After clearing all three Mario games for the NES as well as OG Zelda and a few other gems I felt that my nostalgia for the 8-bit generation of gaming had run out, but that was before I remembered and played the legendary Contra again.
If you remember this controller then you most likely also remember what you got to do to get your 30 lives before the title screen appears. Don't worry if you don't put in all of the cheat code because you can steal some lives from your buddy if they got it right. I remember we would restart the system and do it again until we both got it to show 30 lives.
Contra was the first game I remember playing co-op with friends. I didn't actually own the game so I was always the one dying and getting yelled at and being blamed for not defeating the alien because of my lack of skill. Decades later my students would connect one of those modern NES systems with built-in games to the big-screen TV and would always look for me in difficult spots. It's too bad they didn't let the second player use the light gun from the NES. It seemed like everybody had the gun but it only worked on a few games. They didn't even let you shoot the damn dog who was making fun of you when you missed shooting the ducks. Nintendo would make up for this years later with the Wii system. I remember my daughter wasn't very good at playing Mario Galaxy so she would just be shooting stars at enemies with her controller.
Do you remember all of the creative ways that they would cheat at making 3D levels back then? I do remember actual 3D games in the 1980s but they were super lame. I remember this one 3D space shooter at the arcades but everything was just a bunch of connected lines. I don't think it was until Wolfenstein 3D or Doom came along that most people got to actually play in 3D and those games weren't actually 3D either. I didn't think that way when I was a kid though. I thought the second level of Contra was real 3D, but I also thought that my Nintendo Entertainment System was capable of sentient thought like a baby Skynet with the sole intention of pissing me off.
They've made many sequels to this game. I tried them on the Super Nintendo and even my iPad, but nothing was as fun as the original. It's pretty impressive that I can still be entertained by Contra in the year 2023. We're not that far away from many of our favorite games being a half-century old. I'll be old as hell or a lingering gaming ghost but I look forward to seeing how Nintendo treats the 100-year anniversaries of these classic games. Thanks for reading about my 1980s gameplay today. I made this post entirely on my phone using Nostalgia NES Lite to emulate the game, Google Photos to crop all my gaming screenshots to 16:9, and GIF Maker-Editor for the cover.
