AKA: “Probotector” (EUR), “Gryzor” (EUR Arcade), “Kontora” (JAP)
Summary: A bastard-hard shooter, featuring the most famous cheat code in gaming history. From the moment the first level’s driving music kicks in, you know this is gonna be great.
Review
Contra starts with two crack commandoes being night-dropped into an Amazonian jungle, bare-chested, with nothing but their bandanas and trusty assault rifles by their sides. Lance ‘Scorpion’ Bean and Bill ‘Mad Dog’ Rizer, their relationship unknown but presumed to be purely professional, plunge beneath the tropical canopy to begin facing off against the innumerable forces of the alien threat known as the Red Falcon.
Soon the action has moved on to military bases, frozen tundras and abandoned aircraft hangars. The pace is relentless, with wave after wave of hapless cannon fodder running gormlessly into your line of fire across 8 varied levels.
Unless you’re playing the original Japanese version, that’s as far as the plot stretches, as the pre-game cut scenes got cut out while the game was being translated. The manual includes a rewritten backstory with the action — originally said to be taking place in 2633 — unnecesarily transposed to the present day. Essentially, a UFO crashes into Earth, with an unspeakable evil hidden inside. The Pentagon, keen to avoid an international incident despite the fate of the Universe being at stake, dispatch the two bad boys to go in and kick some extraterrestrial ass.
“Guns. Lots of guns.”
While your standard gun is perfectly capable of blasting through hordes of renegade invaders, it pales in comparison to the other firepower on offer. New weapons can be found in wall-mounted crates or floating onto the screen encased in elliptical pods at certain points in the level. Shooting these oscillating pods will bestow one of five gun upgrades.
- The rapid fire power up gives your weapon an increased rate of fire. This can be picked up alongside any of the other upgrades.
- The machine gun (a.k.a. “Ol’ Painless”) feels better under your arm, and does more damage than your standard semi-automatic rifle. Best of all, you can simply hold down the
button to produce a constant stream of fire. - The flamethrower is a cumbersome gun that spurts balls of fire in erratic loops and twirls. The bolts’ drunken trajectories can be so frustrating that a lot of the time you’ll just let this upgrade sail by.
- The laser fires narrow beams of highly-concentrated energy capable of boring holes through fixed gun emplacements, or two or three enemies at a time. It’s slow to fire, and requires skill to get the best out of.
- The spread gun is everybody’s favourite hand-cannon. Firing funnel-shaped groups of bullets, clearing a screen of enemies is a simple task of blasting a volley of bullets in all eight directions.
Death in this game means you not only lose a precious life, but you also start out again with your relatively weedy pea-shooter, so it’s really something to avoid. And it’s gonna happen — you can expect to see “Game Over” within 5 minutes of first sitting down to play.
Up Up, Down Down…
Contra contained the most famous cheat code of all time, known variously as “the Konami cheat” or the “30-man cheat.” It could be performed by quickly keying in the following on the title screen:
Select Start
Mercifully, this would start you on 30 lives instead of the meagre three that you were given normally. Due to the game’s intense difficulty, there is a large population of players that would never have seen the end credits if it weren’t for this code.
The influences of the action films of the time, which were themselves laced with tales of ruthless Alien invaders, brave heroes, and insurmountable odds, are spread throughout Contra. The two commandoes on the game’s cover art bear an uncanny similarity to Dutch and Billy, two of the expendable assets who find themselves stranded in the jungle in John McTiernan’s survival-themed Predator. Further into the game when you reach the Alien’s Lair, things go completely sci-fi. The enemy designs look like they could’ve been lifted straight from the pages of H. R. Giger’s sketchbook; when he wasn’t drawing dicks, at least.
“Don’t mention the war.”
Contra was curiously repackaged for the European release on the NES with Gundam-style humanoid robots in place of the commandoes from the original, becoming “Probotector.” This was only at the beginning of the “violent video games” media assault, and bipedal robots knocking seven bells out of each other is inherently less violent than a bloodthirsty commando attack.
There was something more behind this decision though; due to various political machinations, the publishers became uneasy with the reference to the Nicaraguan contra scandal in this, their children’s entertainment. Much the same sensitivity is responsible for Europe receiving the “Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles” and Ninja Gaiden being renamed to “Shadow Warriors.”
Apart from the graphical switcheroos, the game was otherwise unchanged from the American release, and so was still excellent.
| Graphics: | 2/5 | Varied and stylised, but very basic. |
|---|---|---|
| Sound: | 2/5 | The sound effects are pretty poor (especially that Goddamn flamethrower), but the music’s good, especially on the first level. |
| Fun: | 5/5 | As long as you don’t get too frustrated by the soul-crushing difficulty of it all, this is great fun. |
| Challenge: | 5/5 | Even with the recommended 2 players going at it together, it’ll be a while before you manage to clear Contra on only three lives. |
| Overall: | 5/5 | An action classic. |
—Ross, 2004-10-27