Contra III: The Alien Wars

"Do they actually expect you to beat this game?"

After years of playing RPG's, something snapped inside me. I just HAD to play a balls-to-the-wall platform game. One that was dripping and oozing and pulsing with raw masculinity; like a man flexing his taut, muscular biceps, his tattoos quivering with sheer testosterone, the sweat beading on the peaks of his arms; his stubble and chocolate-brown hair shining in the bright jungle sun and heat; he then turns his coal black bedroom-eyes to me and a smile curls on his soft, thin, kissable lips; he moves one finger in a gesture that seduces me to approach him; he wraps his arms around my lithe frame and looks into my eyes, nay, my soul with those gentle eyes with their perfect eyebrows and velvety lashes; he presses our bodies together; and then he parts his lips slightly as he presses them to mine; and then….. erm, uh, eh, well nevermind. In any case, I chose Contra III: Alien Wars as my antidote to long drawn-out dialogue and turn-based battles. A good choice, as Contra III is eighteen million platform games crammed into six absolutely impossible levels.

Let's start with the plot. You only need to know three words: ALIENS! SHOOT EVERYTHING! C'mon people! It's a Contra game, what did you expect? You play one of two ultra-buff macho men (I wanna be a macho man…ok, I'll shut up now) with a gun and a death wish. It is your duty as the gamer to take them through the level shooting anything that moves.

Weapons! This game stays true to the Contra way. You have a machine gun, but flying power-up containers can give you new guns like flamethrower and homing missiles. Nice, except when you die you lose the weapon. However, your character actually has two guns, so you can have two different weapons at once (press X to switch). The best part: when you die, you only lose the gun your firing. So you can prolong your weapon's life by switching to another before your face is ripped off. However, you'll die too much and too quickly to make this a viable option. However you will almost never actually shoot one of the fly-by power-up capsules, so it's moot. As an added bonus, you have a bomb that kills everything on the screen. You'll use it in the first ten seconds.

The levels are standard fair: left to right, with huge pits, pillars of fire, swirling sand pits and just about any other natural disaster that could cause you to pull your hair out. Which brings me to the main idea behind Contra III: it's way too hard. No level is complete without something that makes it impossible to just move. In the first level, the city goes ablaze leaving you to hop from monkey-bar to monkey-bar over flames and fireballs like, well, a monkey. And it only gets worse from there. Good levels are challenging because they are inventive, not because it's Armageddon every four steps. Levels two and five do add some variety to the game. The side-view shifts to overhead where our heroes run through a ravaged overworld searching for these weird bunkers to destroy. Only then will the boss show their face. In the meanwhile, the terrain and monsters are out to get you. Forward and back move, left and right strafe, and L and R turn, which, while a nice try, makes it impossible to move anywhere, let alone shoot anything.

The reviewers biggest gripe is his inability to get a boyfriend; however his biggest gripe with the game is the enemies. There's too many and they're too strong. Which brings me pack to my main point: Contra III is too hard. Enemies pour out like maggots from a festering corpse (an apt simile, as the aliens look like mutant insects). It's as if the developers were asking themselves “how many monsters can we cram into one game?” The number is absurd and completely overwhelming. And when you add in the one-hit-you're-dead element to the mix, it becomes clear: you're doomed. The enemies come in all sorts of forms, from gun-toting soldiers to rampaging aliens to fireball-hocking spiders to whatever. All of them come in numbers too big to handle and will make quick work of that flesh heap that was your body. This isn't fun, it's just a pain. You die too much to get anywhere in the game, which you were never supposed to do in the first place. This game is comprised of just six very short and very similar levels all jam packed with monsters to distract you from the fact that each level is just a boring derivative of the others. And you can forget about AI. Who needs intelligence when you've got sheer numbers? This game is like stomping on ants, except the ants kill you first.

But the worst part of this game is the bosses. They're creative, which is a plus, but they're too creative, which is just one more thorn in your proverbial side. When I say they're too creative, I mean they're too powerful. Each one comes fully armed with a huge health bar, ridiculous amounts of firepower, and attacks that you cannot dodge, so don't try. At all. Ever. And those are just the mini bosses. Descriptions fail me, so let me give you an example:

In level three, the first mini boss is a spiked ball at the axis of a rotating platform. You hold onto the platform to shoot at the weak spot on the underside. However, you best be hanging onto the edge or you'll be sent straight into the spikes and die. Also mind the drill atop the ball. When you beat it, you walk up one half-screen until this same ball now has feet and is crab-walking up the side of the wall with you underneath. All the while it's firing missiles at you that you can try to shoot, but won't be able to hit. When it gets high enough, sections of the wall extend out into a spiked floor and ceiling with the ball on the other side of the screen from you, aligning you in its crosshairs. It will then unleash its drill and charge into you. AND, it's only when its drill is out can you shoot its miniscule weak spot at the risk of an impaling. Thirty deaths later, you have to shoot down a helicopter that is launching missiles and birdmen at you. AND THE FUN IS JUST STARTING! When you get to the end of the level you must fight two robots in this small room. One shoots lasers at the floor where your standing, the other hangs onto the ceiling shooting you if you try to climb the walls. Shoot them enough and they lose their bodies, instead bouncing around the room like fleas. Only after you blow these up can you rest. Except you can't BECAUSE THEY'RE NOT THE BOSS!! NO! The boss is a huge robot that shoots homing lasers, a fire cannon that travels in radial fashion around the screen, and bombs that blow up on one side of the room. You have to shoot him in the head while not being struck by the moving lasers, leaping over the flames and running like mad when he has set you up the bomb. If you can survive all this, only then have you beat the level and it's onto level four because you will never learn.

I'm not kidding, that's all the bosses in level three. JUST ONE LEVEL!!! And it only gets harder on higher difficulties.

The biggest injustice is that you can only get the actual ending on ‘HARD' difficulty, which is completely unbeatable without cheat codes. Anything less just gets you admonished for being a wuss.

After all that, the graphics and sound become completely moot, but I'll discuss them anyway. The backgrounds are fine, but the foreground colors are terribly garish, with bright blue and red conflicting with purples, greens, yellows and grays. The music is simplistic and uninspiring, but it gets the job done without getting on my bad side (which is a complement as far as I'm concerned). The sound effects aren't bad at all either, but like everything else with this game, they are overkill. Between the guns and the enemies and the bombs and the dying and everything else, there's too much noise. I turned sound off and put on an album of my own. Not because the sound was bad, there's just too much.

All in all, Contra III can be summed up in one word: excess. This is what happens when crack addicts design a game. It's too spastic, too excessive, too much of a sensory overload. It's also (say it with me) TOO DAMN HARD! This isn't challenging, it's overkill! You weren't actually supposed to get past level 1, and it shows. This game feels like a rush job with millions of minions to make it feel like your being challenged. If you are inclined to play this game, get some PAR codes and make yourself invincible with your weapon of choice and infinite lives, just to cover all the bases, then go on a mindless killing spree. But that isn't any fun. It's just boring and devoid of challenge or entertainment. So with that, I'm putting down my controller, putting on my best eveningwear, and I'm going out to interact with humanity.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 02/10/05