Is Metal Slug SNK’s most beloved series? It is in my eyes. It stands above the fighters and other 2D masterpieces as one of the few 2D series that I will be able to play for the rest of my life. Of course there’s the oddities, such as Slug 3D, and the weaker sequels such as 4 and 5, but overall, there’s nearly unlimited replayability across the many entries that span the Saturn, Neo Geo, Neo Geo Pocket, GBA, PSX, PS2, and soon to be Wii (did I miss any systems?).

Though I didn’t get to spend too much time with the latest in the series: Metal Slug 6 (recently released on the import PS2), what I did experience was good old Slug action; crisp, clean graphics; and tight controls. There’s 6 selectable characters this time around, 2 popping in from SNK’s old school Ikari Warriors, and each character has stats that better suit them say for straight up power or taking out slugs, among others. I didn’t yet get to test out the various characters in depth and simply played a bit with Fio.

Some surface things I noticed: you now can hold 2 weapons and can switch between them on the fly AND when you die (notice I didn’t say if!), you save the weapon that wasn’t being used. As for difficulty, there’s easy and hard. Good old Japan, never one to hand us the ending. I forsee a lot of work to master this on hard, and of course no one would dare play this on easy. At least they wouldn’t admit it in a blog

There’s also a new power meter that builds as you take out bad guys. Once it reaches max, you get a couple seconds of beastly firepower before it resets. I didn’t explore the other game mechanics in my brief time last night, so I’m excited to see what else SNK has up its sleeves.

The missions themselves branch very nicely and contain a lot of detail in the foreground and background as is usual for the series. There’s a polish here though that I didn’t notice with earlier entries, no doubt attributed to the new system the game runs on. Early reports suggest that the port is faithful and honestly, even though the game is still low res and looks only slightly better on an HD set than its predecessors, it shines in good old low res RGB or heck, in s-video/interlaced component as well–one of the many reasons to still hold on to those old Commodore monitors and interlaced sets.

I know these impressions are pretty barebones, but as I play it more through the weekend, I plan to post more thoughts to see how it stacks up to my favorites: 1, X, and 3.

-Andrew