C: The Contra Adventure

"NES Anyone?"

Contra has been around since the real gaming wars began. Starting out on the NES, it's progressed through the years and appeared on multiple gaming systems, only to end up on the Playstation as a game that is more or less a below average game.

-Visuals 5/10-

Gah..this is ugly. It brings was Contra started out to be, in terms of characters that have no real detail, on stages that have alot to look at. Where your attention is, isn't what is intended...it should be put in terms of the characters, and what you're shooting at, but your eyes will be drawn away from that, and then onto the backgrounds and enviroments.

Now, this doesn't sound too bad, right? Wrong...your characters are so small, you need to be paying attention to what they're doing,b efore you end up with no more lives, and no more continues near the end of the game. It's a mis-match, where they give all of the details and eye-candy to the background, and hardly anything to the foreground.

-Sound 5/10-

Un-inspired music for a rather un-inspired game. You have your assortment of tunes to keep you moving, and in some parts, this works out in the games favor, but in others, it's little more than a headache-inducing mess of sounds that is annoying enough to make you turn off your sound.

The sound effects themselves are also small, and appear as more or less, a bunch of noise in teh background to cover up the cruddy music. It fails however, and you have your mono-tone sound of the machine gun firing, and things exploding. Quite sad really, with the way Playstation is set up, you would think they could have done a better job with the music and the sound effects.

-Control 5/10-

Too little, too late. The jumping physics are all screwed up, and the actually movement of the control pad-to-game is just too minimal to get anything done. You'll be hard-pressed to find something that works in a game of this type, there really is no place to go, and no place to run...it's either hope that you move out of the way, or you get nailed, one loss of life.

-Gameplay 5/10-

Contra should be put to rest. This offers nothing that hasn't been done in a million other games of the same type. It's the same old Contra, with the same old theme, set in the same old types of stages, with the same old weapons. Even though it's the originator of games that featured side-scrolling shoot-'em up action, it should have been put in the retirement home right next to Mario Bros.

-Overall 5/10-

While it's an ancient game, the redeeming qualities of this title, is that it appears on the PSX as an attempt to get into the next generation. With sub-par sound, gameplay, control and visuals, Contra has proven that it's tired and worn-out yet again on yet another system. If anything, it should be a collector's item for those who want a piece of age-old gaming on a new-age system.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 10/17/00, Updated 10/17/00