It is an emulated port with custom graphical frontend. This is something that you can get for free, but this is your chance to get it legally, especially if it is on discount. As for the game itself, it is exemplary shooter! Nice hand drawn graphics, lots of animation frames, great sounds, excellent music, great action, even better overall atmosphere! Could be better if SNK did conversion of this game, add some HD material and improve controlling scheme a bit. Controlling is a bit clunky, but the arcade version has the same problem (I spent hours and hours on arcade and problem is persistent there as well). Luckily, first Metal Slug does not require such advanced reflexes. Other Metal Slugs have this problem solved as those games are quite challenging.
Let's first clear one thing: This is XCOM like game, but it is not a XCOM! It is a lite version of xcom. If you start rating the game without comparing it to the xcom, you might start to like it. Yes it has some of the XCOM's mechanics but most of those are just washed down to simplify the game. You are commanding remains of humanity in an attempt to re-take Earth from alien invaders. You do that, by undergoing set of missions which involves: capturing bases, capturing aliens for examination and exploring groudned UFOs. In between the missions, you will manage your bases, train people, research new technologies, adapt alien technologies and hunt for UFOs. There is not that much variety what you can do but you will quickly get the grip what you need to do. Tactical missions are done as real-time strategy with option to pause the game to plan your move correctly. It is crucial that you plan your movements until you get it. If some mission seems to difficult, you can always retreat, research/develop new equipment, change tactic, do some other missions to level up and then, try again. Basically, there are no big pentalties in this game, which might be appeling to some demographic. However, I wished that tactical part is done without annoying reselection of your squads as soon as they spot alien and possiblity to quick group members in your squad. Manual states that quick group are possible, but it simply does not work!! And foolish system where you almost always need to cancel whole unit orders (by pressing 'c') if you want to modify current ones, will drive you mad. If you want a xcom game, then skip this one. It really has nothing of the complexity of the original and whole game seems almost linear, while xcom offered you much much more freedom. Still, xcom complexity and age might turn unpatient so this game is probably for those people. If you haven't played xcom, you can try UFO:Aftermath. After that, try XCOM to see what have you been missing all these years...
This is an excellent game!!!! I was not aware of this game at all!! I only saw that it sits in my gog account unused with some uninteresting cover picture. I thought that this was one of those 3-day development game for kids. But nooooooooooo, I was so wrong!!!! GREAT GAME!! Once you start playing it, you will be suck into the world of islands. Mix of old school Castelvania and Metriod is beyond good here. You go, collect items to unlock new areas, fight interesting bosses and collect treasures (like in Zelda games). 8-bit style graphics adds to its charm. If you have played any of above mentioned games, you will immediately feel at home. This is a game of nostalgic players who grew up playing such games. Worth checking out, since that it is free. Thing that could be improved: Well, final boss fight could have been more difficult, considering that previous bosses were epic.
I never played first MDK when I was young, but I sure have played MDK2 which was an excellent game! This game is excellent and fun!! Although graphics are quite outdated it is impressive to see such a fast-passed action in those days. Snipping is excellent (although it would help if you could walk and move your scope left and right at the same time), and the atmosphere is crazy and something that you will not see everywhere. Yup, craziness is Shinny's trademark. Only real problem is that the game is too short... First 3 levels are quite easy and you will probably finish them in one seating. Fourth and five are quite challenging, which forces you to use your items more sparingly, to plan your movement and to stick with sniper as much as you can. Too bad, that as soon as you get a grip of control and style, you reach level 6 which is the arena fight after which the game ends. Someone definitely needs to remake this game with modern graphics, adopt controls from MDK2 (which perfected Kurt's movement), add more levels and more narrative between them. I would definitely pay for such game.
I haven't played first sequel of the game, but this one is a terrific puzzle game! It reminds me on boulder dash from commodore 64 (or supaplex on pc), but it is more biased towards the logic and thinking, less on reflexes. It gives you enough challenges and motivation to keep going until the very last end. Unfortunately, there are some serious bugs that has to be addressed. First, square click detection is bad. You click on one square and psychobot moves or takes block from the square that is adjacent to one you actually clicked even if you clicked square dead center. Considering that squares are quite large enough, it is still not clear how click detection is so bad. Second, undo feature is horrible! It works fine for the first levels, but as you progress it gets quite buggy that sometimes you have to restart the level all over. Blocks that you collected and destroyed later (tnt or burnt wood) are not at your disposal when you do undo (psychobot does throwing animation but there is no block from him) so you have to click on undo until you reach point when you first collected blocks. Not to mention that undo can get you in the situation that is impossible. Sometimes you can even cheat with undo feature. Game deserves plain 5 stars, but gameplay is ruined in later stages because of these. I hope that authors will patch the game soon.
