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1992 · SNES · Super Famicom
| Region | Date | Publisher |
|---|---|---|
| Japan | 28 Feb 1992 | Konami |
| North America | Mar 1992 | Konami |
| Europe and Australia | 19 Nov 1992 | Konami |
Aliens have invaded Earth, and two commandos, Bill Rizer and Lance Bean, are all that stand in the way. That is the brief, and the game spends almost no time on it. You run, jump, climb, and shoot everything across six stages, alone or with a friend.
Four stages scroll sideways in classic Contra style. The other two are overhead, drawn with the SNES's Mode 7 so the whole map rotates as you turn, while you hunt down a set of targets. You carry two guns and switch between them, each taking one power-up such as the spread shot, flamethrower, laser or homing missiles, plus a stock of screen-clearing bombs. Die and you lose the weapon you were holding.
Konami released it in Japan on 28 February 1992 and in North America on 26 March. Europe got it that September as Super Probotector: Alien Rebels, with the heroes redrawn as robots and a slightly slower frame rate on PAL machines.
It was the first Contra directed by Nobuya Nakazato, who went on to direct later entries. He thought the series needed more humour and more spectacle, and he set a rule that something interesting should happen every three screens of scrolling. That is why you end up hanging from a flying missile, and why mid-stage bosses turn up so often. The effect pushed the SNES hard; the missile scene is drawn partly with background tricks so the hardware could cope.
Brilliantly, if you like being tested. The action is dense, loud and inventive from the first screen, the bosses are huge, and the controls are sharp enough that every death is your fault. With two players it is chaotic in the best way. A run takes an evening, and learning it well takes many.
The overhead stages are the weak spot: turning the map is disorienting and they feel slow next to the side-scrolling ones. Losing your gun on death can leave you under-armed at the worst moment. The difficulty is steep on normal and brutal above it, and North American and European players get limited continues where the Japanese version is more forgiving. Shortness is the other honest complaint.
Contra III kills you constantly, and every death is your fault. The controls are sharp enough that you cannot blame the game. That should make it miserable. Somehow it makes it one of the best evenings the SNES offers.
Bernard Suits defined playing a game as 'the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles'. Nobody needs to hang off a flying missile while shooting aliens. We queue up for it. Jesper Juul calls this the paradox of failure: we avoid failure in life yet seek it in games, where it makes us reconsider and improve. Each death teaches you where a boss will strike next, and the lessons stack until a run you could not imagine becomes routine. With a second player it gets better, because you fail together, laugh at the same explosions and learn the same stage side by side. A shared defeat you can simply retry is a strangely warm thing.
Read: One must imagine Mario happy →
Verdict · 9/10
The high point of Contra on Nintendo hardware and one of the best action games on the SNES. Short, hard and relentlessly entertaining.
