XBLA demo reviews: Omega 5 / Metal Slug 3

I'm not sure if these are new or not, they've probably just accumulated over the few weeks I've spent ignoring the console to focus on essays. Anyway, I was quite eager to try out the Metal Slug game, I remember playing an older one in an arcade a lot of years ago and thinking it was pretty boss.. as for Omega 5 I didn't have a clue what it was about before downloading, and to be honest I still don't. I'm lumping the two together in one review because they both felt fairly similar, or at the very least like different approaches to the same idea.

Metal Slug 3 first then. It's a series I'd venture most people have played at some point in their life, if perhaps only fleetingly in arcades.. I don't know if I've ever seen it on a console. I certainly remember it being more fun in co-op, which makes this limited demo a particularly unfair specimen for review, but the single player was still quite good fun. It gets rather hectic about half way into the first level, with things surrounding you from all angles and large explosions cluttering the screen, and i quickly abandoned any kind of strategy in favour of grabbing the machine gun and firing at all times. It's a pretty intense game but since it's all very comic you don't really get frustrated enough to ruin the fun, having said that I'd rather play a port of Sunset Riders or even Gunstar Heroes over this any day.

Omega 5 is an original XBLA game that, like basically all the others, is good-not-great and feels entirely like something that doesn't warrant either a full price release or the cost of downloading. It's a scrolling shoot-em-up where you basically hover this really generic-looking robot guy around the screen firing a yellow laser that looks like a stream of urine. I couldn't take it seriously for two reasons (three if you include the peeing), firstly because there was some humorous engrish in the level introduction, and secondly because the characters look stupid running. Really stupid, I might add. Maybe I wasn't meant to take it seriously, but since I consider myself a pretty serious guy that just offends my sensibilities all the more. The game itself isn't really very interesting.