Does humour belong in music and games? It certainly does as it distorts and makes fun of a canon developed around an approach. Metal Slug is no exception - instead of coming up with an entirely different concept of a side-scrolling shoot 'em up, the game makes fun of our herd-mentality understanding of wars that others fight somewhere in some developing countries. The comedy is implied in derision, in the awkward movements of the characters, their fear of losing lives in a battlefield that gets masked by their love for carnage and war toys, the thin storyline that cartoonish bodycount scenes try to make up for, the background that resembles a HOPA game that supports the bodycount approach - it's all hillarious and works incredibly well. The gameplay itself is addictive, the controls are just smooth enough to keep you glued to your seat while being sluggish enough to irk you. It is also one of those games that become even more interesting in a 2-player session as you can now both recreate your childhood dominated by cultural heroes of cheap animations and movies (wrestlers,MOTUs,Cover Ups, Rambos, Commandos and all those other moments in popular history of the 80s that other games had immortalized as well). Every bromance naturally has to include jumping on boats, wearing machines and wreaking havoc upon a made-up world. Another few thousand coins and your muscle memory reclaimed and you're there.
