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For those of us that absolutely loved Konami's Contra and its sequels, seeing the original Metal Slug in arcades in 1996 was like finding an all-new game in the series. Metal Slug took all of the classic elements from Contra, added several new gameplay twists, pumped up the violence level, and made old-school gamers like myself deliriously happy in the process. Even after three sequels, one remix of Metal Slug 2 (entitled Metal Slug X), and two handheld games for the Neo-Geo Pocket Color, the original is still looked at as being one of the greatest 2-D games to come out in recent years. Naturally, ports of the game to other systems was inevitable. Sure enough, SNK ported Metal Slug to both the Sony PlayStation and the Sega Saturn in 1996. The downside? Like most other 2-D games at the time, they stayed in Japan. To my knowledge, one company (I believe it was Working Designs, but I may be wrong) did have plans to bring Metal Slug to the U.S. PlayStation sometime in 1997, but these plans fell through.

The story of the PlayStation version of Metal Slug is the same as the Neo-Geo. PF Squad heroes Marco Rossi and Tarma Roving must embark on a dangerous mission to destroy General Morden, who is out to take over the world with an army of Nazi soldier lookalikes sometime in the near future. Luckily they have some form of protection besides the usual array of armaments - the Super Vehicle-001 Metal Slug. This versatile tank, which resembles the tank Bonaparte from the classic anime series Dominion Tank Police, is a life saver - more on this later.

On the surface, Metal Slug is your standard side-scrolling run-n-gun game, similar to Contra, Gun Force, Sunset Riders and a host of others that came out in the late '80s and early '90s. Go from left to right, obliterating enemy soldiers and vehicles, gather items and powerups, and destroy the huge boss waiting for you at the end of each stage. It's execution and style were what made it unique, though. The graphics and animation were second to none. The amount of detail Nazca (the design team that created Metal Slug for SNK) put into the game alone is incredible. Every screen is literally jammed full of all sorts of little graphic touches, from noninteractive characters to the absolutely gigantic bosses. Also, the enemy soldiers (who are usually just mindless robots in this kind of game) have personalities. They point and laugh at you when you die, some tiptoe into the screen and then chuck grenades at you, they dive off of sinking ships and swim away - and when they're lit on fire with a burst from a flamethrower, they scream in agony and run around until they're nothing but charred corpses.

Both Marco and Tarma initially start the game carrying pistols with unlimited ammo and ten grenades. You can get additional armaments (like I mentioned previously) as the game goes on. These can be gathered by freeing P.O.W.s that are imprisoned in various places throughout the game. The armaments they drop come in many flavors: among them the heavy machine gun, rocket launcher, flamethrower, and shotgun. These consume ammo, and must continuously be replenished. Occaisonally the P.O.W.s will drop ammo refills, more grenades (the icon doubles as additional shells for the Metal Slug) and various extra point icons (teddy bears, envelopes and so on). Every so often, destroyed enemy vehicles will drop extra point icons as well. At the end of each level, the P.O.W.s that you saved are added to your total point tally along with the Metal Slug if it hasn't been destroyed. If you get killed, though, you lose your accumulated P.O.W. count and your current weapon, as well as any extra grenades you may be carrying.

Now, about the Metal Slug itself. You encounter it at several points in the game, at which point you can either hop inside of it (just like the tanks in SNK's earlier game Guerilla War) or keep going without it. The Metal Slug has two side mounted blaster cannons that can be rotated a full 360 degrees, and one center cannon that fires explosive shells. It can take three hits before it's destroyed - however, at any time before the third hit you have the option of using it as a kamikaze weapon. I guess it's not really a kamikaze in the strictest sense of the word, as Marco and Tarma will jump out of it as it takes off, but the general concept is still there. The Metal Slug can jump as well, which is kind of surprising for a tank of its size.

The PlayStation version is remarkably close to the Neo-Geo original. All six stages from the original are present, the music is the same (and quite good to boot), it controls just as well and the placement of items, P.O.W.s and everything else is exact. However, even though the PlayStation is a higher-powered system (32 bits compared to the Neo-Geo's 24 bits), in several ways the PlayStation version is inferior. Technically speaking, the Neo-Geo is an arcade machine, and the PlayStation isn't. Most consoles these days could handle a direct port of the original game without breaking a sweat, but the PlayStation was a different story. The machine has never handled 2-D games all that well - Sony did design it to function best with 3-D games rather than 2-D games, and this is evident with the absolutely horrible load times that Metal Slug has. The game will actually stop in the middle of a level to load up the next part! There was also no way the PlayStation could handle all of the different frames of animation that the Neo-Geo game had either, so some animation routines had to be cut.

Metal Slug, despite this version's flaws, is still a great game. Not all 2-D games on the PSX have to go through such horrible loading times, as evidenced by Metal Slug X. It was released for the PlayStation in 2000, and the loading is kept to a minimum. It just goes to show what programmers that are more familiar with the system's ins and outs can do... obviously the programmers at SNK had four years between Metal Slug and Metal Slug X to learn what the system can do, and it shows in Metal Slug X. Still, if you're looking for a decent port of Metal Slug this will suffice - if you can deal with the load times, you'll be set. However, if you have a Saturn and a 4 meg cart, you'd be better off tracking down the Metal Slug port that SNK released at the same time as the PSX port, as it's much closer to the Neo-Geo game than the PSX version is - especially in the loading department.

- Rob