 S...Mass drunk. I'm on a bit of a Game Boy Advance kick lately, so this week let's take a look at Metal Slug Advance, made in November 2004 by SNK Playmore, and games like this can be hit or miss on the Game Boy Advance. When it comes to platformers or running guns, sometimes the screen just seems too small to fit all the action going on, like the GBA port of Contra 3. I have a hard time recommending that one because your character sprite relative to the screenspace is much bigger, which means it's much easier to take damage, and that's no fun. Metal Slug Advance, on the other hand, this one is a blast to play. No, it doesn't quite measure up to the other games in the series. That's probably too tall of a task for a handheld game, but on its own, this game is a quality playthrough. You get a health meter and Unlimited continues to get through five levels broken up into four stages each. There's two characters to choose from, and... Come on, it's Metal Slug. What you see is what you get. You run to the right and blow stuff up. The controls are simple. There's lots of explosions, lots of automatic weapons, lots of vehicles to make stuff go boom, and lots of dudes saying thank you. You get all sorts of fun weapons like ground missiles, homing missiles, rocket launchers, shotguns, all the usual Metal Slug stuff. It's pretty crazy to see the Game Boy Advance be able to provide a quality SNK Metal Slug experience, but it really does pull through. The performance is pretty good. The game looks great, and the controls work well enough. I will say aiming diagonally can be kind of a pain, and the slug itself is really slow, like to the point that I think they deliberately made it that way so you wouldn't be too overpowered. But otherwise, yeah, this is pretty much your classic Metal Slug experience. There are some things unique to this game, though. Like, for example, in level 5, you can hop into this plane and crush some people for a while, but you have the option of ejecting at any time, which brings you to the ground so you can kick the crap out of some bad guys down there. But really, you're gonna want to stay in the plane if you can. Look at this. This is hilarious. Suddenly, the game turns into something like Cybernator or Metal Warriors, except you're flying a friggin' plane. You gotta love that. After that, the level splits up into two different paths to pick from to get to the final boss. There's two new systems here as well. As I mentioned earlier, this is a Metal Slug game with a health meter instead of lives, so the game does play a tiny bit differently because of that, but don't get me wrong, it's still really hard, and there's lots of insta-deaths, like getting crushed by something or falling down a pit. The other new system is the card system. There's 100 different cards scattered throughout the game, and they act as power-ups in addition to giving some extra info on characters or items. Some are simple coins or food items, but some will transform your slug into a more powerful form or give you tons of ammo for a specific weapon or just make your weapon ridiculously overpowered. Like this sword card here allows you to deflect missiles with a melee attack. That's always useful. I should also mention that there is a special card you can find in the final mission that unlocks the dungeon, which is kind of like a mini-game where there's 25 prisoners you have to find with even more stuff to collect if you're into that. So yeah, just a short, simple video on an easy recommendation. Metal Slug Advance is seriously hard to put down, and I know the footage here might look a little bleary because it's Game Boy Advance, but man, this game looks amazing on the analog pocket, so if you've got one of those, I highly recommend this game for that reason alone. Metal Slug is one of those franchises where you really feel rewarded for getting good at those games because it becomes really satisfying and even kind of relaxing to just mow through a couple of levels no problem. And Metal Slug Advance is no exception. Of course, the health meter, instead of one hit deaths, curbs the difficulty quite a bit, but make no mistake, this one is still pretty dang hard, and even if you don't have an analog pocket or a Game Boy Advance, I'd still recommend checking this one out any way you can. All right, I wanna thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.