Eight ways to die When Rambo/Arnie fever ran rampant with teenage imaginations. What's essential is to snag the 'spread' weapon, which spurts out a 45-degree arc of fire in three blobs, giving you a fighting chance to dispatch the hordes of enemies that relentlessly pour onto the screen from left and right - and often on platforms above, too. Some, like the laser gun, are powerful, but not all that useful in high pressure scenarios, while others just beef up the standard gun you start off with. Snagging these essential power-ups involves blasting a floating icon before it whizzes off-screen - not the easiest task, either, because of the way each one bobs around, teasingly. That's Super Contra, right there.Īs ever, the key to making progress is making sure you're armed to the teeth - without the best weapons you might as well give up because the odds stack up against you so ferociously. You still face off against ludicrous numbers of enemies and giant pieces of military hardware, but rather than having to worry about what's above you, you have to think about enemies coming at you from all around - and that's as tough a test as you can get with the default weapon. It's still essentially the same game in many ways. (It sounds ridiculous to include 'slopes' as a new feature, but this is 1988 we're talking about).Įlsewhere, the game switches into top-down isometric Commandos/Ikari Warriors-style levels where you face an even sterner test. The chief new addition is that the side-scrolling levels now feature slopes, making progress through even the first section of the first level potentially hazardous if you're not enormously careful. If you thought the original Contra was a bit of a ball breaker, then this will have you seeking therapy before the first of the five levels is over with. It matters not, because all that's important is the fact that it's a regulation side-scrolling shooter with big weapons, masses of enemies and the kind of steep learning curve that will leave modern gamers in a crumpled, bloodied heap. Against their former (now mutated) comrades. And just like last time out, they're busy countering some sort of inexplicable invasion somewhere in deepest South America. So, here are the facts: It's a direct follow-up to the 1987 arcade shooter Contra and once again features the same grizzled war veterans, Bill Rizer and Lance Bean. Super Contra is simply not even close to fulfilling that criteria - and yet here it is, joining the ever-growing pile of undeserving titles to be squeezed out of Konami's festering retro-bowels onto Live Arcade. It should resonate as a great game as much today as it did when it came out. Classic gaming in the truest sense of the term ought to transcend the era it was made in. But gamers have the unerring tendency to confuse the issue of classic gaming with the plain old nostalgia value surrounding certain titles, or their influence at the time. At the time they were certainly popular, and, if you were around at the time, these brutally tough side-scrolling shooters were generally warmly received. Some people might hail the early Contra games as some kind of late '80s arcade treasure, and that's fine. Clearly not everyone's got the concept of 'classic' gaming nailed down. But throwing any old back catalogue rubbish onto Live and calling it a 'retro classic' is, at best, misleading. We even learned to have a modicum of fun with Green Beret after re-learning how to play it. The odd piece of retro crap like Yie Ar Kung-Fu, we can tolerate. And if Microsoft's having a giggle at the public for buying them, Konami must be regularly hospitalised with the endless belly laughs it's having at our expense. Sometimes it's like Microsoft is sat there mocking us with the dire quality of certain Xbox Live Arcade games.
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