Pong and Beyond

748th played so far

Genre: Shoot ‘Em Up
Platform: SNES
Year of Release: 1992
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami

I’m making my way through the franchises I haven’t started yet, I am coming across some that I haven’t started because I haven’t really cared enough. The Contra series is another run and gun series – very mild platformers that focus on you shooting loads of enemies. They were an arcade favourite that would have found success on home consoles as well, but were either taken over by FPSes as a popular game or combined with other genres, between platformers and beat ’em ups. I mean, Bionic Commando Rearmed did it as well, but added to it.

Our Thoughts

So Contra 3 is a pretty standard run and gun game – you run down a level and have enemies attacking from both directions, while you try to advance through the level. I’ve not been helped by direction changes feeling a bit clunky, which made the game a bit annoying to play in places.

There’s a decent variety of weapons, coming from enemies you shoot out of the sky. It’s quite fun to play around with these and you get two options, allowing for some strategizing. It means that, on the whole, taking out enemies is decent enough – though nothing too difficult.

The game, however, also contains its own amount of platforming, more than games of the genre tend to. What helps is that there’s a bunch of destructible terrain, creating a game that feels quite dynamic, and adds in decent terrain obstacles – including podobo-like balls that jump out of the fire. Not realistic, but it works quite well, and they were quite difficult to deal with in the end.

Final Thoughts

While Contra 3 is a pretty standard run and gun, it at least has some nice level based touches that make progression a bit more interesting than having extra enemies appear.