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| Halfway through the stage you run into one of these mean machines seen above on the left. Yeah, it looks like a car straight out of South Central, complete with spikes and a front-mounted machine gun. Notice the spikes on the roof as well..... damn, Red Falcon thought of everything. So, since jumping is out of the question, all you can do is fire away with all you've got until the vehicle explodes. It's actually easy to tell how much damage you're doing to it, thanks to the fact that it changes colors as it gets shot. Oops, looks like the quality inspection alien let that one slip by. Nothing quite like a visual clue to help you know how quickly an enemy is getting lit up. Also, it pays to mention that a commando carrying a Spreader gun will make quick work of this car. I guess a gun that fires three plastic balls at once will smite even the toughest armored beast. After you blow up P. Diddy's ride, you get to run through some more winter wonderland before you encounter the armored car's EVIL TWIN. Well, it's really not THAT evil considering that it's IDENTICAL to the first-- and that first car was a complete nancy. So blow it up and you'll eventually encounter the boss of this stage. Ahhh, it's tough to have a game dealing with aliens without the presence of a few flying spaceships. This ship in particular fades in and out at different points on the screen while crapping fireballs onto you and releasing minispaceships from its flanks. The minicrafts all fall to the floor and turn it into some stupid obstacle course by making you jump over them. Of course, if you have a really powerful weapon you can always just shoot them before they reach the ground. And if you're really skilled with that uberweapon of yours (the spreader, i mean) you can just aim up and shoot rapidly while jumping, and the boss will hardly even have a chance to think "oh, shit, i suck", let alone fight the battle. After this fight your character will run through the doorway and into a stage that truly epitomizes the old-school videogame level. |
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| STAGE 6 -- The Hallway Leading to the Human Relations Office First, allow me to explicate the reasoning behind my last comment. What I mean when I say "epitomizes the old-school videogame level" is that older games tend to have stages that are filled to the brim with various forms of ruination and subterfuge. How many evil counts do you think actually had swinging blades and little fireballs jumping out of lava beds in their castles? Along that line, how many evil geniuses had buildings filled with hundreds of flamethrowers adorning the walls? In older videogames levels tended to be filled with things that just didn't make a damn bit of sense. Obviously games today are much more realistic, and I'm not just talking about the graphics. In general, stages just seem to make more sense these days; i.e., the placement of their objects seems to make sense. Why do I bring this up? I don't really know. I guess even to this day I've been confused as to why someone evil would construct a building filled with flame throwers all over the freakin' place. I know they're evil, and with evilness comes a bit of eccentricity, but this is ridiculous. It can't be an incinerator, as last I checked, incinerators don't have weapon pods hanging on the walls. Maybe one day Konami will reply to my 300 letters and explain themselves. If I never see a response, I guess I'll just have to be content in knowing that my letter is probably being used to wipe some programmer's ass. One day I will know the truth. There really isn't all that much to say about this stage. Look at the pic above, copy it about 20 times, and lay the images end to end-- Voila! There's stage 6. Aside from the striking redundancy, this level can be kind of a bitch. Rest assured most times you're going to lose at least two lives from accidentally jumping headfirst into a thick red stream of pure incineration. The whole challenge in this level is to make it to the end without gutting your controller with your teeth. With that said, at the end you get to fight a rather strange boss. |
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| You remember all those moronic football player soldiers you so heinously butchered in levels one and three? Meet their leader. As in all videogames, the leader has to be at least three times as big as his underling, and he has to wear spikes somewhere on his body. He's also supposed to be twice as smart. Well, when your henchmen's combined IQ is less than zero, that makes you twice as fucking stupid. Sorry big fella. He just wanders from side to side, jumping like some nutty fruitcake and chucking strange red disks that come from God-knows-where. Maybe he just ate a whole cabinet of fine china, and he's pulling dinner plates out of his ass. Maybe he's a Chippendale Dancer and he's stripping off plates of his armor. I guess that would explain the flashy runway you get to fight on. Eh, it's up for debate. All you really need to pass this conflict is a penchant for jumping and firing like mad. Jump over him as he runs toward you, shoot, jump over plates, shoot, jump over him as he runs toward you, repeat. Not a lot of strategy, but then again, has there really been any strategy in this game so far? Other than not putting your controller through the TV. |
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| STAGE 7 -- The Hall of Spikes and More! Here's another example of an old-school videogame level. Throughout the stage you get to encounter not only spiked pistons and spiked walls that pop up in front of you, but also randomly placed mine carts! Yes, mine carts in a level filled with pulverizing spike arms-- holy shit, this level just OOZES common sense! It's also not at a loss for overkill. This stage is just another long endurance match of dodging spikes. It's so invariant, that I've run out of things to say about it! Therefore, I see it fit to move on to the "boss" battle at the end. The first time I played through this level, I ran through this "boss" battle without even realizing it. "Oh shit, that was a boss?" Here's how the battle rounds out: You have to shoot this golden cross above the door on the right, all the while dodging plastic balls of badness shot by the two turrets below you. At specified intervals, a group of three soldiers will valiantly rush out of the door you're already pelting with ammo. If they don't die from the bullets already headed in their direction, they'll probably just rush right by you like the insipid drones they are. I bet they run on and never get squashed by the spike pistons. God protects idiots. Good thing there are commandos around to kill 'em all. Guess what? Blow up the cross like a good Pagan and you'll get to go into the secret underground lair of Red Falcon himself. Er.. itself. |
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| STAGE 8 -- PINK SPIDERS, ALIEN LARVAE, AND PULSING HEARTS, OH MY! OK, here we are, the final level. This is a pretty gross stage when you think about it. I think some Konami exec got his hands on some pretty nasty cocaine and distributed it to the entire development team. The floors, walls, and ceiling are all made out of bones, and there are these huge hot pink mouths that spit pink spiders that home in on you. Man, if spiders could really fly so freely, civilization would fall. The first boss you fight is a long finger-like head that never really moves (with the exception of its lower jaw) and spits large orange fetuses at you. Fetuses with sharp teeth, to be precise. Now look, I've taken embryology, and fetuses just don't have teeth. Except for the British fetuses. That's only because their teeth need an extra eight months to grow so abnormally large. Aside from the "weird" factor, there's nothing much to this thing. Shoot him in the mouth until the head goes poof and the neck remains. As a side note, the remaining neck looks like some bad erase-job kids do in kindergarten-- you know, when their brains are only half-formed and they wet the bed. Good one, graphic artist. Once you kill this wuss, proceed to the right and shoot more spiders and mouths and other oddities. When you reach the end of the level you'll certainly know it because............. OH MY HOLY GOD THERE'S A GIANT COCK AND BALLS HANGING FROM THE WALL!!!! |
| Just kidding. But wouldn't that be gross if I were right? Maybe Konami intended it to be a big pulsating penis, but just failed miserably and concluded, "eh it sorta looks like a heart, and beats like a heart, let's just call it a heart." Or maybe this thing truly IS a heart, and that pink toothed finger-like thing you fought earlier was a penis! I know there has to be a penis in there somewhere. Cuz I know those Konami guys. Perverts. Apparently, it takes this huge pulsating mass to raise four little egg sacs to parturition. From these sacs jump creepy hot pink scorpions (again with the hot pink) which fly at you and then run off the screen, never to be seen again. As you avoid these meddlesome neon arachnids, you'll want to continue to put round after plastic round into the head until it can't take n'more. If you don't, you'll be here for a long, long time. As a quick side note, one of the coolest things in Contra is how the heart beats faster and faster as you do more damage to it. Why I think it's so frickin' cool, I don't know, but it is. It probably has something to do with the sound it makes. Blow up the heart and you win. Simple as that. But when you do, you better run, grab some popcorn, and buckle yourself in tight, because you're about to experience the most thrilling, nail-biting, pulse-pounding, nerve-racking, ass-kicking ending ever created in the history of videogaming. |
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| Stage 5 -- The Part of Alien Island where Christmas is Year-round As the stage title probably indicates, I was a little bumfuzzled by this level. This island has GOT to have the most diverse climate I've ever seen in one location. I guess by calling it an "alien" island, Konami developers became entitled to a few creative liberties. I'll have to remember that the next time I need to desperately make as little sense as possible. This level marks the return of something very important: The left-to-right scrolling. Yes, for the mentally arrested individuals among you, stop strainin' those brains! You can simply move from left to right across the level again, while firing and jumping as you see fit. You do have to be a little careful though, as there are two new enemies joining the football player this round. The first is what appears to be a soldier firing at you over a water fountain. In fact, now that I look more closely, these men seem to bear a striking resemblance to the American Gladiators (complete with their big toy gun). I'll be damned. I guess what I said back in Stage One really did have merit. Anyway, these guys fire the same plastic balls that you've grown accustomed to, except for the tiny detail that they fire them RATHER QUICKLY. The safest way to handle these fools is to duck down and blast their toenails off. That way, their shots will never hit you, and the shooters themselves will never catch on. Idiots. The second new enemy you fight isn't really an enemy at all. Rather, it's a tree that throws grenades. Yep, a tree. Again with the goddamned creative liberties, Konami. Why not make them alien trees with neon green bark? If you're gonna go stupid, you might as well go all the way, lest you look like a halfwit. Basically, you watch the arc of the grenades and jump when they hit the ground. You see, flying plastic balls will put you on your ass, but highly explosive ordnance will just go right through you. Perhaps it has to do with the grenades looking more like pills than bombs. Maybe it's a trick. Maybe Red Falcon is trying to trick the commandos into thinking that they're receiving free steroids. Maybe Red Falcon isn't so stupid after all. Or maybe Konami has one really BAD graphical artist. Who knows. |
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| THE END Wow, I remember how awesome this ending was back when I saw it for the first time. Of course, that was back when I was 9, and I had just been in that strange construction accident where a 4 foot rusty steel pipe had impaled my forehead, causing blood to build up in my skull and increase the pressure on my brain, allowing me to accomplish little more than a) drool on myself, b) occasionally twitch an eyelid, and c) utter such phrases as "mmm poop come" and "erg, mouths and straw for drinky." I guess you do have to be a slobbering, incontinent sloth with the mind of a 2 year old to be entertained by this piece of golden cinema. And how about that little message at the end? Saved the universe, eh? Even to THIS DAY we have no idea if life exists outside our solar system, and if it did, what if the rest of the universe was populated with galaxies where the dominant life form was a Red Falcon? Millions of Red Falcons plotting our eminent demise. We're not heroes. We're fucked. |
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| AFTERWORD I figured I would leave you with some of the box art for Contra, partly because I had forgotten what it looked life myself and partly because you've probably forgotten that games used to come in crappy cardboard boxes. To the left we have the American version, which looks more like an poster advertisement for Predator than a video game. "Konami" must be Japanese for "Plagiarism." In the middle we have the Japanese cover art, a design so vapid and hideous, it's a surprise any one in Japan ever even TOUCHED this game, let alone played it. And finally, on the far right we have the European cover art. Somewhere along the line, some guy thought it would be great to change the name of the game from Contra to Probotector, a title so provocative it would give Ricky Martin a hard-on. This same imbecile also saw it fit to completely rape the game's image by replacing chiseled armed soldiers with.....MECHS??? Remember when I surmised that some Konami exec had gotten his hands on some really potent crack? Well, I think it's safe to say that it's no longer a presumption-- Konami of Europe is fucking toasted. |
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