A long time ago, back in high school maybe, I had a friend. This friend once wove a fabulous scene straight out of thin air for me. In it, he described a very singular situation. A 70s Blaxplotation film, in which the main character was decked out in the finery you might expect. A fur coat, a menagerie of gold medallions, floppy hat and parrot on his shoulder. This unique character sauntered into McDonalds with a hunger something fierce, but upon receiving his burger he dashed it to the ground, exclaiming, "This is not my cheeseburger! This is not my Big Mac!!" Obviously, something was wrong with the sandwich.

Whether this movie, or even the scene, existed or not isn't really the point. The friend was widely regarded as an inveterate liar anyway. The thing is, there's something mysterious about the idea. What experiences had the man had with cheeseburgers that brought him to despise what he was given so much? It keeps me up at night.

Does this look like ten years of progress?

"A long time ago." In thinking about writing this article I wondered how many times I've started with those words, or something very similar. It's true that I have a serious penchant for the nostalgic. People marvel at my stalwart refusal to play new games while I'm able to repeatedly go after Zone of the Enders 2 or Parasite Eve, playing those games until the cows come home. Why, even now Metal Gear Solid 3 sits basically unplayed on top of my television. The truth is I just don't have the time or the attention span to learn every new play mechanic that comes my way. I'm happier muddling around in Final Fantasy Tactics for the twentieth time than I am trying to puzzle out the machinations of the newest Disgaea-type RPG from Atlus. That's just 'how I roll.'

So, anyway, a long time ago...

Back in high school again I had a friend named Greg. We stay in touch, but (unsurprisingly) a 3000 mile distance makes it difficult to sit down for a good game of Gigawing or Time Crisis II. Greg and I, while waiting for other people to arrive on a Friday night, would often play a rousing session of Metal Slug X. I had found it secondhand at a nearby GameStop and we considered that tiny piece of plastic to be all the rage. When the actual game got too boring our attention was seized by the survival mode, wherein you were given a single life and infinite ammunition and scored points (and advanced in rank!) on how many kilometers you could run in the game before keeling over dead by enemy grenade or poison mummy gas. Even when that got to be too much of a chore there were a dozen or so mini-games involving rocket jumping and baby protection to keep you interested.

If you're not familiar with Metal Slug, there's not a whole lot to know. You assume the role of a soldier in a side-scrolling adventure where your only imperatives are to kill bad guys and pick up prizes (for bonus points). To do so you're given a treasure trove of weaponry, including the eponymous Metal Slugs, which are a menagerie of highly mobile tanks, planes, and submarines. It doesn't get any more complex than "move right and hold the shoot button."

Guess which game came out in this decade.
Now guess which is actually GOOD.

Spurred onward by this most recent bout of nostalgia, I graced my fingers over the packaging of Metal Slug 4+5 in an EBgames not too many weeks ago. I knew from experience that Metal Slug 4 wasn't exactly hot stuff, but had been told that the next in the series (Metal Slug 5) represented almost a renaissance, a reinvention of the classic formula. $25 was worth the risk. After all, how hard could it be to get a game like this right? All you have to do is include pseudo-Nazi dictators and the guns with which to shoot them. Sounds like a winning combination to me!

Taking it home, I was like a kid at Christmas. Fond memories of my times with Greg up in my 3rd floor room came flooding back to me. By the end of level two he'd have the flamethrower and I'd have the super shotgun and we'd be the toast of the town. Not a single green soldier would survive, nor would the colossal tower-climbing end boss. By the midpoint of level 3 things would get a bit hinky, but in that brief spat of time we were the chief artisans of our craft. A dangerous duo. Him as Marco, and myself as the lovely young Fio. We decided it was better to have one person play a guy and one play a girl, so we'd be able to tell each other apart. Plus Fio had some sweet karate moves, and I was all about that.

I didn't have Greg when we opened up Metal Slug 4+5, but my buddy Joel was around and he's used to sublimating my urges. We popped in Metal Slug 5 and I prodded him towards the male character while I chose my favorite little lass. As soon as the game started I could tell there was something fishy about it. The sprites barely seemed to change at all and halfway through the second level we had yet to see a SINGLE gun that wasn't in a previous Metal Slug game. Where I should've been happy about the feelings of nostalgia washing over me like a tidal wave instead there was only the bitter taste of repetitiveness in my mouth. My stomach was a lonely place, an empty pit. The only differences between this and Metal Slug X, a game that's practically a decade old, was a few new enemy sprites and a different vehicle or two to jump in. Heavy Machinegun, Flameshot, Iron Lizard, they were all there and functioned just like they did seven years ago. Something was so, so wrong with my gaming experience.

And, for once, it wasn't Joel...

I refuse to acknowledge any Metal Slug game without a robot last boss.

Metal Slug 5 was basically the exact same game I played with Greg. Logically that should've made me happy, but instead it accomplished nothing but the reverse. The soldiers now look more like Columbian guerrillas than Third Reich'ers, but it hardly makes a difference. New Metal Slugs (the vehicles) were clunky and made with a definite 'form over function' mentality. This game was a watered down version of the Metal Slug I'd played into the ground on many prior occasions. By the time Joel and I got to the ridiculous last boss (A demon! A DEMON!!) I knew that all hope for Metal Slug now, and maybe forever in the future, was dashed upon the rocks of my heart. If the Metal Slug series had a spark of hope left in it, it was not this game. Not a single new gun, are you kidding me? In the over five years and three separate games they've had since Metal Slug X they've brought in ONE new weapon, which was not a whole lot more than a reskin of another gun ANYWAY.

Nostalgia came around and bit me in the ass, and I would've felt more accomplished had I just flushed my $25 down the toilet instead of purchasing a virtual albatross that's going to take up shelf space for as long as I own a PS2. I tried to convince myself that it's still fun to kill enemy bad guys in silly environments, no matter what the name on the game is... but it's just not. I want to play the game that I fell in love with, not some rehashed bull that's pressed just to make a quick buck. And Metal Slug 5 showed me no innovation that suggested it was anything but an aped copy of one of my most cherished memories..

As fate would have it, Greg was back in town the very same week I bought Metal Slug 4+5. I mentioned the game briefly to him, but by the end of the night we were back where we always were. Metal Slug X, him with the flamethrower and myself with the shotgun, shooting down helicopters in deserts just like back in high school.

This is not my cheeseburger, this is not my Big Mac...