This is perhaps the most unapologetically lame and nerdy thing you’re bound to see today. Yes, it’s a video of me playing Super Contra! Within its savage walls, I show you gaming so raw that its musculature is left exposed to an arid post-apocalyptic climate.
I don’t know what you’ll enjoy more, the “kickin’ tunes” or the occasional sound of me tapping furiously on the X button!
Enemies in the Sky (YouTube)
Time to slap your wife and turn the TV off, because there’s a new RD on the streets! Pop it in, put on your headphones, and stay away from JoE’s house because he’s just going to make you kill roaches for him as he sobs in the corner!
A curious obsession with Super Contra is creeping up on me. I have to conquer its evil terrains. I have to dig to the root of this alien menace and pull it out like a tainted radish. Tonight’s leap from the whirlybird rope took me further through the depths of level 3’s scorching jungle, wherein many truths were revealed.
If this doesn’t make you want to play, you might be dead!
Frogmen ambushed me from the canopy to the swamp, but probing more deeply brought the real enemy, aliens, out of hiding. At the end of their unforgiving gauntlet, a trap was sprung! I had haplessly strayed headfirst into a fiendish alien wall that spewed its babies forth like an extremely literal fountain of youth.
Their onslaught was too much for me, and so zapped was my final continue. If only I had a partner, just like the poster and cover art! But who would be so brave?
Update (1:35am): Damn, I wrecked the HECK out of some Super C tonight. While waiting for the eternal download known as the Bioshock demo, I made it to the last boss before I ultimately kicked the bucket. There just wasn’t any juice left in my poor soldier, but it felt great to truck through 95% of the game like some demonic, juiced-up tractor trailer of TV game vengeance.
You’d cheer too
Super Contra or, as I knew it on the NES when I was wee, Super C (because the C-word was suddenly deemed very not legit) landed on the sexy 360 a little while ago and, despite all of the ghoulish voices shouting “No!” in my brain, I dove right in and gave Konami the 400 space bux that I had been sitting on for a while.
You’re probably jumping up and down like some uncultured savage right about now, screaming “Boogah Boogah Boogah,” which roughly translates to “But those arcade versions are teeeeerrible, Joseph!”
Konami, not content with only ripping off ALIENS.
It’s true, they can’t touch the intense eroticism of the NES ports in my opinion, but they’re ridiculously challenging and I’m a complete masochist for this kind of crap. The tough-as-a-Charleston-Chew award really goes to Super Contra, though, because it is a damn MONSTER. I used to be able to hold my own on Nintendo, but this sludge-borne animal has me licked by the third stage. It certainly doesn’t help that aiming in the direction you desire is a feat that even Zeus (as played by Tiny Lister) would find a confounding physical endurance test.
This screen makes the NES game look like fine art.
Cruel difficulty aside, Super Contra still has one of the most epic helicopter battles of all time, right there in the first stage! Expect this to fall somewhere on my future feature, The JLR Presents: The Top 10 TV Game Helicopter Throwdowns of All Time.
Addendum: if you play this game with the vomit-like “enhanced” graphics, you’re the son of a whore! Someone please remind me to scan in the incredible Nintendo Power Super C cover later, because I can’t find it on the internet.
What’s that making Senor Coco go loco? What game’s got him screamin’ like a demon? Why, Midway’s very own digital follow-up to John Woo’s Hard Boiled, Stranglehold, of course!
Were I a betting man, I’d wager this demo will make at least 90% of the population coo-coo like (not for) Cocoa Puffs. The game is totally bonkers and over the top. As Tequila, if you so much as rub your thigh against a flat surface the game sends you into a raging fit of automatic awesome, which is a vague way of saying that you slide along counter tops and tables.
Each segment of the level here is a virtual action movie set-piece loaded with context sensitive acrobatics and glimmering objects that will, upon being shot, explode with sparks and drop boxes and other sharp-ended messes on your foes. When firefights are at their most intense, the screen is a slow-motion frame loaded with blood, splinters, concrete and sparks. Yeah, it uses old, tired Max Payne gimmicks, but it uses them so damn well.
There are even mexican standoffs! In a game! How the hell does that even work? (Okay, I’ll tell you) With everyone aiming at one another, you start dispatching your foes one by one as you use the left stick to dodge bullets like Nick Cage in that NEXT trailer. Oh. Yes.
I sincerely doubt that I’ll rent this game when it drops on the 26th of this very month. I will probably buy it. With money!
subhumanzoids 