Contra FORCE
There comes a time in every well-established series where the creators get tired of working with the same old characters and start introducing new ones. And, inevitably, the fans get into an uproar over the destruction of their beloved timesink's 'integrity.' And sometimes, usually in fighting games, the change is welcome. In Final Fantasy, I can understand why some people get upset with each new sequel. It ticks me off to no end when a game called FINAL Fantasy is so long-lived. Of course, it helps cushion the linguistic stupidity of it all that none of them are really connected.
But really, Contra isn't all that story driven. It's high-adrenaline, loud, bright and stupid fun. There's no need to diversify story content with extra characters. We skip the badly translated cutscenes half the time anyway, and it's not like any NES game ever gave you vital information in a cinema, except for maybe the "watch your lousy back around women" message in Ninja Gaiden. As I said before, Contra is two guys with guns shooting aliens and soldiers for reasons we don't care about. The only excuse they should have to go beyond the Blue Guy/Red Guy duo is if they add four player support. Which brings me to Contra Force, the third and final NES Contra.
When a company 'steps back' a generation of hardware, the results are usually the same: A quick, crappy cash-in and/or a simple rehash of the newest game with watered down graphics and "Meh, close enough" gameplay. Well, I have good news and bad news. And by 'news' I really mean 'dated information.' Force is completely original and not linked to the other Contra series in any way. Or maybe it's a prequel of some sort as it takes place in present-day Neo City, the very city under siege by Those Darned Aliens. None of your enemies wear their organs on the outside the time around. The bad news?
First off, the only thing to really mark this game as a Contra is the gameplay and the little somersault+fart noise death animations. There are no aliens, and the special weapons stay fairly believable, right down to the Metroid-esque Rolling Attack jump. The story behind this one is that the Contra Force is some sort of anti-terrorism organization, and as such, our four heroes have to find some terroists to anti. What luck, the enemy kidnaps the chief. Or something. It's been years since I read the manual and was repulsed by Konami's "hilarious" weapon descriptions. I think I was like ten, even then I knew that the half-assed puns they made in those things in between talking like surfers were sad. The game's intro segues directly to the warehouse level that makes up the first area, it also features the apparent assassination of Grey Fox from Metal Gear.
I'm not sure what the lowest point is here. The bright, almost cheerful color scheme? The fight with the giant sailor-suited guy on the battleship-raiding level? The new powerup system? Why not start with the obvious: The Contra Force. They add up to what you might expect a crack team of anti-terror operatives who named themselves after a video game to be. The leader, Burns, is a pistol-toting, sunglasses-wearing guy who looks a bit like Terry "Garou Densetsu" Bogard's weird uncle. At his side is the pathetically weak and unathletic bomb specialist, Beans. The other two are a black guy sniper and Irons, the prerequisite 'heavy weapons' expert who walks around with a pipe on his shoulder. Burns and Irons seem to be pretty much the most useful, as Burns can jump the highest and Irons can blow stuff up. As for Beans, well, he basically carries a potato gun and plants awkward time-delayed bombs, which might come in handy if the enemy ever came at you from behind. They also tend to go off as a chain of random explosions that blow up a general area that may or may not contain enemies or boxes. The black/red guy is basically another Burns who doesn't jump as good. And if you miss the Blue Guy/Red Guy team, take comfort in the fact the NES's limited pallette makes it so the team consists of two mostly blue guys and two pretty much red guys.
There's a new power-up system at work here which is actually kind of similar to the Gradius/Parodius scheme. Each character has a few 'levels' of special weapons, which are built up by collecting fine luggage. Just think of the possibilities. Now you have to grab several items to get the crappy Flamethrower/Fizzy weapon. Each guy has five weapons to choose from and picking up briefcases moves the power-up a space to the right. When you've reached the weapon you want, hit select and they play a little 'ka-ching' sound effect to symbolize the money you blew renting this game. On the plus side, if you activate a special weapon, it stays there if you swap a man out, unfortunately they lose any powerups they had if you didn't cash them in.
I can't spend this whole article dwelling on the negative of course. If I say something good, it makes me look objective, which makes you think the bad parts are worse. Which is something I'm going for. It still at least plays like a Contra game in terms of physics and being able to fire in a straight line while curled into a ball and somersaulting through the air. Unfortunately, the aforementioned bright happy colors make it seem like the game is making fun of you when you die, which will happen a lot because it's still loosely a Contra.
The number of lives you get varies. It's hard to explain exactly what I mean by this, but each character has his own lives. You can swap between characters to save lives for your good characters, but if you lose that last life with any of them, it's game over, man. So you're basically encouraged to switch to someone sucky (Beans) during a heated battle to absorb a shot meant for whoever it is you were fighting as. So, if you play 'normally' you get say, three lives, whereas if you play with obsessive-compulsive disorder, you get up to twelve.
There's an interesting albeit useless multi-player option in this game that lets you have an AI sidekick back you up for all of five seconds. WOW. It's even less useful than it sounds. Pretty much he follows you from about five paces back and feebly tries to keep up with your jumps while shooting randomly. Beans, you irreprable suckhead, I was trying to jump on that crate. I can't remember, but it may have been possible for all four team members to be onscreen at the same time while playing a 2-player game. Doubt it though. The slowdown is bad enough as is. Even when there aren't any enemies onscreen, it's rather hard to time your jumps because the Contra Force team jumps as if they're in .5 Gs. The swapping system doesn't work out very well at all. It really breaks up the action too much to have to pause and negotiate a sub menu with a strange button arrangement (and its own music, which personally throws me off a LOT.) Not to mention the fact it unintentionally damns the two player mode: You have to swap characters but can't be the same one. That means not only do you have to do the useful mid battle hokey-pokey, but you have to deal with another person trying to pick the same character because again, Burns is the only one who can jump half the obstacles in the game. It bogs gameplay down well, a LOT when you have to switch to Burns, jump up onto a ledge, switch to someone else and let Player 2 take over Burns so he can get up there. Ah yes, and they're also playing from the same "lives pool" as you. Now the "You stole my life!" arguments can erupt into all out warfare. On the other hand, the game offers the option to switch modes of play in the middle of play, so if someone has to go to the bathroom or whatever, you can temporarily set their character to "NO USE" and keep chugging along as one player.
I'm not sure if it's a good or bad sign that the overhead scrolling stages are almost more fun than the sidecrolling levels. The air battle is easily the most interesting stage, where you wing-walk between planes in a seemingly very inneffective combat formation. Unfortunately, the bosses all pretty much suck. I'm guessing the Konami programmers ran out of miniboss ideas in the production of Hard Corps, because the bosses are all Herculean men in various military uniforms who hop around and shoot. And somehow, they still manage to be friggin' hard. It could just be my mind's tendency to assume that a person with a thigh the size of another human being shouldn't be twice as agile as my fighter. I don't know. There's also an encounter in the first level that I'm not sure if it counts as a mini-boos or a platform. There's this indestructible forklift that moves forward a little when you get near it, and you need to jump onto the fork to get over the thing, only sometimes if you time it just wrong you wind up slightly abrased by the machine and are of course, instantly dead.
Possibly the biggest piss-off of them all is the fact that with all the cutscenes (including the riveting "WHAT DID YOU WANT WITH SUCH A STRONG ITEM AS THE PLUTONIUM?"), the ending doesn't resolved a damned thing. After somehow braving the team's own HQ and its treacherous elevators, followed by a showdown with the (large, hopping) terrorist boss, the team looks off into the sunset while the ending monologue scrolls by all the plot threads left unresolved... the chief being still MIA, terrorists still existing in the world, you know, generally making you wonder why the hell you just wasted the past hour shooting it out with A MAN IN A SAILOR SUIT. And with Contra Force and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighter, Konami bid its last adieu to the NES.
Of course, this wasn't the first time they broke the tried-and-true Contra formula with extra characters and gimmicks. You knew that already if you clicked past the Contra Hard Corps review to here, you knob. But somehow C:HC seemed less icky. Sure it was goofy as all get-out, but it somehow had a sort of visceral appeal that kept it in the Contra groove. Again, somehow. I suppose Contra Force falls into the category of total series overhauls that didn't quite make it. But, it wouldn't be the last time...
-MANNA
Forced Contra is a felony in 48 states.
Smith snaps the ball to Burns, who powers up with a suitcase and passes to Iron, while Beans trips on his own shoelace and falls facefirst into a Burmese tiger trap.
This guy is number one on President Bush's Axis of Goofy.
Burns meets his match. And his name is Bayou Billy.