The action and platform games in the NES catalog are very varied, we can find titles with a poor design and programming quality, as well as others that were excellent in all technical aspects, today we are fortunate to see one of the classics that perfectly represents the above mentioned, it is Contra, a shooter that every gamer should know.
Games like this can be found in quantities, but Contra has something very special, due to one of the most relevant factors which is its gameplay, but before touching that technical aspect we must highlight its beginnings, starting with its development, which began in early 1987, being its main programmer Koji Hiroshita for the arcade version.
Due to its success in the arcades, the decision was made to make a port for consoles, including the Famicom and NES, however, the development went to Shigeharu Umezaki and Shinji Kitamoto. Despite being different programmers, they knew how to perfectly port an arcade game to a console, taking into account the technical limitations, it was simply excellent.
The objective in the game is very simple, we are a specialized armed guerrilla force, which must infiltrate an island of an organization called Red Falcon, because it has a malevolent plan to destroy humanity. As we go deeper into the facilities we will realize that it is something that goes beyond simple humans, it is an alien force that wants the extinction of humanity.
As mentioned above, one of the strongest points of Contra is its gameplay, despite being simple, it has what it takes to keep the player in front of the TV for a long time. We only have the directional pad to move in different directions and at the same time to aim our weapon, a button to shoot and another one to jump.
At the beginning we will start with a simple and low-powered weapon, but sometimes we will see clouds in the sky that, when we hit them, will give us a weapon identified with a letter, among which we can see R, M, F, L and S. Each of them changes the way we will eliminate and aim at enemies, except for the R that increases the shooting speed, that is, a power up for the weapon we currently have equipped.
We are not always going to see levels of lateral movements, sometimes we are presented with worlds with a depth effect, something quite attractive for the time, this was already used by other games like Golgo 13, but Contra added a touch of unbridled action. In these scenarios the objective is simply to eliminate everything we see on the screen, in order to infiltrate the secret base.
Before passing each phase we will find a boss, each of them has a unique design and a degree of difficulty, these at first are weapons controlled by humans, but as we go deeper we realize that everything is changing, becoming secret bases of aliens and the bosses become big monsters from another planet.
In general terms, Contra is a good video game that can be complicated at the moment of playing it, but with the right practice and attention, we can be able to complete it. In addition, we have the option of being able to play it as a team with a partner in a cooperative way, something that decreases its difficulty a little, but we must synchronize our movements properly so that our ally does not die in the attempt.
