Revisiting:Contra

Up,Up,Down,Down,Left,Right,Left,Right, B,A (SELECT,START is unnecessarily added by some.)Contra was one of the very first games I played (and hated) on the NES. For those who are not familiar with Contra, Contra is a multidirectional Run and Gun Shooter Arcade game released in 1987 by Konami. The player controls a commando who battles waves upon waves of enemies which include (but not limited to) humans, machines, mutants and aliens to reach his ultimate goal, which is to save humanity(duh). Much of the games popularity came from its two-player simultaneous gameplay, which was an uncommon feature in video games at the time. The game became widely popular when it was ported to the NES in 1988. The cheat code you see above is the Konami Code which gave the players thirty lives instead of just two.

I played that game when I was five years old and boy, was I introduced to the emotion "Furious". This game was insanely HARD. Who ever thought of the concept of evil henchmen running towards you and touch you even the slightest bit causes your death was both genius and psychotic. Who the hell dies from getting touched?! Don't get me started on the jumps as well...damn those jumps. It took me almost two weeks to just get over the first level without losing a single life, had a good weapon at hand(Spread) with a good score. (I was five,give me a break...) then of course, came the second level...and the third..and so on and so forth. No matter how hard I tried, I would only reach up to the third level on the default life settings which was pretty frustrating for me but not until I was introduced to the "Konami Code".I also assume that Contra was my first game to discover the presence of cheat codes in games. (But I'm not really sure that's why I assume...) Thanks to that, I was able to breeze thru the game without a care in the world. Looking back at Contra, I can say that it was one of those games that developed my level of skill with gaming, the dexterity of my hands and good hand-eye coordination. Unfortunately, it also made me hate jungles, little pixel dots that can kill and

also introduced me to my first 'controller throwing' moment.

Contra is one of those games that will test your patience and precise execution. A little bit of your memory as well. Even though it only has a few levels (that's for the whole series.) You'd want to try it over and over again just to see how far you can go with just this life or just this skill and that's where Contra shines. It's difficulty itself is a reason for it's replayability. Now, if they can release a proper Contra sequel for the nextgen systems and it's all set. Let's Go Konami!

peace Out!

-Chady