You know what’s cool? When one of the dudes who worked on a really great sequel to someone else’s creation writes an article ruminating on the things about the original work that inspired his own efforts. I’m pretty into that.
9 thoughts on “GSJ10: Xenofightin’”
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I don’t know quite what it is about them, but both Contra 3 and Super Castlevania IV are games I can play over and over until the end of time.
I _still_ can’t beat this on Hard. Granted, I haven’t put in the time that I did on the original Contra, but it’s darn tough compared to Normal.
At least I _can_ beat it on Normal, though. That counts for something, right?
At any rate, really good point on how the game serves up set pieces at an absolutely alarming rate. Is this possibly the video game equivalent of a Michael Bay movie? (Am I allowed to say that? The game is good, even if Bay’s stuff isn’t always.)
Just FY everybody’s I, Contra 4 was meant to have a “Car” moment. In the opening stage there is a bridge when the play area is still entirely on the bottom screen. A plane (not unlike Contra 3’s plane) was intended to fly by on the top screen and just totally nuke the jungle. You would then play the entire jungle stage engulfed in flames with a cool heat wave effect and smoke and everything. So it’s the jungle you know… then suddenly ON FIRE and on TWO SCREENS! It’s the car TO THE MAX.
Unfortunately there wasn’t time for this coolness and it had to be cut, but you can still see proof in the fact that once you climb the mountain (ramp) in the Jungle Stage, all the vegetation is withered and dead.
Just to let you know, I really, really enjoyed Contra 4. More so than 3. It felt like the right mix of the original and Contra 3, and for that, it totally wins in my eyes.
Agreed. Contra 4 is cool enough, even though I’m a wimp and can’t even beat it on the easiest setting. I’m not really sure when my gaming skills deteriorated so, but it doesn’t help that I’ve ‘upgraded’ my DS Lite with a 3DS, whose atrocious hardware design makes it pretty impossible for me to play these type of games.
Mostly, though, I’ve always liked Contra, but always been pretty terrible at them.
I like all the articles from this issue, but man, some just simply feel much too short. What is this, the internet?
Fun write up. The car is pretty sweet. I think Contra 3 would be the best Contra game of all time if the overhead stages didn’t kind of suck. And the boss on the second over head stage is just broken as hell. There simply isn’t any way to get good at that fight, especially on Hard mode.
So Contra on NES is still the best. I’m very partial to Shattered Soldier too.
Finally I get to comment on one of these. The FFIII one didn’t appear until the comments were already shut down for some reason. Ditto DKC. (I would add to DKC that I was only disappointed it upstaged the truer to the original series, yet more novel, DK ’94 for the Game Boy.)
I have to agree with Tomm on Contra III in general representing the midpoint between the old run-n-gun of the original and the setpiece design of future games (not to mention Treasure’s Genesis output).
I always had fun going over to a friend’s house who had an SNES, and just jamming out to Contra 3 for a Saturday. I don’t think we ever beat it, but man if it wasn’t fun to blow stuff up.