Contra III: The Alien Wars (SNES) Playthrough
370A playthrough of Konami's 1992 run-and-gun shooter for the Super Nintendo, Contra III: The Alien Wars.
After knocking it out of the park with their NES adaptations of Contra in 1988 (https://youtu.be/CewtWdK4aI4) and Super Contra (https://youtu.be/uAm9xC1TLsw) in 1990, Konami went full-bore in creating the third mainline game of the series. Contra III: The Alien Wars (known as Contra Spirits in Japan and Super Probotector: Alien Rebels in Europe), originally a SNES exclusive that released in early 1992, continued that trend and quickly earned itself a reputation for being the best Contra game yet.
It is the year 2636, and Red Falcon's invasion force has returned to Earth to carry out another of its genocidal campaigns. Jimbo and Sully - descendants of Bill and Lance - now stand poised to take on the renewed alien threat.
Contra III takes the elements that defined the first two Contra titles and polishes them to a blinding finish. The action is now split between side-scrolling, top-down, and auto-scrolling segments spanning six stages, and each features a non-stop barrage of impressive set-pieces and boss fights. The pacing gives it the feel of an action movie more than a game: you'll rarely go more than a few screens without encountering some sort of unique challenge to break up the flow of the action, and there's a huge amount of variety between them.
The presentation has been similarly amped up. The massive boss monsters make use of fancy Mode 7 rotation and scaling effects, explosions and enemy sprites regularly flood the screen without much slowdown or flicker (until you set off a bomb, at least), and the synth-heavy soundtrack does a nice job of setting a driving tone that suits the action well.
The controls are responsive and make good use of the SNES pad's extra buttons, and though you only see the proper ending by beating it on hard, the difficulty settings are well-balanced to accommodate players of all skill levels.
Contra III: The Alien Wars was a pitch-perfect 16-bit update to one of the NES's most beloved franchises, and despite being such an early release for the SNES, it's still looked upon as one of the system's best titles. In this era of gaming, Konami, it seemed, could truly do no wrong.
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