Metal Slug Anthology: PSP versus Wii

By Katie . March 23, 2007 . 6:51pm

For some of the same reasons that SNK’s King of Fighters series is ostensibly, erm, the king of fighters, Metal Slug, the specialty developer’s other sweetheart since 1996, rules the lonely roost of the run ‘n gun genre and occulted action games at large. The lines’ unparalleled visual style, alien probe-related humor, and unmitigated difficulty have for years attracted fans of controller-abuse and arcade machine vandalism from all reaches of the gaming underground. The bigger and more recent news, the re-releasing of Metal Slugs 3, 4, and 5 and 6 in various combinations across just as many platforms, have made some noise for a long-quiet front in today’s clamoring market.

But now, now’s the time for you fish-bellied holdouts to finally bite – Metal Slug Anthology is on the line, and it brings every single one of its war-waging brethren – numbers 1, 2, X, 3, 4, 5 and 6 – and plenty of cutting-room floor material to the PSP in one package.

Purchase at Play-Asia

Here’s why to try: few other games, and not even most animated movies – even the CG kind – can claim as fluid or as cogent an aesthetic as Metal Slug’s. The genius of its 24-bit backbone, which is teensy-weensy by today’s standards, lies almost solely in one fact and one fact alone: that despite the scripted nature of each soldier, armored car, dive-bombing plane, and myriad other foes, their frames are so many and so finely drawn that each eyeful seems like a spontaneous, one of a kind moment in time, no matter how many more times a soldier pumps water from a sinking boat, or roasts a chicken on a spit, or kicks back in a lawn chair while reading a newspaper. Unlike some games whose notoriously over-swapped palettes compensate for lack of variety, and whose main characters look suspiciously more alive than the rest, no death pose seen a billion times or cry heard just as many can remind you that MS is a limited, old game. Not only are no corners cut in the programming, but everything is just… so natural.

There’s really no other game quite like Metal Slug – putting it in the rare breed of Contra- and Gunstar Heroes-caliber run ‘n guns but not playing a lot like them – and the mock World War aesthetic takes it to beautifully untouched territory. But one decision still remains: for which system am I to buy? For folks who stick by their Sony PSPs and haven’t sprung for a Nintendo Wii, the question might better be posed – can the portable really hold its own given the demands of the bustling interface, let alone of ALL SEVEN games?

In answer, we’ll go over a representative handful of games and see how well they stand up on the PSP compared to the recent – and might I add, interminably faithful – Wii versions.

Lead-up to the Mode Menu, and In-game Menus:

Believe it or not, the opening screens provide a sour first taste of the performance discrepancies to come between the PSP and Wii releases of Metal Slug Anthology. On PSP, a semi-excruciating load time between company logo, splash screens, opening video and title means it takes about, I’d say, 20 seconds to arrive at the Mode Menu, no two ways about it. This isn’t so bad as a gateway to such gargantuan goodness, but then there’s the Mode Menu itself… something looks funny. On the Wii, the rumbling tank in the fore, the marauding soldiers behind, and the inset in the above-left that plays gameplay footage for your currently-selected game all look as frame-filled as the games themselves. But on the PSP, a choppier reality exists – and the tank bullet doesn’t make sound when it fires. A shady omen of delayed or non-existent sounds to come? Yeah.

Which brings us to the point of the character select screens in games after 1. How does one put this tactfully? My grandma knits sweaters faster than the time Metal Slug Anthology takes to LOAD when you tab from Marco to Eri (they’re the first two, by the way, and they’re always neighbors – getting to Fio requires a bathroom break). Same thing when you die – better just choose a character you like and stay with him or her, especially in the cases where they have different strengths (games 5 and 6, I believe). And you never really notice a sound effect’s impact until it follows 3 seconds after you’ve pushed a button.

All said, I really think SNK should have lightened the load(ing) for the sluggish little UMD drive by under-hauling all that crap out of the main menu. They added in nice perks, like wallpapers and downloadable music tracks for your PSP browser and probably for your computer via USB transfer, so they could’ve afforded a more streamlined set up. Maybe then the games wouldn’t take a full five winks to pause, either.

Control ‘Con’-parison:

The many faces of the wiimote caused quite a stir when the Anthology was originally announced on its native system. People thought they were going to have to flick the controller to throw a grenade, and laughed at so tacked-on-sounding a prospect. But in reality, the configurations on Wii allow for almost whatever’s your pleasure: sideways, two-handed, flicky… ahem. What I mean is, it turned out fine.

Now see, a portable just can’t take the Fire button-mashing treatment like a console can for a number of reasons. Main one being, that when you have to pound the hell out of that Fire button, your whole hand is apt to shake, and when your hand shakes, so does the screen. The stiff PSP buttons, and the fact that they don’t always seem to prompt a reaction from hardware so strained while running MSA, lead to some unnecessary deaths. You can turn on rapid-fire, but that’s for wusses and people who value their carpals, yeah?

My demand is simple: no more mashing on handhelds.

Now for the games!

Metal Slug:

The harbinger of a dynasty. Metal Slug is a shorter and gentler challenge than the rest – as gentle as one-hit kills, hulking metal behemoths, and hails of bullets can be. Singing shades of Contra in its vertical scrolling stages and even Double Dragon with its Abobo-like midboss Alan, it’s also a little more familiar to the average old-school flunky. But the finer things in life are here in spades, too, like shooting up support girders, storefronts and cliff faces until they collapse in debris-spewing explosions, usually trailing a tank or two in their wake. Knife-wielding kamikazes rain from the skies in a case of stab or be stabbed, providing a quick lesson for the uninitiated that guns can’t always solve your problems in the Metal Slug universe. For 1996, the animation is sublime and the music hard-hitting, and the wild array of weapons – including Flame Shot, Shotgun, Drop Shot, and Heavy Machine Gun – and enemies that this edition begat were to become the signature marks of all Metal Slug games.

This is the Pro-PSP moment for the article. This game runs without a hitch in widescreen, original pixels, or 4:3 aspect ratio sizes. Being the earliest, this should come as no surprise, but with the lack of frills like selectable characters destined to come in later, it’s also too bad this is the only unaffected port. The Wii version, naturally, does just as well.

Metal Slug 3:

Some say, with the utmost deference and eloquence, that Metal Slug 3 is the ‘good one’. Well, it’s probably not my personal favorite – too whacky, with its departure from recognizable locales to giant crab-infested beaches, zombie-infested alien crash-sites, and um, pretty much any place infested with anything – but it certainly is the most flamboyant. Getting turned into a mummy in X was one thing, but now you too can be a corpse-blue, leg-dragging, and blood-barfing zombie, not to mention a submarine-piloting tamer of giant eels named Wendy.

For all its razzle-dazzle in Wii (and Xbox) incarnations alike, MS3 suffers at the peaks of its excellence on the PSP, like at the Giant Crab boss of Mission 1. What should be a pixel-by-pixel-perfect rampage of destruction on the part of a bridge demolishing, iron-shelled Hermit is instead a belabored and unimpressive stop-motion montage when so much as one round goes flying. Sad, really. I haven’t gone through all the paths, but I assume Wendy lunges out of her cave-wall cage on the Wii a lot more smoothly than on PSP, too.

Metal Slug 6:

The first couple of levels in MS6 are especially rapacious effects-mongers, with the biggest nod going to the scaling in the walker sequence and in the downhill boss fight of Mission 2. While the Wii edition is innocent of any charges to its technical performance, the PSP port suffers a good deal of slowdown, pixelation, and microscopic sprite syndrome here. But put on your patient face – it’ll blow over once you blow these suckers up.

One thing that doesn’t seem to improve, mind you, is the ever-present threat of untimely in-game loading. In fact, the last 2-D Metal Slug game is jam-packed with such intense sprite-play that crossing some kind of buffer point and getting caught in the resulting loading limbo for even a moment is inexcusably disruptive. Not since Golden Axe (that’s 1989, people) have I come to such a staggering stop because some big baddie was about to appear – and that’s not even always the case here. Could be because I was riding the ‘Mule Slug’ and hauling a cannon-carriage amidst an army of tanks and infantry, but one pays a hefty price in time that they don’t on the Wii (and probably wouldn’t on the Neo Geo, for that matter). However, perseverance is key in any edition of Metal Slug, so persevere I did – and just as the later levels tone down the spectacular factor, so too do they lose those nasty hang-ups a bit.

And so, the ruling: while quite playable and enjoyable thanks to the base material, it takes everything Metal Slug has to shine through the marring process that was its port to PSP. The Wii version may not be a good traveling companion, but if you insist on gunning on the go, I recommend you get both so as not to miss out on the full splendor of SNK’s finest hour.

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