Ironic that a game who’s plot is about breaking your programming and going against what would be expected of you ends up with a reputation that takes what it presents at face value and twists what it actually is so it could fit the mold of what people expect 7th gen games to be, and this game faces no critical re-evaluation to this day, simply look at that disgrace of a description, in-fact there’s only one other person who appreciates it for what it is and he is the one who recommended this to me in the first place, it seems everyone else is still stuck up on taking the first 45 minutes of this game as gospel for representing everything else it has, failing to recognize that the game acknowledges the doubts a person could have about sci-fi military shooters of that gen because it begins with a section that can’t be anything other than a parody to GoW. Shed away all of that and you have a fantastic shooter underneath with a heartfelt sci-fi story, the variety of weapons on display here are nice and fit whatever playstyle you’d want to go for, there’s also the fact that you can combo with your partner to unleash some devastating attacks, it all flows into one, fluid gameplay system.

TL;DR, it’s not a fucking GoW clone or a cover shooter.

I will refrain from rating this game because as much as I enjoyed it, I genuinely cannot, in full conscience, dare to call it a well-designed game. Now I know what you must be thinking reading this, “But what matters is if you enjoyed it at the end of the day” and right as that statement is, I feel like I’ve hit a wall with it. When do we stop, draw a line and say “Yeah, we deserve better than this, because we got better than this a fucking decade ago and what we have now has no excuse being worse than what we got before”

What 4R attempts to do is capture the same kind of design RE4 (and subsequently 5/6) had, and modernize it, and to say that it falls flat on its head and miserably fucking fails would be a gross understatement, they removed the one thing all of those games were balanced around, and what made them so satisfying and unique compared to other shooters in the market in the first place, proper enemy feedback which leads to consistent stuns, you’re crowded? You quickly shoot a zombie in the shin or head and perform a melee attack, that’s your bread and butter for proper crowd control, for christ’s sake, it is so tightly designed to the point where RE5 has a difficulty mode where you go into danger status in one hit, one goddamn hit, and it still comes across as a fair, balanced and enjoyable challenge. Imagine the sheer amount of confidence you must have in the systems that you designed to put in a challenge mode like that into the game. Meanwhile in 4R you find yourself at the mercy of the RNGods which is exasperated by reticle bloom, a mechanic pulled from 2R and put into this game just to make you constantly beg, plead and pray for a stun to get yourself out of one tight situation out of a dozen. To at least stagger an enemy that’s running straight at you with a pitchfork, or to grab you, and speaking of grabs, the balance regarding that single move alone is busted to an unbelievable degree, enemies love to spam it and it happens to be ambiguous in how it’s telegraphed to the player, there’s a form of the grab (close running grab) that you pretty much cannot react to. so on-top of an inconsistency in stuns, you also have inconsistency and vagueness regarding the enemy attacks themselves, and for some reason the grab damage doesn’t work like in previous games where the danger comes from messing up the mashing QTE, getting grabbed in itself is a danger because it happens to do insane damage simply at the startup, for example sometimes there’s a delayed reaction because you and the enemy are so close to one another, you shotgun the zombie but in a very short frame it happens to grab you, you are not rewarded for your sharp reaction time because half your health depletes from that startup alone.

The fact that the game design and balance feel like an afterthought despite having a decade of action RE before it to pull from, add on and improve upon is so disappointing that I can’t help but ask the eternal question what were they thinking? All in all, I hope Capcom learns from this game’s shortcomings, but given all the lavish praise it received, I doubt that will be the case.

text by Ario Barzan

★★★☆

“A FULL DAY'S MEAL IN A SIX OUNCE STEAK.”

Ah – the lovers of masochism. Those who upload the fruit of their labor onto the Internet and kick bastard games into the ground with inhuman, button-pounding prowess. Our chain to their existence is their Pro Status garnered by guiding Ryu Hayabusa through primordial-stuff-fit inducing levels. Just how many tries did it take? Did they come home from work or school each day and practice ’till midnight? Have they put off Real Life for their goal? I wonder if these people aren’t just A.I., programmed to conquer pixilated hell.



Contra: Shattered Soldier, released in the early lifespan of the Playstation 2, was, as we say in the business, not hecking around: a heaven-sent for such masochists, and a destroyer of worlds for those who found Donkey Kong Country difficult. One came to either embrace the game as it gave them a heart-halting slap on the back, or despised its gleeful abrasiveness. A middle-ground did not exist, because the presentation was black and white, and hard as diamond.

That was the problem, I guess. “Hard-ass” is as far away from a title as you can give me (though I really don’t want a title). Yes, I can enjoy a challenge that, now and again, has me weeping as a denied child would, but limits do exist. For example: God Hand’s Challenge #15, where it’s you without roulette orbs or tension gauge, against three enemies on the highest difficulty – fifteen seconds to win – and enough life on your end so that a single hit kills. Thinking about it makes me want to tear a small animal in half. Shattered Soldier was not nearly so abusive. Still, you were given a constant visit by failure, and it was a bit of a downer.

So, if Shattered Soldier‘s militaristic perverseness in forcing us to dance to the beat of its death drum was the attraction, Neo Contra is more unfettered and consistently accessible – more fun. The odd thing is that no one made much of a shout, or whisper, even. A cold neglect hung around the game as the media waved a hand away at its shortness and lesser difficulty. Certainly, Shattered Soldier was nothing big, but it did have a viewable following. Neo Contra, then, is almost invisible. After going on a mission to track a copy down in its Bargain Bin home, finishing it three times with a friend in two days, and then four times by myself, my brain was . . . hot, and bothered. Hot from joy, and bothered by the bitter reality that the heaviest slice of Videogamedom’s inhabitants have turned into edacious gremlins, preferring a fat bag of chips over a delicious steak. They want seventy hours of gameplay that’s stretched like the deformed skin of plastic-surgery-addicted stars.

In such an age, Neo Contra‘s briefness is, yeah, startling. And because the challenge isn’t so damned, we can jog through most of it before the timer on the oven lets us know our deep dish pizza’s finished. Though, when it comes down to it, length is such a context sensitive thing. It’s distressing to see this mentality of believing XL is just the fit for every game under the sun. Super Mario Brothers 3‘s size is perfect for its design; and twenty years later, we can still play the thing and feel gratified. Neo Contra is itty, oh-so-bitty in the current world of “Epic” (which has all but lost its meaning), yet it is crammed with loving expertise, able to be played whenever, free of cumbersome devotional demands.

From the get-go, four stages can be completed in any order. You might want to start out on the fourth, since it’s kind of amazing. It begins by showing Bill Rizer’s upper body moving, shaking as the sky goes by – then, the camera pulls away, and you see that our friend is running on top of a helicopter’s spinning blades. A swarm of overgrown bees attack, followed by an aircraft dropping bombs all over. Trash these punks, and take on a flying battleship, which, in due time, is knocked out of commission by another that’s ten times bigger. You infiltrate this behemoth, a deliciously videogame-y war zone populated with cannons, missile launchers, sentry guns, and hordes of soldiers. And the boss, dear Lord, is a dog who hops into a water craft and shoots screen-filling laser patterns.

Yes, Neo Contra pushes Serious Business away, and it’s all the more glorious for it. Picking up the case and comparing Jim Lee’s bright art to Ashley Wood’s, you can already notice the change in tone to buttery ridiculousness. As Shattered Soldier opened with a grunge-rock-infested cinematic flashing apocalyptic Engrish across scenes of destruction, this detonated in my face with a woman wailing, “NEO CONTRAAA,” while Bill and secondary-character/black-samurai Jaguar used rocket launchers to destroy a giant robot, and – well. Get an S ranking, and witness Jaguar cut the hecking world in half, and then swim through the space debris in a loincloth to sourceless humming. As a friend put it when I sent him a link to the clip on Youtube, “There’s something very wrong, here. And, yet, at the same time, very right.”

In concept, the game is pretty tough. As logic dictates, however, 3D movement opens wider dynamics, spreads the yellow tape out. This is not to say the design isn’t tight – it is. It’s invigorating, respectable. You will die a healthy amount of times before nailing it. If Neo Contra’s stages are Gauntlet stages – you versus the swarm in platform-less, relatively linear mazes – the difference, then, is that Neo Contra doesn’t just chuck stuff and have you mash away, forming a nihilistic space in your gut, or mindlessly set up monster-spawning pods to feign a need for strategy. Instead, each level has set-pieces that fit together like gaudy, accurate clockwork. This propulsion promises to take care of your entertainment expectations, and does. While Mission 2 has you riding on dinosaurs and taking out hover-bike guys, you’re dodging boulders on hills on Mission 3 with men atop them, performing Russian jigs. Bosses are wonderfully executed – flipping, clicking, rolling, shifting monsters of mechanic brilliance. And the soundtrack is a fist-pumping explosion of Euro-Dance, House, and other thumping things provided by synth-junkie Sota Fujimori.





Anyone I know who has played this has had a blast. Remember you and a neighborhood friend co-oping and hurriedly yelling at each other because shoot the boss in the head oh my god? Neo Contra inspires a similar giddy adrenaline. There are minor points of contention, like how the 3D isn’t always perfect, mainly at the final boss where you have to dodge spiraling balls of fire on this tiny platform. And how the extra weapons are a bit too nice, a bit too easy to get, a bit too tempting of a junk food once obtained (look – you get the Hammer of Dawn – except it’s better). At a point where my life is running on intervals of time, and videogames’ bigness muddles playability, I’m glad to have something fresh, small, and savory.

text by tim rogers

★⋆☆☆

“A PAINLESS, FORGETTABLE LITTLE EXERCISE IN POINT-MISSING.”

As human beings blessed with remarkable patience, we here at Action Button Dot Net didn’t immediately scream ourselves into comas when we heard that an American — that is, a non-Japanese — developer was being put in charge of Contra 4 for the Nintendo DS. With Zen-like resolve, we refrained from jamming out a pre-emptive review that centered on the fact that developer WayForward Technologies’ previous effort had, for the record, been Shrek the 3rd: Ogres and Donkeys (rated E for Everyone). For one thing, as a group of individuals so convinced that half of the people who do make blockbuster videogames should probably be imprisoned for petty theft, we’re all about handing out the benefit of the doubt to anyone who actually hasn’t had the opportunity to make a game that IGN is going to pretend to give a stuff about. Furthermore, while WayForward’s Sigma Star Saga was, in execution, a piece of greasy stuff, it was so full of out-of-left-field, balls-to-floor concepts (a role-playing game where the “battle system” involves “old-school shoot-em-upping” is welcome, by default, in a world where RPG “battle systems” are normally focused on selecting “fight” from a menu and then watching your dudes fight) that it gets a miraculous passing grade. If Contra 4 is these guys’ chance to work with a budget, more power to them. What’s next, Square-Enix putting a D-team of unknowns on Final Fantasy XIII? Go right ahead! Why not put the development team who brought us Marc Ecko’s Getting Up in charge of the next Silent Hill game, while you’re at it? (Being dead serious here.) Let’s put Darth Vader into Soul Calibur, too, while we’re at it. I mean, let’s face it, when it comes to Japanese videogames, “experience” usually means little more than “an octogenarian in charge”. Well, unless you’re talking about Contra‘s esteemed director / designer Nobuya Nakazato, still alive, still kicking, still brilliant, whose latest two Contra games for the PlayStation 2 were both amazing and written off by critics the Western world over as “not exactly the same thing as the original Contra“. That man — well, simply put, he’s a genius, and we’d like to marry him. Did you know he directed Vandal Hearts, the only strategy RPG you can play from start to finish without getting hit once? (The maps are small enough so that the enemies don’t possess “AI”, they just move in pre-programmed “patterns” to accommodate for the player’s actions.) Here’s Irem making R-Type Tactics, when Nakazato had already made Contra Tactics a decade ago.



Enough about awesome stuff, though, and on with the disappointment: it’s a shame that Contra 4 kind of misses the point all around. It’s got enough flow and enough snap, for one thing, though it really just doesn’t crunch enough. It mushes along. Whereas Neo Contra is the epitome of crunch, Contra 4 is too stop-starty for its own good. Review-writers whistling, yee-hawing, moosecalling, and hi-ho-ing about the game’s “extreme difficulty” need to dump a bottle of chill pills in their tomato soup tomorrow at lunch. What are these people doing, just holding right on the control pad, and tapping the Action Button with the stylus? Contra 4 is easily playable by anyone with a cool head (and, say, the ability to win Virtua Fighter 5 tournaments despite actually, methodically sucking at Guilty Gear) if you shift your damn paradigm for three seconds, stop in place, look at where the enemies are coming from, and rush the holes. Play it like a runningback, not a linebacker, for God’s sake. (Finally! A similie everyone in our readership will understand!) I hated the game, personally, for my first two clumsy attempts, and then went on to get all the way to stage five on my next credit, and lord knows I’m not a rocket scientist. When I got to the end, I was convinced that I’d had it all wrong when I said I hated this stupid game. In the end, it’s not worth hating. It’s just there.

Contra games have always been about sadistic locomotion. Hell, all classic Konami games are about locomotion. Observe how little this skilled player stops in his entire playthrough of the original Castlevania. Now check out Contra III. Or Contra. These are speed runs by highly skilled players, though really, it’s not impossible to think that these games can’t be cleared flawlessly on a first attempt by someone who’s just really good at videogames. It’s a tenuous point we’re trying to make here: Contra 4‘s idea of “insane difficulty” comes less from the actual heart of the Contra games and more from playground rumors — about this game called Contra that’s so hard because you die in one hit and there’s even a thirty lives code because it’s that hard. Contra 4 strives to make a difficult game by flooding every corner of every stage with endlessly spawning, somersaulting enemies and furious blinking bullets. The level designers tossed off each little monsterpiece probably without bothering to play-test them. Let’s see how the jerks like this! In the end, though, the game is missing the fleeting flow and motion that previous (ahem, Japanese-developed) Contra titles had all sharpened into perfection, maybe because the (Japanese) developers had originally conceived the games as arcade entertainment devices, or maybe because the (Japanese) developers just employed a lot of common sense. If breathing deeply and rushing the holes in the enemy lines (while never letting go of the fire button) is how the (American) developer wants us to play Contra 4, however, then we’ll have to call them more clever than we might have given credit for — and then scold them for making the game otherwise kind of flat and bland.

Review-writers all over the internet were able to excuse the so-called “insane difficulty” because the game has plenty of “old-school charm”. Huh. “Old-school charm” is a tough demon to quantify, though I’m pretty sure they’re all talking about the little quippy liner notes strewn all over the game. I’ve removed the game from my DS since playing it, and there’s a copy of Dragon Quest IV lodged in the cartridge slot right now and it will require surgery to be removed, so I can’t check and make sure, though I vaguely remember the “help” text on Contra 4‘s title menu proclaiming that “Arcade Mode” is “All about beefy dudes and spread gun. Just what the Contra ordered. Heck yeah!” (Warning: embellished.) The (black-and-white) instruction manual cringingly recalls fond memories of the over-the-top, rage-against-the-Reaganomics leveling-with-the-kids Konami instruction manuals of the 1980s. It’s like, man, when we were kids, this stuff was hilarious! Now, it’s kind of like your uncle flying three thousand miles to come to your wedding, and then dying on the plane (drug overdose) while wearing a Santa Claus suit.

That’s the way Konami classics were, way back when — stone-faced beef-dudes with spread guns raging against nameless alien threats while their instruction manuals ranged from cheeky to lippy to jerky. Now, the global climate has mutated; scientists and the police have determined that precisely half of the anonymous saps stepping forward to type “lol” at the latest regurgitation of the “eternal battle between pirates and ninjas” meme as reported by Kotaku.com either played high school football or tried out for it. We’re sixteen years away from a generation of Al Bundys who would rather play Guitar Hero than watch John Wayne as “Hondo”. John Wayne never needed a hecking spread gun.

We can’t really blame WayForward for pandering to these people, anyway: they’re where the money is at — all of the money. Still, once again, an innate quality of Contra is lost on these new Western overlords: though it’s exceedingly hard to tell from the first couple of installments, the entire Contra series — big dudes, big guns, big monsters — is a gradually accelerating elbow jab directed at the ribs of American pop culture. Exhibit A would be that your dual-rifle-wielding Schwarzenegger-like hero motherhecker, arms heavier than nuclear missiles, manages to somersault no less than nine times in the air every time he jumps. Contra Hard Corps, with its ladlefuls of bizarre, should have gotten the message across that the over-the-top violence in these games was clearly a gleeful pastiche. It seems that in America, a country where half the people can’t read, 75% of the people can’t locate the North American continent on a map, and 95% couldn’t succinctly explain the difference between Jerry Lewis and Alan Greenspan, it just didn’t get through. Kids genuinely thought that “beefy dude hanging onto soaring intercontinental ballistic missile with one arm while shooting a shotgun with an endless supply of ammunition with the other arm” was a worthy role model, like they were going to be able to pick up a brochure at the career fair. (In the case of Neo Contra, the brochure’s cover would read “Beefy dude who takes on an entire air-force-worth of planes with just a machinegun while running in place atop spinning helicopter blades”.) Years later, we had the “stylish hard action” of Devil May Cry, and years after that, we had Devil May Cry 3, which kids on the internet squealed about: the hero, Dante, is such a badass, like when he surfs on that missile and stuff, though what the heck is with the pizza in the first cut-scene man that stuff is so hecking gay. Lo and behold, Devil May Cry 4 casts a CG scientologist pederast in the role of Dante and a tight-faced emomaniac in the role of the main character, Nero.

Neo Contra, most poignantly, casts a katana-wielding black samurai as one of its beefy heroes. There’s a CG cut-scene (essential viewing) where said badass black samurai cuts a group of rushing soldiers in half with his katana — “Awesome!” shout the YouTube kids. Then a Hummer comes blasting at him full-speed — with a shoulder-thrust, he knocks the hecking thing over. “BADASS!” shout the YouTube kids. Then a group of a hundred men come charging at him — with one vicious slash, he turns them into a volcano of blood. “heck YEAH!!” shouts YouTube. Then a huge, monolithic threat shows itself, and our very black, very samurai hero summons power from the depths of his soul, and unleashes a slash that cuts the very planet earth in half. “TOO heckING RADICAL!!” ejaculates YouTube. The screen grows black. Ten seconds later, we see our two heroes swimming through space in their underwear. Like, somehow, the destruction of the planet earth had also stripped them of their clothes. Suddenly, the internet is afraid — deathly so — that mass media might, as their preacher insists, be intent on turning them into homosexuals:

“WTF??! That was great up to the point those two appearing swimming in space humming. Eww.”

“WTF!? is this the reward for getting overall S rank in the game… are you kidding me!!! I lost my respect for the S rank after seeing this -_-“

“2 gay guys swimming on space WTF!!!”



“It went from pretty cool to real gay”

(Ignore the comments that call the video brilliant. Those people are obviously from the UK.)

So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: Contra, in the words of its most treasured (and paying) fans, “went from pretty cool to real gay“. This is why an American team was called in to handle Contra 4 — to keep this eternally told tale of shirtless men with large machine rifles as heterosexual as possible. There is to be no hecking with the average gamer’s grip on sexuality.

We could say that, ever since Nobuya Nakazato breathed life into Contra, Japanese videogame designers’ respect for the medium in general has been dwindling into a razor-sharp point. Game characters’ hairstyles come to resemble behives on top of layer cakes; robots crafted by pedophile scientists to look like little girls and wear skirts short enough to show off their panties utter bone-dry dialogue as cogs in a rat-hecking nonsense-plot machine forged by a supercomputer bent on intergalactic terrorism. Contra was too subtle for the times it occupied, and Contra 4, as a bald-faced re-painting, sure as hell isn’t any less subtle. Mind you, there’s nothing terrible about it. It’s not worth a groan — just a little, high-pitched sigh. If anything, it’s nice enough anti-proof that if ever there was a time for literature in videogames, it might as well be right now.





Reading Contra 4‘s Wikipedia page is a headache and a half. Particularly the section about unlockable characters. Apparently, when the original Contra was released in the US, Konami of America, missing the point as they would many times again in the future, altered the game’s storyline so that it took place in modern times. When Contra 3 was released, with stages that were obviously set in some far-off future, Konami of America had no choice — they had to admit to the future setting, and rename the main characters so that they were “descendents” of the main characters from the original Contra. Now we have Contra 4, with its lovingly compiled unlockable encyclopedias on the history of the series, with two playable characters named “Mad Dog” and “Scorpion”, names that were originally used in the American versions of Contra and Super C as the code names for Bill and Lance. Contrary to the game’s supposed “respect” for the series “canon”, they are treated as “new characters”. Furthermore, Mad Dog is black, which is cool, though that doesn’t change the fact that he’s just a palette-swap of all the other characters, for stuff’s sake.

In short, the missteps of Contra 4, on its short trip from concept to videogame, or bill to law, or whatever, can be summarized by this paragraph from Wikipedia:

“The continuity of Contra 4 is based on the Japanese canon that was adapted into the English localization of series with the release of Contra: Shattered Soldier. However, the game’s producers took a few mild liberties with the established canon by integrating elements of the American localizations of the older games. The alien Black Viper was originally mentioned only in the American manual of Operation C, whereas the original plot of that game was about an unnamed superpower creating new weapons using an alien cell. In the timeline presented in the manual and official website, the events of Operation C are interpreted as a previous mission of Mad Dog and Scorpion (the new characters in the game) against Black Viper (whereas the original game was a solo mission of Bill Rizer).”

The inverse erection caused by reading that has officially punctured my bladder. I just did a test urination, and I predict I will be pissing blood for six weeks at the least.

WayForward Technologies said in interviews with “gaming blogs” all over the place that they were really glad they’d been offered the chance to make a Contra game, and they promised they wouldn’t mess it up. On the surface, they kept their promise. Though we kind of wish they would have tried to, you know, make up some actual compelling game concepts instead of gazing at their shoes the whole damned time, dead scared of pissing off people who know the difference between Red Falcon and Black Viper (people who probably can’t tie their shoes, don’t have jobs, and are playing your game via an emulator and a flash cartridge, anyway). Instead, all we get is this lame little tacked-on grappling hook, which the official site proclaims “allows for new combat situations and dramatic set pieces that underscore the game’s adrenaline-soaked pedigree”. Actually, it just lets you slurm up to the top screen whenever there’s a grabbable platform up there, and usually only at points where you absolutely have to go up there, anyway.

It’d be nice to say something, right here, about the two-player co-op, though the game requires multiple god damned cartridges, so there goes that.

Really. Is “it’s old-school” or “bound not to disappoint fans of the original Contra” the best praise WayForward could have hoped for? What kind of world are we living in? For Contra‘s 20th Anniversary, if you’re not going to put something new on the table, why not just release a cartridge with all the old Contra games on it? I’d take a compilation with flawless emulations of Contra III and Hard Corps both on it over Contra 4‘s vanilla remake of the original Contra any day. Thank god MegaDrive emulation on PSP is so perfect! Hard Corps and Ranger X are probably all a man needs, to be honest.

If you arrive at the end of this still looking for the evolution of Contra, look no further than Gears of War. Remember the last stage, on the deathtrain streaking under a blood-red, post-apocalyptic sky? There’s a cut-scene where a subhumanoid alien monster berserker freak charges through a stack of crates. The crates shatter and explode, and for an instant, their contents are revealed: boxes of cereal. With 98% of the world’s population wiped out, someone is still shipping cereal from one place to another. That’s a classy little jab right there. That Cliffy B guy gets it.

–tim rogers

paragraph i couldn’t fit anywhere else: Likewise, when From Software released Metal Wolf Chaos for the Xbox — a game in which the hotshot president of the United States sets off on a continent-spanning giant robot battle against a coup-staging vice president — the internet’s children didn’t go “heck yeah! Satire!” — they went “heck yeah! Awesome!”