I love the Metal Slug franchise. SNK’s long-running action series is one part Contra, one part luxurious hand-animated film, and many parts fun goofy nonsense. It started out way back in 1996 on the powerful Neo Geo arcade hardware, before spawning numerous sequels and ports across different platforms all the way up to the three current machines.
Metal Slug 3 was perhaps the first entry in the series to gain significant notoriety in the US, thanks to a heavily-marketed premium-priced port that released on the original Xbox. The notion of paying 40 dollars for a conversion of a single old arcade game on a disc seems rather absurd now, but in 2004 it was good enough for an astounding 76 average on Metacritic. I like Metal Slug 3 just fine, and I’ll admit I owned that Xbox disc at launch, but it’s shocking to see what passed for value 16 years ago.
Perhaps more bizarrely, this same now-crusty arcade game from the year 2000 has been released on the PS4 three different times in three different unique conversions. Here they are, ranked from worst to best.
