My love for Metal Slug began in Hollywood bowl. Bastard bastard Hollywood b(umh)owl. Why bastard? You shall see. Again, it began in Hollywood bowl, when the restaurant was where the arcade is now, and the arcade was where the restaurant is now. Must’ve been the late 90’s. Then, the arcade actually had a few games with buttons! Not a wheel or gun or football or dancemat, as is now mandatory. Metal Slug 2 was a game with buttons. And I played it a bit.
And it was hypergood. You shot Arabs (mostly, if you were me, as this was the first level and I rarely got further) before it was controversial, occasionally using a gun-fortified camel. There was blood (unless my rose-tinted glasses have recently been re-tinted crimson) and it was always a hoot watching a baddy’s face as you cut his chest open with a knife and the stuff came out in a manga-style jet. The bosses, despite usually being machines, were as full of character as the rest of the game. One that sticks in my sponge-like mind is a harrier-style plane that not only fired the ordinary bullets and missiles, but burned you with its jets (quite obviously the weak point – I think). It was rock hard. But fantastic.
But I never played it very much. Why? 10-year-olds don’t have much money. And I have never frequented arcades. I only met my good friend Metal Slug whenever I went bowling. And buying it was not an option. I didn’t have a NeoGeo or whatever it was on. Dunno if I even had a Playstation then. Games were not my number 1 priority; learning was. I was a smart-arse kid.
But now, being an older, less smart and more fat arse, games are a high priority. So I know stuff about them. This includes the seedier side, so I did get access to Metal Slug on emulators, but they buggered up or didn’t work in the first place. I’ve never owned a Metal Slug game, funnily enough. I was considering buying the PS1 version which came out recently, but wasn’t going to pay £20 for a PS1 game. But now that Metal Slug is coming out on Xbox, PS2 and GBA later this year, I think I will shell (or even slug, hardehar) out.
So, why is Hollywood Bowl a bastard? BECAUSE THEY DON’T HAVE IT ANY MORE! But they DO have ALL THREE House of the Deads and TWO Time Crises (that, trust me, is the plural of Crisis). Now, these games are also a hoot, but do we really need 5 lightgun games? I suppose pikey rudeboys (the main population of the country, Herts especially) are too stupid to use a stick and buttons. But don’t they have real guns? Well, I’d probably complain if they did get a new Metal Slug machine actually, because the pikeys might like it. Perhaps Hollywood Bowl’s not a bastard after all, if only for keeping Metal Slug sacred.
