When Contra debuted in February 1988, I was 12 years old and never really knew the pleasure of pumping xenophobes full of lead. I unwrapped the cellophane ]packaging, jazzed at the artwork on the cover of two hardcore commandos looking like the mother alien was about to skewer them both. What transpired after I popped in the ol' flip-top-lid NES was fast and furious shoot 'em ups at their best and managed to occupy the rest of my winter that year. I tend to go back to old-school 8-bit a lot, as it helps me define what the gaming industry has learned and sometimes overlooks with the next-gen titles. Contra didn't have customizable characters, nor online multi-player. What id did have was an endless supply of bullets, a soundtrack of beeps and boops that constantly filled you with a sense of urgency, a spread gun that was sickening to lose if you died, and oh, let's not forget that naughty delightful 30-man code. No back story, no opening FMV cinema with Hollywood production values. Just mean warfare on side and up scrolling screens. One hit on your sorry butt was a kill, so the reward of getting through it without the code was and still is bragging rights to this day. Two marines, a red and a blue, teamed up for an extra-terrestrial onslaught culimanting with sinking all your firepower into a weird central nervous system at the end of stage 8, guarded by arthrpodic creatures reminscent of H.R. Geiger facehuggers. It's a 40 minute deep dish of gun-blazing that still has me salivating to mash the fire button with a friend to this day.
Okay, if you do not know that cheat code right up there then you're not a true gamer. When I was a little kid my first words were those right there. My family thought there was something wrong with me. Okay so that's ... Read Full Review
Ignore the obscure title "Probotector" European gamers, what you see here is the best example of how the use the NES hardware. Although Contra is weaker on the NES compared to it's arcade brother, Contra on NES is probab... Read Full Review
