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The best Contra game ever!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: August 05, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Think you're good at Contra games? Think again! This game's easily the most intense 2D Contra game available. Why's that? Play the first level and you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. While it's fast-paced action throughout, don't go thinking that you're gonna beat this game in one sitting. Huge explosions and enormous bosses really push the power of the Sega Genesis to its limit. And the 2-player mode is the greatest! Not that the 2-player mode's gonna help you get any further, but it's still really cool to play cooperatively with a friend. Four characters to choose from! Four unique weapons per character! Multiple endings! Just play it. You'll thank me later. Trust me.

That's not a Belmont..!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: February 10, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Konami's (eventual, grudging!) offerings on the Sega Genesis tend to be underrated and overlooked (Sunset Riders, Rocket Knight Adventures/Sparkster, Japanese anyway); they usually were available on the SNES as well. Here's a game that didn't appear on the SNES and actually could not have appeared on that system; here's Contra: Hard Corps. One of the toughest Genesis games around - but balanced and fair in its own strange way. The only truly annoying thing about it is this difficulty - it doesn't make you sit through long talks, or restart areas after dying. It's just hard, on par with the system's Ghouls 'n Ghosts, but less annoying. Deaths come when you weren't sharp or wary enough, not because you didn't execute a well-known jump perfectly. You spend a great deal of time memorizing patterns, but the experience is far from routine. Take just one hit and you're dead, the standard for an oldschool Contra title; you have three lives and five continues (with no Konami Code to help, by the way).

The game focuses on sending you into tons of manic battles, shooting, jumping, and occassionally sliding along; you'll run into powerful enemies or sub-bosses all the time. The first level plays out like this: You see your APC ram through some robots, you get flung through the window (ow) and end up in the city where tons of small robots will run onscreen at you. Run right, kill or duck past a menacing but doomed and mostly harmless big spider robot, blow up a big gas truck with a robot on top, dodge a spinning robot that ends up knocking a building over, run up the side, battle a huge boss that is actually really easy. This all happens within the course of three minutes, maybe less if you're really quick. Some folks say this is less a Contra game than it is a string of boss battles, but don't worry - the usual detailed backgrounds and level progressions are here. This isn't Alien Soldier; this is a game with well-written exchanges (sans flubbed grammar) and a coherent plot.

On with this theme, there are a total of seven endings for the game (you'll need to locate a hidden area and undergo a totally unique set of fights to get the secret ending); you can opt to be bad for another. Along the way you're often presented with two selections to do one thing another; these choices will take you along very different paths. It's amazing that the game holds up such a high level of difficulty, never reuses bosses, and sets different moods (prison trains and garbage dumps feel much different than jungles or battles on an airplane wing). There's tons of hidden animations - usually you'll blast things long before they get a chance to go into their peculiar attack routine or different animations, including sub-bosses; some have very rare attacks that just are there in case you were waiting to see them but can be very hard to see.

This is much more action than you should expect from a Genesis - or SNES - game. Part of Konami's 'trick' appears to be more animation via sprite rotation. Everything runs smoothly despite full-screen shaking, explosion effects with blast halos (all for the visual; these don't hurt you in most cases) and tons of enemies onscreen. It's not at all uncommon to have five enemies onscreen (some areas throw many more), and equally that many small detail sprites flying around as well. A lot of stuff doesn't look as good in terms of artwork as its counterpart from older games, but a lot looks better - bosses in particular. There's no denying the art direction has changed since Treasure departed, though.

Control: You've four characters to choose from (usually with their own unique dialogue for conversations, and small changes in the endings are seen as well), each of which has a very different arsenal and only Ray and Sheena have very similar physical characteristics - Ray is well-rounded, Sheena is tougher to play as but awesome all the same; Brad Fang (a cyborg-werewolf) has incredibly powerful attacks you must get close to enemies to use; Browny, finally, is a mouse-like robot that doesn't need to duck and has very unusual weapons (along with a jetpack). Bombs are available; many sub-bosses can be taken out with one hit from them, good for ridding yourself of annoyances. You can choose to switch between shooting standing still (better for vertical firing) or the classic run and gun mode; your full selection of weapons is available to be cycled through with the press of a button. Not bad for three buttons, and you rarely will do something you hadn't wanted to. Four available weapons (you can upgrade your default weapon, and with the bomb so...six) provide an impressive arsenal to help you out in every situations. Gone is the classic Contra tendency to cause

"Let's rock!"

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: November 02, 2002
Author: Amazon User

If not for the insain level of difficulty found in this and others of its type, I would have given it five stars. The game takes place a few years after The Alien Wars (SNES) and you get your playing choice of a G.I.Joe-Duke-look-alike comando, a tough lady named Sheena (no, not Lady Sia!) who wears cyber-metalic lingerie and somewhat resembles Nova from StarCraft Ghost, a werewolf with a gatlin-gun for an arm, and a cycloptic robot named Brownie. Each characters starts out with a machine gun but gets his/her/its own set of additional weapons via power-ups.
To sum this all up, it's a side-scroller that has you shooting everything up while trying not to get hit. You get 3 health points and 4 continues so be careful.

Best genesis game. Hands down.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: January 13, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This game is the definitive Contra game. Not only are there 4 characters to choose from, but there are several endings, path branches, and secret endings to uncover.

This game is addictive, action packed, and incredible. My friend and I have been playing it sporadically over the past 6 years and we still havent gotten past the 4th mission's final boss yet.

Do yourself a favor and buy this game---it's the best of the entire series (better than Contra III, and thats saying A LOT).

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