Contra: Shattered Soldier : Web Wombat: Games

Sometimes, we aren't looking for stories that open the heavens and shower us with premature enlightenment; we aren't looking for graphics that make you bust a retina.

Sometimes, we're just looking for something freakishly addictive, something that lets you drop that 'ole grey matter in a box and just play.

That something is Contra.

Konami had the knack of addiction down to a fine art, back in 1990. With the release of the original Contra at arcades all over the planet, and the resulting conversion to Super Nintendo and various other consoles of the day, a revolution rocked the world, a revolution made up of hyper-kinetic gameplay and sadistic difficulty.

Brutally fast and drastically painful, Contra became an instant classic, with its side-scrolling platformer attitude, colourful sprites and massed waves of enemies, and those who could last 5 minutes without dying were worshiped as gods, little cults springing up to revolve around certain players.

Indeed, Contra could be considered the catalyst for what would eventually become the long standing Castlevania series.

Why was it so addictive? Well, one answer would be that it was so hard to win that most people kept on playing out of pure frustration.

"I'm gonna win…NOOOOO!"
"Ahh, you forgot about the spider bot, didn't you?"
"SHUT UP! Alright, this time…*BANG*…damn."
"I'd watch out for those foot soldiers next time."
"ARGGHH! HULK ANGRY, HULK SMASH!"

Scenes akin to the one described above were legion wherever a Contra arcade machine was to be found, and fistfights were prolific, usually just after exchanges such as these.

'Coz it's three-dee, some levels get fancy end bosses

Madness? Yes. But it was a cool kind of madness and, for a while, it was good. This fanatical fervour, as with all things, finally came to an end, but not before the release of several sequels, all of which were more evolutions than revolutions of the gameplay ethic.

However, it's been a very long time since the last Contra outing and the big question right now is "Has Konami managed to retain the Contra experience while adding on new shiny bits?"

I think I am justified in saying that the closest you will get to a real answer is "Yes…and no". Why this is so will be explained in the following paragraphs, so read on, dear friend, read on...

The first thing you notice when you plonk the nicely designed Contra CD into the big black box is the utterly useless but nicely rendered intro which has absolutely nothing to do with the game. Then again, Contra didn't have much of a storyline anyway, beyond "go from point A to point B, kicking 7 shades of smelly brown stuff out of everything in between".

However, the pure testosterone level of the CGI gets you straight into the Rambo kind of mood necessary to play Contra successfully, so I suppose we shouldn't complain.

A first for Contra, and possibly a sign of Politically Correct gaming in action, is that you can pick a female character instead of the typically buff Marine type. Not that it actually makes much difference to the gameplay in any other way than cosmetically, but it's a welcome change nonetheless.

Picking a level, you are dropped straight into the action, with nothing more than a multi purpose machine gun (think the android gun from a certain Christopher Lambert sci-fi prison flick, which shall remain nameless) and a couple of spare lives, with basically no idea what the hell you're supposed to do other than get across the other side of the screen.

Using a side scrolling camera, Konami have, apart from keeping the classic Contra experience alive, managed to avoid all the hassles of a third-person shooter, such as the clipping issues and tracking problems that plagued most of the early Tomb Raider games.

Not to mention that a third-person camera just wouldn't work, because you'd end up getting shot in the back every 3 seconds. Speaking of getting shot…

The enemies you'll face include your basic robot grunts, senior grunts, semi-bosses, real bosses, and generally enough robo nasties to make you froth at the mouth, and possibly at the brain.

Frenetic side-scrolling shoot 'em up action returns!

At any one time it's guaranteed that you will be savaged by no less than ten constantly moving enemies and will be given no more than 3 seconds to take them all out, since one blast from any opponent will kill you off faster than Mortein kills off flies.

I have to say that I feel that the PS2's visual capabilities have been a bit wasted on Contra, which utilises only the barest graphical features available and never really allows the camera to move in close enough for any kind of detail.

An advantage of this graphical sparsity is that you can have freaking platoons of the above mentioned enemies swarming all over the place without any kind of slow down, and the super high frame rate really helps to keep up the frenetic and totally constant pace that Contra is famous for.

Some might say that the platform change and the years between drinks for our dear little Contra Marine have diluted the formula, but I think not.

Like the rest of the Contra series, this is yet another evolution in the line, and a welcome one at that. Unfortunately, some hardened journos, weaned on a diet of Deus Ex and Ghost in the Shell philosophical essays, have found Contra: Shattered Soldier's gameplay a bit too frenetic.

I, on the other hand, still enjoy a bout of pure adrenaline-drenched insanity now and then, but I don't worship it with the same fanaticism that I once did.

Definitely one for the rental market, and not really a good idea for your gaming collection unless you're a full on Contra freak.

Game: Contra: Shattered Soldier
System: PS2
Players: 1-2 (co-op)
Memory Card: Yes
Developer: Konami
Distributor: GameNation

Rating: 70%

(Ratings Key/Explantion)

Contra: Shattered Soldier is on the shelves now.

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