


So are the attack choppers from Metal Slug 2, and most all of the tanks, jeeps, airplanes, and personnel carriers from all the previous games. All the soldiers who appeared in previous games, including the riot-shield-bearing soldiers, the riflemen, the knife grunts, and the ones who like to stand around and laugh at you when you die, are all back in the game. It's not hard to tell that Metal Slug 4 reuses a lot of the graphics, characters, effects, and animations from the previous game, but at least the developers seem to have tried to put in every possible enemy and vehicle. Instead, much like in the original Metal Slug, you'll fight only enemy soldiers and a wide variety of enemy vehicles.

Metal Slug 4 doesn't seem to have any of these strange enemies to fight. Metal Slug 4 seems like something of a return to the original Metal Slug game, before the series went, as some fans put it, "all crazy." Metal Slug 2, Metal Slug X, and Metal Slug 3 all had completely bizarre enemies, including aliens, mummies, and zombies. In the active roster, Tarma and Eri are replaced by two fresh-faced youngsters, the white-haired Trevor and the bubble-gum-blowing Nadia. However, Tarma and Eri are still on active duty, and they'll appear at the end of each mission (and sometimes in the middle of some missions) to wave you on to the next area or congratulate you for a job well done. Although the original headband-wearing hero Marco Rossi and the bespectacled Metal Slug 2 heroine Fio Germi both return as playable characters, their comrades Tarma Roving and Eri Kasamoto do not. However, Metal Slug 4 has a different cast of characters. As in the previous games, you can't aim your weapon diagonally while running-you can fire only up, down, back, or forward, though just like in previous games, several vehicles can fire in all directions. Metal Slug 4 is developed by newcomer Mega Enterprise and has much of the same look and the same exact control scheme that the previous games have in the series-button A fires your normal weapon, B jumps, C tosses a grenade, and D isn't used. This includes Metal Slug 4, the latest game in SNK's side-scrolling shooter not unlike Konami's Contra, whose unique combination of cartoonlike characters, highly detailed animation, and intense, sometimes gritty firefights have made it an arcade favorite. Though the original developer of the Metal Slug arcade series and the arcade hardware is no longer around, publisher Playmore has succeeded SNK as the publisher and distributor of all new games on the classic NeoGeo arcade hardware.
