Facebook – Top 100 FAVORITE Video Games: 55

55: Contra (Arcade/NES/every console ever, pretty much)
Developer: Konami
Year: 1987

Yep, I’m going to hell for this. If there’s any problem with creating a list like this, its that – once you get high enough – you start to really hate yourself for putting great games so far down. Contra in the 50’s is an injustice, some of you will say, and you might be right. But, as will be the case with many games coming up (and especially once we get into the top 30/20 area), the games have to fall SOMEWHERE and Contra just happens to fall here. Don’t let this make you think I hate this game, though. No, if there’s any one game that defined side-view (and sometimes half-top-down view!) action shooters, it was Contra.

Depending on which version of this damn game you’re playing, you are either Bill or Lance and you’re waging all out war on either Red Falcon the military organization or Red Falcon the invading alien force. It doesn’t really matter, as all version take you across a number of levels until you end up in some creature’s hive and destroy the thing (which clearly has alien spawn shooting off it at the end). In no version of the game does the manual really set the stage for any grand narrative, and that’s fine. All you really need to know in order to enjoy the hell out of this game is that you have a gun and the other guys have guns, too, and they’re shooting at you. Likely you should kill them, and kill them dead.

Now, while it would be difficult to talk at length about Contra’s storyline with any great depth, anyone claiming the game’s narrative punches as the reason they play it is a damn liar and joining me in hell. No, we all come for the amazing fun of the gameplay which is at the same time both simple and brutal, but always addictive. You go from side-scrolling to a pseudo-dungeon crawl to a climb up a mountain, over and over again. And while this doesn’t sound that fun in text, with levels so well designed and recognizable that they can be created with love and care in brick form…
…you know you’ve got something great. Enemies litter these levels, both in men-on-foot and automated turret form, things fly at you and guys jump out at you. To say that shit is constantly trying to kill you would be an understatement. And these things aren’t hard to kill, really: typically, enemies take one shot to kill, turrets take some extra emphasis, and bosses sometimes move about in annoying ways, but are fairly routine in regards to the methods needed to eliminate them.

But the difficulty comes in the form of having only one shot in the chest being enough to kill you. This causes some panic in situations where, while ducking, you’re fine, but can’t move; you want to stand up and shoot the enemies in plain sight, but there are too many damn bullets and you only have one life left. And, in the case of some of the bosses, you will feel like you never have a chance to stop moving to avoid heavy fire from destroying either Bill or Lance and ending the game. This creates great tension and some asshole moments where your friend steals your last life just as you are about to die. Dick.

All in all, Contra is a damn fine game, addictive as fuck, and really at its best when played with a friend. I ignored talking about the game’s music much simply because I already commented on it in a previous list a week-or-so ago. Its not hard to come across this game, though, as the original, arcade (lesser, in my opinion) version is available on 360 Arcade and, I believe, the NES version is on Virtual Console, but perhaps its not. Who can say? (someone that checks into it, that’s who) At the end of the day, though, Contra is a game that is still enjoyable these days and with good reason; its a timeless classic that maintains its difficulty and fun factor, all these years later.

Classic Moment:
So hard to really nail down a specific “classic moment” from this game, but perhaps its fair to comment on the Konami code. While not introduced in this game (that right goes to Gradius), Contra did popularize the 30-lives code in a time when looking up cheats on the internet was, well, impossible. Word of mouth got gamers those much needed lives and allowed some people to get past that first wall-boss at the end of level one. And, these days, every gamer can recite the code without much thought. How many button combinations introduced in gaming history are memorized and so widely used?

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Added February 17, 2017
Contra is and will forever be one of my all time favorite titles across any console and one of the few games I can plop down and start playing through to the end immediately, at any time. It is rare that I can just boot up a game and fall in love all over again, and this is one of the greats.