The End is Nigh: Metal Slug 3

By Martin Gaston

‘The End is Nigh’ is a weekly column by Play.tm’s Martin Gaston, pondering the nature of videogame endings and why we do or don’t choose to finish the games we play. As the new decade dawns, Martin’s been thinking about one of his favourite titles of the past ten years, and his quest to finish the game on three credits or less…

Metal Slug 3 is one of my most beloved games from the last decade. I’ve been playing it on and off since its release way back in the year 2000. In all that time, I have only ever legitimately seen the ending screen once, and even then that was only with a budget of ten credits. This is partially cheating, now that I think about it, so actually I’ve never actually completed the game – three credits maximum is my time-tested rule of thumb.

The game, SNK’s final side-scrolling masterpiece before their bankruptcy, is simple: shoot a path from point A to point B. Much of the appeal comes from its immense aesthetic charm, with the intricately animated characters blazing a gorgeous path of destruction across locales including a beach, a zombie graveyard and eventually outer space.

Its main enemies are essentially Nazis, which is itself rare to see from a Japanese studio, but also include evil crabs, evil submarines, zombies (inherently evil), evil yetis, evil aliens and evil cloned versions of your player. And you shoot them. With guns. The kitsch violence erupts in wonderful flurries of colour, with the scenery whizzing, popping and exploding in great plumes of destruction. It’s also bloody hard so you’ll die a lot. It’s an absolutely maniacal experience, with each of the game’s five stages offering up further distractions by way of multiple routes.

There’s been a bit of an arcade game renaissance in recent years, with the most prolific entries being Bizarre Creations’s Geometry Wars and Housemarque’s Super Stardust HD. They’re both fantastic titles, but where Metal Slug has always had the edge – at least in terms of keeping me addicted – is in the existence of a finite ending. It also helps that a complete run of Metal Slug 3 won’t take much longer than 25 minutes; just long enough to fill a quick break.

Dangling progression like the proverbial carrot, the game cuts the action in just enough places to keep the player soldiering on. It’s always just a little bit further to the end of the stage, and then, well, there are only five stages after all – might as well chew through another credit. When remembering the game’s sinister true intention, to keep players dropping 50p’s into an arcade cabinet, it’s easy to appreciate the true skill in SNK’s deft touches. I’m just lucky I’m playing it on the Xbox.

There’s something to be said for the game’s metered linearity. It never, ever offers a respite from the action – your only moments to relax are during the few seconds at the end of each stage – but somehow it manages to create its own little pacing rhythm as you battle on towards the definite ending. Part of the game’s appeal will always be the comforting sense of familiarisation, giving you the foresight to clear a whole screen of baddies before they’ve even finished piling off the truck delivering them, and part of that appeal will always be the knowledge of whereabouts you are in the game’s fixed structure at any given time.

Which, if you ask me, is why the elusive ‘kill screen’ from classic seventies arcade titles is such an iconic goal: it marks the end of the game and grounds players in a reassuring beginning, middle and end construction. It’s exactly the same reason why Oblivion is a better ride at Alton Towers than Ripsaw, and it’s probably why I’ll still be playing Metal Slug 3 in 2020. After all, it’s not truly complete until you’ve done it on a single credit.