When you lose all your lives, the game starts you at the beginning of the level. Sure, in its original arcade and SNK home console incarnations you could feed credits at will and continue where you died without penalty, but SNK made the Xbox port a little harder. It's not a game you can plow through in a night. Players expecting a facile quarter-muncher will experience their own epiphany: Metal Slug 3 is hard. Where progress is earned, not given, the player appreciates the game and his own skill more than he would if he simply fed credit after credit, plowing his way through by attrition. They are not easily obtained, but they are the most satisfying part of learning to play a challenging, well-designed game. They are the fruit of careful experimentation and observation. It was a true 2D epiphany.Įpiphanies like these come only after playing a particular stretch of difficult gaming over and over again. With good timing, you can trick the choppers back and forth just enough so that you know what direction they will fire, and then step out of the way. As you pass under a chopper, it turns, indicating the direction in which it will fire (diagonal left, straight down, diagonal right). I was damned if I jumped, damned if I didn't, and I began to despair.Īnd then I made a crucial discovery. But I couldn't jump their shots without simultaneously dodging the chopper fire, and I died once again. Then I focused on the choppers, jumping the soldiers' fire as I aimed. No dice: the helicopters carved me up with their incessant hail of chubby red bullets. At first, I focused my attack on the wagon. At the far end of the screen was a covered wagon carrying a bottomless supply of armed soldiers.
Two helicopters circled overhead, spewing machine gun bursts.