Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start. This famous "Konami code" stirs up plenty of memories for providing a full weapons cache in Gradius and adding thirty lives in the old NES rendition of Contra. Recently, the Xbox Live version of Contra touched down on 360s across the US and it includes this same code; allowing thousands of people to cheat.
Developer Digital Eclipse deserves credit for giving gamers the option to have it both ways. Those who take the tough-as-nails and honest route earn more Achievements, while gamers who activate the code get thirty lives, but no Achievements. The trade off makes sense. The game's lack of polish doesn't.
The player takes control of one of two gunmen, Bill and Lance, and then launches an all-out assault against the alien forces of Red Falcon. The game offers eight levels and plenty of enemies to shoot using an array of killer power-ups such as the laser and the spread gun. The assorted Achievements range from easy (picking up the fireball gun) to incredibly hard (beating the game on just one credit- yeah, good luck). So even though a run-through may take twelve minutes the first time, there's reason to come back for more.
While the game provides plenty of thrills, it would have been better for Konami to release the NES version and not just the arcade edition. That's because the arcade version is a little stiff, with haphazard jumping and the occasional cheap death.
The graphics mirror the arcade version of the game. The sound features a remixed batch of Contra tunes that, while enjoyable to listen to, fail to do justice to the original score. Fortunately, players have the option to switch back to the original soundtrack at any time.
For 400 points, Contra excels as a good, cheap game, even though the developers bungled the multiplayer. The game features co-op matches that can be played either off-line or via Xbox Live. However, the buggy matches and random or freezing put a damper on the otherwise solid product. Even offline, the game runs poorly. Perhaps this is something that Konami will fix in a future update.
Contra deserves more than one play-through, but the bugs make it one of Xbox Live Arcade's black sheep. Hopefully, Konami will pull out all the stops for a version of Super Contra.
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