When we initially got the first bit of news about Contra Hard Corps for the Sega Genesis the press of the time pointed out another game, Gunstar Heroes a lot. There was mention that Konami must be going all out because they lost so many programmers to the recently formed Treasure (developer of Gunstar Heroes). Like Contra Hard Corps was a throwing down of the gauntlet, that Konami was just as good as it ever was (man those were the days). Contra Hard Corps certainly earned that title, which is evident to anyone that has played this Sega Genesis classic.
First, when playing Contra Hard Corps be prepared to lose and lose a lot. The game is hard. Couple the difficulty with only five continues, each netting you three men and the fact you can only take one hit means you have 15 hits between you and the final Game Over screen. That is not much considering how tough this game is.
Contra Hard Corps is one of those games that images simply did not do it justice. This was a problem as back in the day we had only magazines to get information to us- we did not have Youtube. Videogame commercials were rare, not as rare as today but still not an often occurrence. This meant finding a store that would set up a demo kiosk or borrowing from a friend (good luck with that).
This game pushes the Sega Genesis. Hard. There are multiple enemies of multiple sprites on screen at once in many boss fights. There is rotation and scaling- stuff the Genesis is not capable of out of the box. There are tons of explosions taking large portions of the screen up. Things are chaotic and an organized mess that makes Contra Hard Corps all the more impressive.
The Super Nintendo received Contra III: Alien Wars and well, read up on it here. We directly compare both games in our first issue of our magazine, available here for free (PDF) and paid (print).
It seems the only way to play Contra Hard Corps legally is via a physical copy as Konami doesn’t really care anymore. With that in mind check out Ebay or Amazon and get a deal on a copy before school starts back up.