The Game Boy Advance edition of the game features two new characters specific to that title: PF squad trainees Walter Ryan and Tyra Elson. Eri and Tarma returned in the fifth game. In the fourth game, Nadia Cassel and Trevor Spacey made their debut, replacing Eri and Tarma, respectively, but have not returned for later games. These four are considered by fans to be the quintessential Metal Slug team.

In the second installment, Eri Kasamoto and Fiolina “Fio” Germi were added to the cast. Marco Rossi and Tarma Roving were the first playable characters, but each was reserved solely to the first and second player, respectively. This leads to the ability for the player to run in and use melee attacks to take down a number of troops. In this series, however, contact only results in either party’s death if an attack is performed. In most run and guns, contact with an enemy leads to immediate death. First and foremost is the ability to perform melee attacks. Metal Slug however takes the concepts introduced in Contra and expands upon them.

All of these characteristics come from the Contra series, which the gameplay is based on. The gameplay of the series is characteristic of run and guns: The enemies come in hordes, the weapons have high fire rates. There is also an anthology of the first 7 games in the main series (including Metal Slug X) available for the Wii, PlayStation Portable, and PlayStation 2. It was also ported to other consoles, such as the Sega Saturn, the PlayStation, the Neo-Geo Pocket Color and more recently, the Game Boy Advance, PlayStation 2, Xbox, Xbox 360 and Nintendo DS. Metal Slug is a series of run and gun video games first released on Neo-Geo arcade machines and game consoles created by SNK.

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