History

-THE BEGINNING-

It all began on the January of 2004; I heard about the release of Metal Slug 5, and after first falling in love with the games a year before, I went searching for a ROM. I would’ve searched for a real arcade unit, but Northern Ireland isn’t known for it’s availability of arcade games, and the only place I know that has arcade games, the Belfast Airport, has twelve year old games. Sucky twelve year old games at that.

Carrying on, I eventually found the game, and with much delight, booted it up in NeoRageX. The game didn’t work.

Pants.

So I went in search of a version that worked, and along the way, I heard a lot about unused things hidden inside the game, the most talked-about being a large stone turtle. I’ve always been fascinated by what doesn’t make it into the final version of games, and I can distinctly remember buying Banjo-Kazooie, and looking over old magazines which featured vastly different areas. And I can remember even more distinctly when I found out about Stop 'n' Swop, but that’s a tale for another day.

I eventually got the game up and running, and I enjoyed it. It wasn’t as good as Metal Slug 4, but it was decent nonetheless. But I was still curious about those unused features, so I high stepped it over to GameFAQs and asked about the unused stuff and how to access it.

-THE GAMEFAQS SAGA-

I wish I could say that I have no beef with GameFAQs. The walkthroughs, codes, and so on are helpful and good, but everything else; the reviews, the forums, the members, the stupid "top 10" things, it all just irks me. It reeks of diabolically insane fanboy sweat. Moving hastily on . . .
I popped over to the Metal Slug 5 forum, which in those days, actually had people posting in them, and intelligent discussions, instead of either nothing or those obnoxious "I CLAIM THIS BOARD" threads (I MEAN WHAT IS THE POINT OF THEM). A fellow called Jon the Moogle started a thread about sprite ripping, and there was mentioning of a debug mode to rip them. Curious, I asked about it, and it was only after someone (Foppe) had posted an incredibly in-depth and descriptive answer, I realised he already posted instructions before. D'oh.
So I got to try it out. WOWZERS!! Unused areas! Unused sounds! Unused graphics!! And I could fondle and fiddle with these to my heart's content!
I browsed with an open mouth OF SHOCK through the sprite viewers, and came across things that I hadn't read about previously, like giant jellyfish, small speed boats, and GLEN ACHILLES!! Now, I could understand about the jellyfish and speedboat not being documented, as they didn't even compare to the Stone Turtle and pillar guy; but Glen Achilles was badass, and I found him super interesting. I looked and looked, and he was mentioned nowhere, and it was extremely awkward trying to find discoveries by visiting a ton of different forums.
So I set about to cure that, and I started work on Metal Slug 5: Missing in Action.

The bad news? It was a shoddy Microsoft Word document, with an obscenely ugly layout and images, and it was hosted on Yahoo! Briefcase. Being a Word document is one thing, but being hosted on Yahoo! Briefcase just takes the cake. So as you can tell, despite my thread on GameFAQs about it, it wasn't met with a brilliant response, thanks to Word documents being prone to viruses, and Briefcase being a shitty file hosting service.

-THE METAL SLUG DATABASE-

A site I visited frequently, Metal Slug: Iron Cavalrymen in Hell, was under new control after the original owner had financial and personal problems, so a new guy stepped in. Danny Kim, better known as Enomosiki. He had another Metal Slug site, so running two at once was a struggle for him, so he killed Iron Cavalrymen and just made it a plug for his site, the Metal Slug Database. I was horrified, as MS:ICH had facts and information and stuff, while the MSDB was just music and ROMs and "content", but lack of any information and stuff. Being an evil dick, I was reluctant to help make it any better, because he killed one of my favourite sites. But I decided to be nice, and I sent him an early revision of Missing in Action, which he converted to work on dar Internet, and split it into pages, while adding stuff I didn't add or wasn't aware of.

With a proper host, the GameFAQs thread was booming, with plenty of people giving submissions, their praise, and everything. Life was grand, updates were frequent, and everything seemed hunky dory. Of course, things went down the shitter when the thread was purged, and I had just about seen everything in the game. It didn't help any that nobody at the MSDB seemed to care much about submitting stuff to me, and those who did had nothing worthy of pointing out to me. Plus, I had gotten sick of how obnoxiously shoddy the thing was in terms of layout, and I took a "break" from updating to revamp the whole bloody thing, to include every Metal Slug game.

-THE REVAMP-

It took about four or so months, working on-and-off, sometimes not wanting to continue, but it was finally finished. All new content! An actual layout! It was worth it. It would've been more satisfactory if people, you know, submitted stuff, but you can't win them all.

Despite the revamp, there was very little in the way of submissions or feedback. Seemed a bit of a waste, tuning up something that just about nobody cared about anymore, but that's life.

-THE FUTURE-

What's next for Metal Slug: Missing in Action? Probably some uninteresting and slow updates, neglect of the site, the usual.

Oh snap, the future is now. lol. =(