It’s Contra!
Everyone loves Contra.
Rather, everyone loved the NES version of Contra, the most popular and most widely-appreciated
version.
That being the late 80s, though, there was by definition a huge gulf between the arcade
experience.
By necessity, the home consoles received a break, an easier time in what was one of the
most vicious games of the time.
And even then, the level of difficulty was such that every kid from Saitama to Smethport
knew how to circumvent this: Up up down down n’at.
But such a thing didn’t exist in the arcades.
You just had misery, destruction, and maybe some Laffy Taffy you got from the counter
after some idiot left their tickets in the skee-ball machine.
Now we don’t even have that, with this XBLA remake of Super Contra, the 1988 successor
to the alien-slaughtering childhood-destroying nightmare.
And it hates you.
(As all good arcade games should.)
As was the case before, two grizzled combatants with unlimited ammunition and a mean streak
a mile wide take to the ground to thwart an alien invasion, using whatever guns just happen
to fall from the sky courtesy of inexplicable flying weapons pods.
The primary innovation over the previous version, though, is right here: sloped terrain.
That’s pretty much it.
Oh, there are also overhead-view free-roaming segments, mixing up the gameplay a little
bit...
but it’s still the same basic concept: Shoot anything and everything that moves.
Unfortunately, that’s where the game gets a bit dicey.
Y’see... despite being a combat-trained, grizzled combatant, you move about as fast
as a anemic snail carrying ten thousand rounds of ammunition.
And your standard firearm, to which you are reduced every time you lose a life, fires
rounds that seem to max out at about five miles per hour.
Compared to its predecessor, power-ups are much fewer and further between.
And then that lasts until you get hit by anything, which - given the swarms of hostiles constantly
rushing the field from every angle, might be as many as twelve seconds.
I used to be good at this.
Honest.
Unfortunately, when Digital Eclipse remade this game for XBLA, their idea of “graphical
enhancement” seemed to be “keep everything looking pretty much the same, but add huge
explosions and blurring effects.”
Which is great when you annihilate a huge helicopter, only to have foes rush THROUGH
the wreckage (and huge explosions and blur effects) to mangle you.
The screen, being an interpretation of the arcade version, features a vertically-oriented
playfield (again, jarring to the home console player) flanked by woefully blurry pictures
of our heroes.
While it brings the game to a new audience, who might be able to take to it for what it
is - and don’t get me wrong, the classic arcade mode looks fantastic if you feel like
being a purist - those of us who grew up playing the home versions probably haven’t hit this
particular gap between the arcade and Super C versions quite this hard.
Oh, and the code... is a lie.