Arcade Archives: Contra is a port of the game Contra from the Arcades, released digitally for the PlayStation 4. It is a run and gun shooter and is the first game in the Contra series. The original was released in 1987, and this version contains both the Japanese and US versions. As an arcade game, naturally there isn’t much to the story but if you open up the manual, it gives you the backstory that the playable characters are Bill and Lance, who are super soldiers (codenamed Contra) tasked with destroying the aliens’ invasion base on Earth.
With that backdrop, you’re thrown right into the game and the controls are easy to work out. It has a 2D perspective so you run from left to right, shooting all the enemies in the process. You start with the default gun, but as you defeat monsters, they’ll drop powerups including more powerful guns like one that shoots three bullets or a laser. rounding out the controls is the ability to jump / duck.
Once again, naturally, as an arcade game, Contra is designed to be hard. You will die if you touch an enemy, or if something hits you. It’s designed to overwhelm the player and designed to kill the player in order for the player to keep inserting money. Since this version is not an arcade cabinet, you’ll have infinite continues as well as a menu with quite a number of customizable options. You can tweak the difficulty, the number of lives each credit, remap the controls, the ability to continuously fire by holding down the shoot button, create save states and how easily you can get additional lives.
So while the game is hard and you’ll constantly die, at least you’ll be able to grind your way through it to the very end. That’s when you realise that this is a really short game. The game is also predictably structured, with a run and gun section, then a 3D section where you’re shooting up instead of to the sides, and then a boss. Repeat this three times and you’re finished with the game in under 30 minutes (much less if you’re good). Throughout this mode, there’ll be a high score.
So there’s not much to the game apart from playing through it again and again to get high scores. There are two additional modes, the High Score mode disables continues so you play under you get a game over to obtain the highest score. The Caravan mode gives you a 5 minute time limit to get as high a score as you can. In all modes, you can upload the high scores onto online leaderboards. However, all these modes are basically the same game anyway and the average player is effectively guaranteed to die during a run.
Overall, Arcade Archives: Contra is a blast from the past. You’ll get a kick out of the nostalgia if you’ve played it as a kid, however for newer players this is a rough game. The game is designed to kill the player as easily as possible which can be frustrating since it can feel unfair. It’s a short experience so you don’t waste much time on it even if you don’t enjoy it so it kind of balances out.
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