A Tribute to Contra III: The Alien Wars

[PumpkinKoRn52]

The Following is a tribute to Contra III: Alien Wars. This post is actually a post from Maddox.xmission.com and is owned entireley by him. This is my viewpoint, but I did not write this. I only censored it. If you would like to check out more of his stuff, go to Maddox.xmission.com

Enjoy!

Back when men were men and video game characters still had manly hair cuts, one game stood out from the crowd as being the manliest: Contra III: Alien Wars. Everything about this game is no joke. Right off the bat, your character starts out with a rapid fire machine gun and an invincibility barrier for 15 seconds of invincibility so you don't have to put up with any bullstuff cheap shots while you're getting accustomed to the controls (emphasis on you, since I've mastered the controls to every video game I've ever played and have yet to play). You won't find any 5-minute loading times or 45-minute introductions in this game. Instead, you'll find 31 flavors of but kicking with a side of good old fashioned beat-down.
Aliens destroyed with the tank die the exact same way as aliens destroyed by machine gun, laser, spread, homing, flame thrower and rocket. I wouldn't have it any other way.
The premise is simple: aliens have invaded and they're probably up to no good, so destroy every last one of them to be on the safe side. There aren't any rendered CG sequences in between levels. This simple premise alone is enough to guide the story; gamers don't have to be spoon-fed the plot in long, boring cut scenes. It doesn't take hours and hours of character development to get into the game and you don't need to set aside a two hour block of your life to get to a save point. In fact, there aren't any save points. Save points are for pansies.
Your character in this game always has infinite ammunition, an attribute lacking in almost every game today. Developers today try to make their games as realistic as possible and the end result is having to spend hours and hours trying to find stuff in the game. It's boring. Nobody wants to play "virtual scavenger hunt." If I wanted to find stuff for hours, I'd clean my room, and if I wanted realism, I wouldn't be playing video games. It's that simple. The characters in this game don't talk. They don't have cute names. They don't make smart comments every time they run into something, and they don't have 10,000 frames of animation. It doesn't try to be a movie and a game simultaneously, because that formula never works and people always end up skipping the rendered sequences once they've seen them anyway. What's the point?
You never spend more than a few seconds running anywhere in this game. Wave after wave of aliens are always attacking making it impossible to become bored because the aliens are always changing. Level three for example has you dodging flame thrower robots, flying lizard alien mosquitos, a two-legged robot wall climber, snipers, winged troops jumping from UFOs, wall cannons, two mid-sized robots (which look suspiciously like Hideo Kojima's Snatchers) and one giant Snatcher. All of this in one tiny level.
Why I decided to write this homage to Contra III is because the game is just plain fun. I recently bought State of Emergency for PS2 and was sorely disappointed with how shallow the game play was. After the novelty of shooting everyone wears off (30 seconds into the game), you realize that there just isn't much more to it. You end up running around the same mall killing the same enemies over and over. The camera is the worst, and you're constantly having to find new weapons to hunt down some generic looking pedestrian. zzzZZZZZzzzzZZzzzzzz. While technically it's quite an accomplishment to have over 200 autonomous characters on screen at one time, you have to wonder if that's enough to make a game fun. Well, RockStar answered that question for us: no. It's boring. I'd take Contra III any day over a game like State of Emergency because Contra III, while over 10 years old has game play that's infinitely more in depth than State of Emergency's mindless button mashing.
Sadly, 90% of the kids playing video games these days are dipstuffs who are washed over by fancy graphics, which is why the two Playstation attempts at recreating the Contra franchise have failed. 3D Contra sucks, as does 3D Castlevania (the piece of stuff N64 version), and I'm sure they're going to screw up the new Metroid that's going to come out. Why don't they leave the clbutics alone?

[Zedian]

Super Contra or Contra III was an awesome reason why I purchased my SNES years ago. It was a challenge and didn't give hand-me-out cut-scenes to make things easier for gamers. I loved the first one especially...though I admit I used the 99 life cheat code, I just had to.

[Niehaus]

Beat those a few months back on my emu. Decent games imo.