 bucks. That works out to about six bucks a game and that is a bargain considering you are getting a kick ass NeoGeo game for less than a price of a Sega Genesis/Megadrive or Super Nintendo game for the Wii Classic Console. Nintendo really has a perfect opportunity to encourage more collections of on retro 2D games and build the existing on the Virtual Console marketplace. Considering that the Wii only has 512 Megs of internal memory and that Virtual Console games can't be played directly off a SD memory card a Wii DVD disk is a perfect format for large masterpieces of sprite graphics such as Metal Slug. It looks like Nintendo is totally cool with 2D games on the Wii. They are clearly not going to be the anti-2d fascists that Sony of America has been when they prevented NeoGeo games to be published on the PSOne and PS2. However Sony is going to allow Metal Slug Anthology to be published for the PSP. This collection jives with the number of great 2D games on the Nintendo DS, Gameboy Advance and Wii Virtual Console platforms. Does this game show off the 3d power or weird innovative interface of the Wii? Nope, not at all. But more importantly it shows that Nintendo is open to all forms of good games being developed and published on the Wii.
Jake at January 8, 2007 
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Comments
Good review... Concise and well-written. I agree with you about the classic controller 100%.
Posted by: Boyd at January 8, 2007 4:12 PM
how do i play 2 player on metal slug on wii
Posted by: josh at March 17, 2008 3:12 AM
