Collection essentials #176: Contra III: The Alien Wars (SNES)

I’ve given high praise for the Contra series so far, and here’s another great entry. It’s also the first Contra game I ever owned, another one my mom grabbed at a yard sale in the early 2000s (the same copy shown in the photo). I didn’t play it much when I first got it, perhaps being a little intimidated by the difficulty, but I eventually got around to it much later and greatly enjoyed it.

Contra III takes advantage of the additional power of the Super Nintendo to present a game that’s more over-the-top. The whole thing is like an ‘80s-movie hypermasculine-hero power fantasy, going against hordes of evil enemies, monstrous boss creatures, and performing superhuman acrobatic feats. A highlight of this is one level where you’re literally dangling from missiles flying through the sky and jumping from one to the other while trying to destroy an enemy ship.

Contra III adds some cool gameplay elements to the mix too. You can now hold two different guns and switch freely between them. There are now a limited number of bombs that you can detonate when you feel overwhelmed to damage the whole screen and be invincible for a moment (borrowed from the shoot ‘em up genre). It would have been nice if they had come up with the evasive slide maneuver that they added in the following entry, but oh well. There are also top-down-perspective levels that are a little different from the ones in the second game. In those games such levels were strictly linear, following a set path, but in Contra III’s overhead levels you are free to explore an area with a grid-like layout hunting down a certain number of targets to finish the level. Some people don’t like them, but I think they’re pretty cool. And let’s not forget that a buddy can join in for a cooperative blast.

This is one of those games where the true final boss and ending are not available unless you play hard mode. This is likely to extend the length of time people would spend with the game, since games like this are pretty short. Hard mode is HARD, and I haven’t come close to beating it…yet.

Sadly, after the mid-’90s Contra would never be quite the same. I’ve never quite taken to any of the Contra games in the same way that I have for the first four on home consoles. But part of that is just a testament to how great these classic games were. Absolute essentials.