They just keep coming. They don’t stop. It’s overwhelming. I’m overwhelmed. I detonate a bomb that obliterates everything on the screen. They keep coming. I never stop shooting. I shoot while moving, while prone, while jumping, while spinning. Always moving, always shooting. There’s no cover. The guns have no ammunition, no clips; there’s no reloading, no overheating. There’s no opportunity for caution. If you ever stop shooting, you will die.
Contra III is a run and gun game characterized by near omnipresent danger and continuous full action (using all of the inputs, always moving, jumping/crouching, and shooting). This state of perpetual stress stems primarily from two features. The first is the merging of the obstacle (something to be avoided) and the enemy (something that will hurt you unless defeated) via a simple but profoundly impactful mechanic, that coming in contact with the body of an enemy will damage you. The second is profusion of enemies that appear in never-ending streams. In Contra III, enemies pour forth from every direction, coming from bases and bosses in the four side-scrolling levels and out of the water and ravines in the two top-down levels. This enemy-obstacle dissolution and continuous hoard production necessitate a spatial reconceptualization in which you are constantly clearing the path ahead of you so as not to be crushed or suffocated. Another genre in which these two features are present is zombie-survival games in which you are both trying to avoid zombies as enemies who perform various attacks, but the hoard of zombies also continually recreates the space around you such that you must either cut a path through them or flee. However, in contrast to such zombie-survival games, in Contra III, your space is highly restricted, so fleeing is never an option, you must always cut through.
This logic reaches its apotheosis in the second stage of the fight with the final boss of the game, Emperor Dragon God Java. After destroying two demonic jack-in-the-box heads which Java employs as arms, Java opens its mouth and a literally endless stream of enemies pour forth. If you only attempt to clear the enemies pouring from Java’s mouth, the enemies will never stop. You must simultaneously clear a path through the air and on the ground for your character by shooting the ceaseless swarm but also actively endangering yourself by not doing so in shooting up at Java. There is no interruption in the stream of enemies. This attack pattern falls outside the implicit turn-based logic of a majority of video game boss fights. The player dodges a massive attack or series of attacks and in return, so the transaction goes, the player is given a brief opportunity to return fire against the boss. Contra III violates this implicit logic and forces you to manage chaos. There’s no orderly way through the game in which if you dutifully dodge and return fire at the appropriate times, safety is assured. There’s only the tedious and stressful weaving through continually changing chaos.
Before the start menu, a brief cinematic sequence plays in which you are presented with a glimpse of a modern city from the future, A.D. 2636, as a cloud-like spaceship descends and uses a blue death ray to obliterate the city. Over the decimated skyscrapers looms the massive and grotesque face of the demon Java before “The aliens wars begins!” scrolls across the screen in massive red letters imposingly set against a black background. In case you might have had any confusion as to what you might be doing in this game and why, the protagonists, Jimbo and Sully, clarify your motivation and tack. Jimbo’s mouth moves without emitting sounds as the words “It’s time for revenge” flash onto the screen. Sully then appears similarly with the words “Let’s attack aggressively” appearing below him.
Sully’s contribution of “Let’s attack aggressively” turns out is less a suggestion and more a requirement. If you don’t attack you will die. If you aren’t aggressive, you will die. Unlike the health recovery system present in other push-forward combat games (such as Doom (2017)), Contra III is very much the product of the arcade-era in which you lack health, have very few lives, and only earn lives sparingly through the accumulation of a certain number of points. With the exception of the relatively rare pick-up of a barrier, which grants invincibility, there’s no point in the game in which you not in a position of absolute precarity. You might think that having several lives grants at least a small window of error, but such appearances are deceiving due Contra III’s punitive weapons management system.
There are seven weapons in the game, the rifle, spread gun, laser gun, homing gun, crush gun, fire gun, and m-80,000 Helio Bomb. The default weapon, the rifle, is rather weak and you actually need two weapons at almost all times. You need one gun to deal with a great number of weak enemies coming from a number of direction, a function which only the spread gun accomplishes effectively, and a primary damage-dealing gun for tougher enemies and bosses, which depending on the stage, is either the crush gun (for immobile enemies) or the laser gun. In many instances the spread gun is not even robust enough to deal with many enemies, which is why the stage-clearing m-80,000 Helio Bombs must be used. The particularly punishing aspect of death is that when you die, you lose whatever gun you were holding and your bombs are reset to 1 (from a maximum of 9). In a boss fight, if this happens, you are unlikely to receive additional gun or bomb drops, so if you need multiple bombs or either of your two required guns, the fight will at least take significantly longer and it might be impossible to eke out victory. In theory you have multiple lives, but in many crucial areas of the game, you only have one.
Contra III is a movement-strategy game, a game not about defeating enemies triumphantly but always barely avoiding death. The game ends not with you triumphantly lording over a defeated enemy, but hanging on for dear life from a missile.
Contra III: The Alien Wars. Super Nintendo Entertainment System version, Konami, 1992.
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