Metal Slug Defence (iOS)

Watch her hat when you hit the screen...

Normally, I don't like this kind of game. You know the type, the Tower Defence games. Or Defence games in general. The idea for the most part that you can put down a few items without really knowing your opponents and hope that somehow, what you made and placed will be perfectly suited to kill the enemies of which you have no clue as to how many there are, nor what they have, nor what they can do. Some might argue "That's the point" or "That's what war is like" I would to take this moment to respond that for the most part, it's very unfulfilling and bores me to the point that I want to puke BLOOD in your faces! Having said that, I gave Metal Slug Defence a shot because I heard it was a little like Army of Darkness Defence and I quite enjoyed hearing Bruce Campbell sound bytes while playing.

It doesn't take long before the game becomes utter mayhem while you're spewing out units left and right

Let's get this straight first of all, you'll enjoy this game a LITTLE more if you're a fan of the Metal Slug series. It's got the graphics from the games, most of the characters and enemies and uses them all in a sort of rolling tower defence strategy.

How much? For how little?

The game itself runs on this basis, you get points by simply sitting there. When you've accrued enough points you can spend them on a unit to deploy, said unit then runs right until it gets to an enemy unit and then they fight. The loser dies, the winner goes on with reduced (usually) health until they die. You keep doing this until you're attacking their base (or they're attacking yours) and someone's base is blown up. Game over, move on.

He makes a return, he'll kill your units very quickly. Better pump out some more by now.

Progression through levels (of which there are 3-5 per area), will net bigger and bigger challenges, while gaining more and more in-game cash to spend on upgrades and improvements. There's also the Prisoners of War to rescue akin to the original series though they seem to be only found on chance when the game deems you've played enough to earn them. There might be conditions behind it but I'll be damned if I can work out what they are from here. In unlocking all the prisoners from an area you can gain boosts to specific units, to all units, to the rate at which you charge points, even down to just getting new units and items to use in battle.

So many units you really shouldn't buy. You don't need them.

Pointless items to get you to spunk money at the system. I've loads and paid for none as you win many in the game anyway.

Other nods to the game are the use of backgrounds from the games, key and recognisable bosses that have been fought across the series from the giant hermit crab to the aliens from the meteor, a giant robot with laser cannon eyes and even (almost as synonymous with the game as the main characters are) Mr "Come on, Boy" Allen O'Neil with his heavy machinegun and usual vocal insults. It reeks of nostalgia and it's loved for it.

The background is red, this is clearly hard mode now.

And that's it. However what this game does have, which a lot of similar games do not, is style. The added bonus to this kind of game is that each character has a special move which highlights even more of the series. Marco has his Heavy Machine Gun, Tarma has his Shotgun, Fio has a Rawket Lawncher (yes with the original odd accent) and Eri has a laser. Other weapons and units come in from various games including the Metal Slug Tank itself, an Ostrich with a gun mounted on its wing and an Elephant. Other units include virtually ALL the enemies but you're not going to get those straight away and I'll happily tell you as to why.

Another welcome return boss!

In-App Purchases. They're here and they don't exactly help. You win credits in the game, but stars are used to buy extra units and items to boost your abilities in the game. You can win SOME stars during the game but then these become more valuable than gold dust and by the time you've enough to get something really big like the giant tanks or walking crab monsters, you're likely upgraded enough to be able to one-shot most levels and bosses even on the hardest setting. There's a whole 2nd world at least (only played for a week, sod off) offering the same levels as before but with more P.O.Ws to rescue and harder enemies and bosses. Along with that, other bonuses too from beating the levels, new enemies to buy with REAL CASH stars and so on and so forth. But you can get to this point easily if you play through the older levels repeatedly until you unlock all the P.O.Ws, get their bonus effects and you can breeze most of the boss levels by that point in the harder worlds. The only annoying part is that you've got a Sortie points level that determines which levels you can do and each attempt costs points, but you regain one point every minute. A full refill costs about 30 stars... or you wait about 2 hours i.e. FOOADS, (Fuck Off Outside And Do Something).

Or play another time based waiting game.

...whoo

There is also a Vs Mode for people to play with friendly games and full rank versus games. The linking up is reasonable for the game itself, assuming people are still playing it by the time you get to play. You get to see what they're taking into the game from their deck of characters/soldiers/tanks and you play from your own point of the game onwards. Becomes amusing when you see what they focused on and what they actually bought and you're slapping the shit out of them with you game-won items rather than paying real cash and STILL WINNING, so I'm seeing even less of an incentive to pay for items I just destroyed while keeping all my cash-monies to blow on Jelly-Babies.

They're only memorable because they're weird.

It's good to play as a quick pick-up, as something you can come back to every now and then between work shifts, over lunch breaks etc and the multiplayer is fairly innocuous to the point of being a chuckle seeing how badly you're doing or how over powered you are compared to some other equally sad prick on the internet. It's an ok game with little depth but a lot of upgrade potential for those that want to get ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING marred by the flagrant abuse of the in-app purchases but the game itself is free (for now) perhaps if it was worth a little but had none of the in-app purchasing, I'd be more appreciative of this system and the dynamics of multiple units and the tactics behind those.

Nearly every original series, game enemy, makes an appearance here.

However it doesn't, so I'm not. An ok game that you'll get tired of eventually, likely before you beat everything and unlock everything.

Double Dragon (Arcade)

While not the first beat em up with depth (moving to the background and the foreground) Double Dragon is believed firmly to be the first co-operative playing beat-em-up. This is quite the break from tradition, previous games being of the 1 vs. 1, mano e mano, method of playing where two pointless characters stop everything to kick seven shades of shit out of each other. Or the brawling games known for having one character on a lone quest to stomp out several hundred other characters in the name of stomping for the sake of stomping.

Double Dragon, the great grand daddy of the brawling games. Featuring large sprites, scrolling levels and backgrounds, huge bosses (sometimes) and even a little cut scene at the start showing the motivation anyone needs for punching, kicking, whipping, baseball-batting, knifing, massive number of colour swap dudes to death (and a few dudettes); a woman gets punched and carried off. Can't think of a better reason myself to start a huge brawl against one of the possibly the largest gangs in the world with more members than McDonalds has workers.

The game's premise isn't exactly ground breaking and not something that hadn't been done before in games or films. One (or two, for the first time ever) man, conveniently colour coded in blue and red, sets out to avenge a woman by breaking skulls, legs, and generally beating to death every single thing in his way. Your method of executing this is the now oft recognised means of walking, punching, kicking, jumping, grabbing weapons and using these skills and abilities in a myriad of ways to overcome all obstacles in the protagonist’s way.

Unlike other incarnations of the same game, on different systems, you start out with full access to all your moves and abilities. You have the 8 directional movement, you have your punch button, kick button and jump button. A simple system yet the game allows for more involvement than just this. While you're walking up to enemies and punching and kicking them, repeated hits allow for bonus moves such as roundhouses and uppercuts. Jumping while attacking can give flying kicks, or reverse jump kicks if you're not moving. Double tapping a direction gives the well-known, head butt and use of both attacks at the same time performs the elbow smash which in itself, is a huge game-breaker if used to maximum exploitative means.

Enemies usually come at you in waves of 1 to 3 opponents at a time, bosses are either some HUGE guy(s) (called Abobo... go check the flash game out based on just him) or a very tough clone of the main characters. Or it's the final boss being a cheap bastard with a machinegun that can still be butchered with the same exploit moves. Having said that though, some of the boss set ups can be rather straining on the machine, particularly on the second level where there's a significant slow down as a result of the multiple enemies on the display.

Each level starts with the characters on the far left and progression is made by walking to the right, navigating occasionally ladders and pits which rather unfairly remove a whole life if you're dumb enough to walk into them or unfortunate enough to be throw/knocked into them. Once having walked right enough to run out of the appropriate level, the boss appears and attempts to kill you rather quickly. Interestingly for the game, once a level is beaten you actually are seen to move to the next section in an almost seamless progression before starting over on the right-walking once again.

Just to avoid too much monotony, certain enemies drop weapons or some levels feature extra items that can be used such as cardboard boxes (ow?...no I don't think so), barrels (that's more like it), or gifts like dynamite (who seriously brings dynamite to fight?) knives, baseball bats, whips and such. Each level providing more and more deadly traps from pitfalls at construction yards, broken bridges, walkways and being stabbed by statues or slammed by shifting bricks... yeah that last one is rather Indiana Jones and very much a break in the style of the game, serving as nothing more than a means to drain your coins and credits with heavily punishing damage from what seems to be dodgy collision detection and arbitrary "you're fucked" moves.

The difficulty ramps up exponentially through the game by the use of more awkward locations, the previously mentioned "fuck you" damages from level 5 and that every enemy increases in health for each level you progress. The supposed difficulty however is not from the challenge the enemy provides as each enemy fights the same way no matter what level they're on, it's a grind fest of damaging a health bar you can't see. Unlike games like Final Fight or Violent storm, there's no way of knowing how much damage you've caused to an individual in seeing if you've done 1 bar or 5 bars of injury, or if they're on 50 bars before you fight. As such, you've no way of seeing which moves are the most effective in killing your opponents. But if you're winning and surviving, that can be seen as a progression of sorts.

The co-operative aspect of the game, all depends upon how well your partner can play. While it's an idea to see someone getting beaten up and wanting to jump in and save them with a flurry of wild attacks, the game will register the attacks on the other person, meaning you'll hurt them, maybe even kill them. The potential for knocking someone down and killing them in pits, or hurling huge weapons that bulldoze everyone including your partner, there's a lot of dick moves to enjoy and before long you'll be punching the person playing with you, and the fight continues outside of the game into the arcade and the friendship is over. Maybe, thankfully.

However, despite the dickary potential, it's a solidly good co-operative game that excels in the aim of being enjoyable for 2 people to play. Except at the very end, where if both players have defeated the last boss, the guy with the machinegun, then the real final boss becomes, the other player in an all-out battle on one life (or more if you REALLY want to spend coins) for the right to rescue the punched-out woman from the start of the game. It's an odd situation for a game to encourage a solid co-operative attempt throughout, only to then reward the players with turning them against each other by force and play as opponents. An original game concept in its execution and one that's rarely been repeated in games since then. (Streets of Rage perhaps depending upon choices).

Musically, I think nearly everyone that knows of this game, at the mention of Double Dragon could hum a few bars of the theme tune and likely the first level as well. It's choppy and upbeat for the most part and definitely reeks of an 80s composition vibe heard in multiple tracks released that decade, particularly the earlier years of the decade. It's not something you'd bump your head to, but you'll find yourself humming it along with the game as it worms its way into your ear.

The game though, does suffer from the repetition of repeat plays, being an arcade game you know every time which enemies will appear, holding what and so on but I'm beating at a limitation of coding rather than the game's actual faults. It still holds well on the nostalgia factor and will bring people back for the occasional play just to remember what the game was like and to remind ourselves of how far we've come from such roots. Despite the aged looks and appearance, the game is still just as playable which is more than could be said for a lot of other games and the rather unique aspect the game does have (beyond being the first co-op brawler) was that it had more moves and attacks than say games like Final Fight which relied upon attacking, jumping and special/desperation moves.

I have to say, were I to actually own an arcade, I'd have this one out on the floor. Not at the forefront perhaps, but down the back or the sides, a little darker in presenting than the others but it'd be there, for those willing to explore a little further, willing to see a little more and see the older days as a show of honour. Not without flaws but given it started something, it did it well enough that many games failed to match it. Now THAT deserves recognition in the least.