![]() The classic sounds of Super Contra are emulated fairly well and still manage to keep the adrenaline pumping. That can be frustrating when you're in the midst of a good run and your online friend decides they're tired of watching you play. If your partner quits out after dying, your game ends too. The achievements based around it are nice, as are the leaderboards that go across all modes of play, but there was one quirk that annoyed us. The only online mode available is a co-op affair. We went ahead and did the borders for the next XBLA Contra game. Significantly better than broken isn't much to write home about. To be fair, the game plays significantly better online than when we tried to play the first Contra XBLA release. There really isn't a lot of data being transferred here and it shouldn't be that tough to make the game run smoothly. We met with success only a couple of times while repeatedly running into lag so bad that the game either disconnected or had to pause to re-sync. Finding a lag free game was far harder than it should have been. Why? Maybe the code wasn't robust enough to run both the game and display some art without lagging? Oh wait, the game suffers from lag anyway. For some reason, the horrid borders take a break when you hop onto Xbox Live for a co-op game. It's like a train wreck so horrible that you can't stop looking at it. It's actually bad enough that it detracts from the gameplay experience because you just can't stop looking at them. Black bars would be more attractive than this wretched excuse for art. The borders filling the extra space on each side of the screen are easily the worst we've seen. Or maybe we should say that Digital Eclipse has not been friendly to Super Contra. This transition has not been friendly to Super Contra. The other new visual addition comes with the transition to a widescreen format. The explosions look out of place and are overdone to the point of getting in the way of incoming bullets, but the smoothed sprites are done quite well. ![]() In the case of Super Contra, enhanced means some reworked explosion and gun effects, as well as an all around smoother look. As is the case with most classic arcade games that have made their way onto the Xbox Live Arcade, Super Contra can be played in either the new enhanced graphics mode or with the original look. A new top down view was added for the indoor areas of Super Contra as were inclined surfaces, but the gameplay is essentially the same as the first Contra. If you can manage the difficulty and controls, you'll find a game that looks significantly better than the original Contra, but doesn't hold quite the same nostalgia especially if you think of the NES games when you think of Contra. The d-pad…well enough has been written about that in the past for you to know that it is less than ideal. The analog stick is unwieldy for games designed around old-school arcade sticks such as Super Contra. Things are made more difficult yet when you factor in the Xbox 360 controller. It was designed to be a quarter-muncher, after all, so the level of difficulty is no joke. With the side scrolling, shooting madness that is Super Contra, only the skilled will make it through alive. For a short game, this might seem like enough. Take things online and you're given eight lives, but no continues. On the standard XBLA settings, you're afforded three lives and a limited number of continues. The original arcade game was not exactly easy and the difficult task of beating the brief game holds to this day. But then the game starts and it is the Super Contra you know and perhaps have fond memories of.
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