Contra

"Challenging fun"

A favourite game of mine in my youth, Contra is an excellent blend of nice shoot-em-up action, varied and fun levels, and great challenge. In Contra, you control a US marine of some sort, and you have to run, jump, crouch and shoot your way through jungles, enemy bases, snowfields, and more, defeating human and alien enemies along the way. Your ultimate goal is to infiltrate the alien base, destroy it and save the world. Clichéd story aside, Contra has everything you’d expect from a NES shooter: lots of enemies, nice graphics, fairly good music and addicting gameplay.

The controls are quite simple, with one button jumping and one shooting. You start out with a rather crappy and unimaginative gun, but as you go along you’ll encounter little flying objects that whisk by. Shoot the objects and they’ll drop at your feet, revealing weapon upgrades or other powerups like invincibility or turbo fire. Weapon upgrades include Spread (where you have multiple shots that spread as the travel), Laser (a powerful, but slow laser is fired from your gun), Flip (your shot spirals in the air and so can affect multiple targets) and more. The weapon effects really look quite nice, as do the explosions of the many mechanical guns that you’ll be encountering in your journey.

Of course, nice guns would be useless unless you had some mean enemies to use them on. Apart from the mechanical turrets and blasters mentioned above (and there are a lot of them; Contra is fond of using those sort of hazards to blow you out of cover), there are lots of other enemies ranging from regular human gunners to grenade-throwers (cheeky bastards) as well as laser grids, spikes and tanks. Then there are the aliens, which are usually arachnid creepy-crawlies or other nasty things. The enemies usually move fluidly and look fairly good (nice colouring), but nothing is outstanding – that is, except the bosses. The bosses are big, ugly things, ranging from mechanical hunks with lots of gun turrets to giant robots to tentacled alien scum. They’re all huge, vividly coloured and often quite distracting, which is bad because they’re always shooting at you or throwing little minions at you. They’ll be much easier once you figure out their patterns and timing, though.

Unfortunately, if you get hit just once by an enemy or boss you’ll die and lose any powerups you might have. When combined with the scarcity of lives (four lives per continue) and the fact that gaining lives is hard, you get a very challenging game. Indeed, progressing through Contra’s levels requires great jumping and good aim, with spot-on timing. It can sometimes get frustrating when you die cheaply, and some of Contra requires memorisation of enemy movements and tactics, so poor gamers or little children might get frustrated. Still, even replaying levels is fun and so you rarely get a sense of tedium while repeating parts of the game after you’ve died.

Part of this fun is because of the great levels. While the enemies don’t change a whole lot (except later in the game where there’s an abrupt switch from human enemies to aliens), the level layouts and looks do. Most of the levels are side-scrollers, ranging from lush Jungle terrain with autoguns popping out at you, to bare snowfields, to dark alien bases. To add variety, there are a few non-side scrolling levels such as the Base levels and the Waterfall. In the Bases, the action is viewed from the back, at an angle, so it’s kinda top-down and kinda back-on. This provides a nice 3D effect and also changes the gameplay, because all you can do is move from left-to-right and jump/crouch. The different heights of enemy fire are confusing at first, but actually quite ingenious and provide some of the three-dimensional feel. The waterfall, which is similar in looks to the jungle, is a vertical-scroller where you move upwards instead of to the right. Each level also throws its own traps and hazards at you. Gun turrets, autoguns, lasers and spikes abound, and they make your movements a lot riskier.

Contra’s challenge is more easily approached if you have two players instead of one. A friend can join in on the fun on the second controller, and this is a must not just for the ‘extra gun’ factor, but because the game is at its most fun with two players. Whether you want to cooperate with each other – one guy taking care of the top half of the playing field, the other guy taking the bottom half – or compete against each other – going for points and snatching up the bonuses like the selfish bastards you are – the inclusion of a second player makes for an easier, more fun ride. I can still remember playing this game in my youth, with my friends and I squabbling about weapon hogging or inconsiderate movements (both players have to be on the screen, so if one player surges forward or lags behind the other player may be ‘inconvenienced’)…it’s really quite nostalgic. Anyway, if two of you still can’t beat the game, then you can always fall back on the infamous Konami Code, but that might ruin the experience. You haven’t really played Contra until you’ve beaten it without cheating.

The whole experience is helped by great sound effects and music. The different gun upgrades each have different effects, from high-pitched whirling noises to cool, mechanical laser sounds to the usual spattering of the machine gun. Enemy shots sound similar to yours, and their deaths neither look nor sound flashy, so that’s a minus; however, the nice music balances it out. From tense techno stuff in the Base levels to weird tunes in Waterfall and Snowfield, and of course the usual menacing track in the Alien’s Lair, the levels of Contra each have their own catchy and atmospheric tunes. They aren’t groundbreaking, but good enough to get you humming along, and add to the game’s overall ‘feel’.

Contra isn’t an extremely long game, nor does it have any totally unique features to set it apart from other shooters. Still, its fun and addicting gameplay inspired many later games and sequels; after all, the great fun of blasting your way through the levels, evading countless traps and battling hordes of enemies should appeal to any action or shooter fan. Anybody with a NES and access to an old-games store should give Contra a whirl.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 11/25/01, Updated 11/25/01