Run 'n Gun games - From Contra to Metal Slug and Mega Man (Turrican is a thing too I guess)

DocAwe said:
@Calandrino
Oh I'm quite familiar with the concept of the rotary stick.
Ikari warriors is a game my Lil brother and I grew up playing in the arcade.
I'm just happy to see someone attempting to recreate it for home use and it definitely has my attention!
I'm no stranger to arcades or the NEO•GEO.
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sweet

Arcade-at-home options seem pretty good now, between the fancy niche controllers and the gimmicky minicab things out there. I don't think there were as many options for paddle controls and stuff 10+ years ago, now at last we can have authentic arcade-quality Pong at home. Still no 4-way USB joystick that I can find though, I think if you want a 4-way gate you have to mess with screwdrivers and part replacement and stuff.

BrunoMattei said:
Midnight Resistance on the Genesis is one of those games I want to love but the controls absolutely kill it. Why was it so hard for the devs to just imitate what Contra did?
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I can understand wanting to preserve the sweeping, multiangle shooting, but almost anything else they could have done would've been better...
 
BrunoMattei said:
I forgot to mention this but another new Run 'N Gun is coming out and this time for the Genesis:

www.alphabetagamer.com

Life on Earth: Reimagined – Beta Demo (SEGA Genesis) | Alpha Beta Gamer

Life on Earth: Reimagined is a brand new Sega Genesis side-scrolling shooter where a scientist attempts to eradicate a bacteria that could end the world.
www.alphabetagamer.com www.alphabetagamer.com

Looks good. There's a surprising number of new indie Genesis games that are on their way.
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The ROM for this one is out there but it has a layer of copy protection (why?) that has yet to be cracked. I'm all for paying game devs if the game is actually good but don't make me drag out my ancient ass Genesis in storage to play your game.
 
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BrunoMattei said:
The ROM for this one is out there but it has a layer of copy protection (why?) that has yet to be cracked. I'm all for paying game devs if the game is actually good but don't make me drag out my ancient ass Genesis in storage to play your game.
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Often they scramble the rom, then offer their own commercial option via Steam. Kraut Buster is still like $3,000 on ebay though.

Incidentally Tanuki Justice gets 5 stars, any and all criticism of it is attributable to skill issues.

Tanuki-Justice-3-700x393.jpg
 
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I decided to play the new Contra (AKA Cucktra). Don't worry, I pirated it. Uhm, I give it a 5/10 so far.

The visuals are fine. It reminds me a lot of Bionic Commando: Rearmed aesthetically. Here are the problems:

Cutscenes. It's Contra. No one cares about the story. You can skip the cutscenes. But it's still pointless. Just have an opening and ending cutscene and that is it. That's all the player needs.

Annoying NPC's that talk over gameplay or slow it down. In level 2 the game just pauses and gives you fodder enemies that offer no challenge whatsoever while an NPC rattles on and on forever. What's the point of adding skippable cutscenes if you're going to add this crap?

Last but not least, the fatal flaw, the thing that made me officially stop and make this post: the weapons are weak af. Even when you upgrade the weapons they still sound super wimpy. There's something really fucking wrong when 8 and 16-bit games from over 30 years ago have better weapon sounds. The Spread is good and more like the Contra 3/Hardcorps Spread so it doesn't instant-kill most things but it's still fun to use and extremely powerful. Unlike any of the previous Contra's it just sucks to use because the sound effects are so shit and there's no satisfying enemy death sound effects or splosions or anything. Plus the Crusher was nerfed which is unforgivable to me. Why nerf one of the best weapon powerups? All the weapon powerups aside from the Spread and Homing just aren't fun to use because you have to upgrade them by finding another powerup of the same type and even they still kind of suck.

Edit: the weird thing is that Contra 4 (also made by Wayforward) the weapons and sound and overall aesthetic were great. I just hate the DS splitscreen and wished they designed it with one screen in mind.

The most interesting thing they did is that you have a special ability that has Spread bullets bounce across the screen, Laser slows down time, etc. Which is cool but... When you do that you downgrade the guns... And when the guns just aren't fun to use especially when downgraded it doesn't encourage you to experiment much.

Just play Super Cyborg instead. It's $5 and infinitely better.
 
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I replayed Metal Slug XX having played the DS version (Metal Slug 7) on an emulator and thought "That was pretty good." But XX is a downgrade in some ways. Yes, the game is now co-op and runs at 60 FPS which is great. It has a few more branching paths but they're really short and not too new or interesting. But, the level design changes are much more "Fuck you, memorize the level from top to bottom to not get hit a single time." Jap shmup game logic. Which was not the case in the DS version, probably because the DS couldn't handle that much shit going on. It's not so bad starting out but by the time you get half-way through it just becomes a slog and the devs love to repeat the design choice of hiding soldiers taking potshots behind literal tanky enemies over and over and over again. Something that wasn't done too often in the original trilogy.

The hit-detection felt very biased in this game as well. It approached Silver Surfer-tier hitboxes if you know what I mean and I think you do.

It's cool to play as Leona if you're a KOF dork but I can't really recommend it on the whole. The original trilogy could feel like a slog but once you re-play the level once or twice you have a pretty good grasp and tend not to die too often, at least not until the final level of Metal Slug 3 which is the ultimate quarter muncher.

Of the post Metal Slug 3 games I'd rank them like this:

5

4
7/XX
6

5 isn't that great and is very divisive and I get that. But for me it felt like it possessed at least some of the magic of the original trilogy. 4 is just generic. And 6 is atrocious with one and only one cool moment in the entire game.
 
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Dolphin Blue. I was very harsh to this one when I played it almost a decade ago on an experimental Atomiswave emulator. Atomiswave is basically just Sega's Naomi board that was used for the Dreamcast. Turns out, you can easily play it and all of the games launched on Atomiswave on Flycast and I think on authentic Dreamcast's now.

Very fun Run 'N Gun made by the original guys behind Metal Slug. Same kind of gameplay only there's no jumping into tanks or any drivable vehicles. However, it's a little bit closer to R-Type in the sense of you have to time when to use the Dolphin of the title to inflict max damage and exploit the invincibility frames which makes this different enough from the Metal Slug titles.

Only downside is that there's so much shit on screen that sometimes getting hit can feel unfair but otherwise this is an underrated title. I give it 9/11 out of 10 and would recommend.
 
BrunoMattei said:

Dolphin Blue. I was very harsh to this one when I played it almost a decade ago on an experimental Atomiswave emulator. Atomiswave is basically just Sega's Naomi board that was used for the Dreamcast. Turns out, you can easily play it and all of the games launched on Atomiswave on Flycast and I think on authentic Dreamcast's now.

Very fun Run 'N Gun made by the original guys behind Metal Slug. Same kind of gameplay only there's no jumping into tanks or any drivable vehicles. However, it's a little bit closer to R-Type in the sense of you have to time when to use the Dolphin of the title to inflict max damage and exploit the invincibility frames which makes this different enough from the Metal Slug titles.

Only downside is that there's so much shit on screen that sometimes getting hit can feel unfair but otherwise this is an underrated title. I give it 9/11 out of 10 and would recommend.
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Atomiswave is basically a Dreamcast with cartridges.
If you have a GDEMU installed in your DC you can technically run all of the AW games but not all can really be played.
I think the light gun and driving games don't work because of interface issues or something.
I have a GDEMU Dreamcast but haven't tried any of the AW games yet but I've been meaning to.
 
Metal Slug 6.

Okay, another game I was a little too harsh to. I give this one an A for effort. Some bosses are more annoying then I would like but at least this one has some new sprites so it doesn't feel like a total copy/paste effort like Metal Slug 7/XX which is almost entirely made up of used sprites excluding bosses. I would say it's above average. 7/10 Metal Slug title. Worth a play through.

Big thing I hate about 6 and 7/XX is that fucking Zaibetsu weapon powerup. It is fucking garbage. It gets you killed more often than you think and you just know, you just fucking know, there is some incel nerd somewhere out there with 8 subscribers on YT who puts out his "master" playthroughs of 6 and 7 that have like 22 views and the sperg swears up and down how l33t the Zaibetsu is. No. It's garbage and it feels like a troll weapon because you always get it just when enemies swarm you.

Also, I had quite a bit of difficulty with this one on Flycast. I used two different downloads and had the same weird problem where whenever I used Marco the game would crash. Weird bug. I have no idea if it's an issue with the conversion of the game for Dreamcast or it's a Flycast issue or whatever. Which sucks because I think Marco is really strong in this game with his OP pistol and it allows you to save ammo for the other weapons. The other issue I had is that I couldn't use Tarma's ability to lock the Vulcan gun in place whenever driving a Slug.

The world waits with baited breath for my new order of Metal Slug games post 3 and it is:

5
6
4
7/XX

However, all of them are completely skippable if you've played the Metal Slug trilogy. It's more of a you've tried the best and now try the rest kind of situation.
 
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Sparky Lurker said:
Still no proper trailer yet, but posting here for posterity, game's name is Neon Inferno:
Same dev from Steel Assault.
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I watched for like ten seconds but I was sold as soon as he switched to shooting stuff in the background like Wild Guns. Steel Assault is very good.
 
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