A playthrough of Konami's 1992 run-and-gun shooter for the NES, Contra Force.
Showing up fairly late in the system’s life, Contra Force is the third and final Contra game for the NES. It came out six months after the SNES game Contra III: The Alien Wars landed on store shelves, and it was the one of the series' two US-exclusive releases (the other being C: The Contra Adventure, released in 1998 for the PlayStation.)
Contra Force began life as Ark Hound (アークハウンド), a game that bore no direct ties to any existing Konami franchises. It was shown off a fair bit by both the Japanese and American gaming media before it was rebranded - I seem to recall even Nintendo Power previewing it as Ark Hound at one point.
As you might expect, Contra Force has a markedly different feel from the other games in the series. It dispenses with the futuristic sci-fi shtick that Contra was known for, so don't expect to see any pink facehuggers or walls made of pulsating viscera.
Contra Force plops us into the shoes of a band of mercenaries (the "C-Force") that are fighting to bring down a terrorist organization in Neo City sometime in 1992.
The fight to reclaim Neo City covers five different run-and-gun stages that alternate between side-scrolling and top-down viewpoints like we saw in Super C, but in terms of gameplay, Contra Force is a very different beast.
At the outset you pick which C-Force member you'd like to play as. The choices include Burns, the machine gun-toting leader; Smith, a sniper with access to homing missiles; Beans, an explosives expert; and Iron, an ace with incendiaries.
Each commando has unique abilities and upgrades that can be activated through a Gradius-style power-up system: picking up a case will move the cursor on the icon bar one notch, and you can activate the highlighted option with a tap of the select button. These run the gamut from typical (faster rate of fire, heat seeking shells, etc.) to absurd and hilariously game-breaking (that invincible jump, wow!).
From the sub-screen, you can swap your character out for another, you can bring a second player in mid-game, or you can temporarily enlist the help of a CPU-controlled sidekick. Even though they will only remain active for five seconds at a time, you can call CPU players in to help as often as you like,
and you can dictate the role you'd like them to play with the "battle plan" options.
But for as novel as the idea was to have the computer fill in for a buddy, when put into practice, it works about as well as the rest of the game does. That is to say, it doesn't.
Konami's late-gen NES games are notorious for their performance issues (remember Parodius?), but Contra Force is on a whole different level. The character sprites are large, nicely drawn, and some of them are impressively fluid in motion, but it quickly becomes clear that Contra Force pushes the console way too hard. It desperately wants to be a 16-bit game, but the no-compromises approach to presentation ends up seriously compromising the entire package.
In the single-player mode, the game runs significantly worse than the two-player modes in Contra and Super C did. The game's speed and frame-rate bog down whenever anything but the player sprite moves. If an enemy runs on to the screen, if a barrel explodes, or if there's a moving platform - any one of these things can cause severe slowdown.
And if you have a CPU controlled partner or a second player on the screen, expect to play most of the game at 60-70% its intended speed. It often borders on being unplayable.
If you'd like to know what the NES looks like in the throes of a heart attack, the last boss fight (28:08) offers a convincing example.
It is super easy, though, if you want to tough it out. You'll rarely see more than two enemies on screen at once, power-up icons are plentiful and easy to grind, and the invincible jump power makes dying virtually impossible. If you hold A down, you'll automatically jump again the instant you touch the ground, so you're only vulnerable if you take your finger off the A button. You can even bounce off of enemy bullets like this!
Contra Force‘s only saving grace is its soundtrack, and credit where credit is due: it's fantastic. The music is some of Konami's best on the NES.
The janky mechanics and the crippling performance issues bury the game, though. It didn't do any favors for the Contra and Konami brands, that's for sure.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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