Okay so I am a HUGE Neo Geo/SNK nerd to the point that I own 2 home systems and several Neo arcade cabinets. This being said I of course love Metal Slug. The MS series is a 2D fan's wet dream. Great animation, arcade action and awesome humor. Metal Slug 3 is my favorite in the series. It is hard to explain but there are just so many "wow moments". Turning into a zombie and projectile vomiting blood to clear the screen, the vertical shooter section of the last mission, all the awesome weapons (THUNDER CLOUD!) and so many other things. Even though I own the game on the Neo I still bought it for live arcade for online co-op. So what do I find when I download the game and fire up a co-op game with my man CronosBlade......

Rant on

....... God damn fucking laziness that is what I found.

First of all there is graphics smoothing. This is fine lots of games have this SOTN, Contra and others. The difference is these games have the option to turn it the fuck off. Kind of lazy huh devs.

The online play was less than optimal. It wasn't unplayable but over broadband this is unacceptable. I can play a pretty solid match of Virtua Fighter 4 the "devs" should be able to get this right.

Previous ports of Slug 3 had mission select so I just assumed this would. Nope sure didn't.

The last and worst sin of all is that the game is fucking censored. You heard me right. When you shoot the enemy a little white splatter shoots out. Of course the splatter should be red blood. The zombie projectile blood vomit is still there, being eaten alive by plants is still there, but no god damned blood from bullets. You might ask "why the fuck would they do that?" Well it isn't what they did it is what they didn't do. Many U.S. home versions of Neo Geo games had some censorship MS3 was one of them. It was easy to get around this - by having a Japanese system or getting your system modded so you could switch the region. So the lazy ass fucks at SNK Playmore just dumped the code of the English home version of the game and didn't change this. Even though they could have used one of the other ports that has blood. FUCK!

Rant off

Listen the beauty of Metal Slug is much more than blood from bullets and mission select. It is just this lazy dumping of a great game really sucks. I am still going to play the hell out of it with friends online. Just last night with Cronos we ended up taking a path I hadn't played in years. I'd also still recommend the game to someone that has no other way to play it.

Man I am nervous as fuck about Samurai Shodown II on XBLA.