A lot of the blame can still be leveled on SNK. I paid $50 for MS3 on the Xbox without hesitation because up till then I been logging in so many hours in the game in Kawaks, and it was time they got their money.
However, is $50 reasonable for MS3, a four year old game based of ancient hardware? Even as completely awesome as I think the game is, and with the token extras, I still have to say no.
The reasonable thing to do would have been to release a comlpete Metal Slug set for fifty bucks, maybe sixty. No extras, no Live scoring, just a spartan, but accurate port of the whole series. That'd be worth the money.
But SNK is used to getting top billing for their individual games. A NG cart of MS3 would run over three hundred easy. They are used to having their games dumped and on the net within hours of release too.
I guess that SNK figured that the gamers owed them one. So they thought if they gave us a superior version of one of their very best games, with some extras thrown in to make it interesting, that the community would feel obligated to pay $50 for Metal Slug 3 as I did. Obviously, they thought wrong. Metal Slugs 4 and 5, as well as numerous KOF games, are being released in bundles.
I beleive that SCEA looked at PS2 MS3 from a pure value standpoint, and deemed it, as I do, not worth full price. And SNK was stubborn, and luckily found an out with the Xbox. I really don't care, the Xbox version is superior anyway, and I got to pay for a game I had been enjoying for nearly a year. The deal is square with me.
