Modern video games, for all of their advancements, seem to often base themselves on one simple premise:
“The world is going to shit. Let’s find 1-2 men, under-arm them, and send them into the fray to save the entirety of the human race. Basically I think our best shot is counting on 2 guys to give 10 billion percent rather than have everyone do just a little bit. No more of this victory garden bullshit.”
For quite some time, these men were not only without armor, but were often shirtless
which is probably why it took only a single, slow-moving bullet to bring them down. But a brave few were not only without shirts, but without faces.
But who were Bill and Lance, the Contra guys, really? Who were these faceless, shirtless men who differed only in their preference of pants color? And why did they have matching bandanas?
In order to really know, we have to dig into the annals of Contra history, one game at a time.
Is “annals” not the best AND worst word ever?
Contra
This installment introduces us to Bill “Mad Dog” Rizer and Lance “Scorpion” Bean.
I’ve never met anyone with a nickname like Mad Dog or Scorpion, and I think it’s because those kinds of nicknames create very unrealistic expectations. Scorpion is either a deadly desert creature or a magic guy that commands the power of hellfire. Mad Dog is a lot of things, and none of them are things that I could discuss old episodes of Mighty Max with.
I DID know a guy nicknamed Poopdick. But who hasn’t known a Poopdick here and there?
What’s strange is that for a few years there are 2 different Contra story threads. If you choose to believe the Japanese version, this first mission takes place on a fictional archipelago near New Zealand in the year 2633. If you side with America, which you should because anyone named “Mad Dog” is almost certainly American (although I wonder what, say, the Czech version of Mad Dog would be. Or Cobra. Do different countries have their own ideas of which deadly animals make the coolest nicknames?), then the plot is that everything is happening in the present day on an unnamed South American island.
So one version of the storyline is that it’s the future and we’re fighting aliens, and the other is that it’s the present and we’re fighting South Americans. In some ways, both scenarios have claims of realism. On the one hand, based on history, the idea of an armed conflict with South America is more likely than an armed conflict against a full-scale alien invasion. On the other hand, South America is not exactly known for its military industrial complex cranking out monstrosities such as giant robots, killer worms, and man-sized hearts that hatch baby scorpions. Although the existence of these creatures would lend credence to the idea of escaped Nazi scientists living it up in nearby Brazil.
Super C
The division between the Japanese and American storylines almost disappears except for one minor difference: In America this game is known as Super C, which is my new favorite rude thing to call someone with an attitude problem. In Europe and Australia, this game is known as Probotector II: Return of the Evil Forces.
I don’t know what a Probotector is, but it sounds vaguely sexual. Almost as sexual as a Super C, which I imagine to be…nope, not heading down that road.
Also, I don’t know how necessary the subtitle is. I mean, I think we all assumed that shit was going down again. This was a long time before the Heavy Rain era of gaming where you wake up and take a shower before you figure out that the bad guys are back. The game starts with you rappelling from a helicopter and opening fire before you hit the ground. So the Return portion is already in full effect.
Alike in both storylines, this time aliens have taken over an allied military base and have possessed the troops, forcing Mad Dog and Scorpion to fight both aliens and their possessed brothers.
I’m not totally sure why that level of pathos is necessary in a game where there are no faces. I like using my imagination as much as the next idiot, but is this information going to change how I play the game? Is a professor working on a cure somewhere? If so, I’ll try and just jump over as many of them as I can, but no promises. All of a sudden you find yourself trapped in a zombie ethics debate that I just don’t care for. I mean, before I just assumed that these were all alien assholes deserving of a nice spread gun blast. Now, Hey, there’s Alpha Company, who were all invited to my daughter’s bat mitzvah.
Contra III: the Alien Wars
This time, both the American and Japanese versions are in the year 2636 (which, for those of you counting, is 3 years after the original Japanese version, a million years after the original American version). Finally, someone decided to unite the Japanese and American plots. I’m sure it was a long night in the writer’s room to come up with the way to do it in the American version, and luckily they figured that it could be the future, and instead of these guys being Bill and Lance, they are the descendants of Bill and Lance, Jimbo and Sully.
My question on this one is related to the Japanese version where these guys are still Bill and Lance…okay, one of the characters in Contra III is clearly a black man. So how does this work? Were we just not seeing him as black before? Did he have some kind of futuristic race-changing surgery? Did they just find a second guy named Lance “Scorpion” Bean? If so, I can’t blame Bill for going with him. If I found a near-perfect replica of a beloved ex-girlfriend who was the same in almost every non-race-related way, including having the nickname “Scorpion”, I’d give her a shot. Hell, it would save time. Do you have any idea how much shit they give you at the jeweler’s when you ask them to engrave “Scorpion, my endless love” inside a wedding band?
Contra Force
I don’t even really want to discuss Contra Force. It really has nothing to do with Contra. It was some other game that they slapped the Contra name on. No aliens, no Bills, no Scorpions, no probotectating, no nothing.
This is why 90% of movie tie-in games are bullshit. What they do is take a game that’s basically already built, throw Iron Man graphics in there, and then you have a great way to waste a few more dollars on Iron Man.
Bill and Lance sold out. It sucks because up until this point, the name Contra meant something.
Contra Hard Corps
First of all, great name.
It turns out that Hard Corps is not the official name of the unit in this game. The official name is Unified Military Special Mobile Task Force K-X, but they decided to go ahead and nickname themselves Hard Corps, which makes sense. Seriously, I wouldn’t even be able to remember that Unified Special Planets Mobile shit if I was the guy in charge of the Special Mobility KY team or whatever.
What really shines is the choice of characters in this game. No longer are you limited to Blue Pants Guy or Red Pants Guy. Now you’ve got a choice of four!
Ray Poward!
Listed as a “standard male soldier” which is either laziness or a acknowledgement of how the military feels about folks, Ray is your basic default army guy except for his “burning lust for battle.”
You know, I have a little problem when people use the word lust outside of a sexual context. Maybe it’s just a cultural thing, but in a recent meeting someone said that we should buy furniture that’s more “sexy.” I don’t find chairs sexy, or even bean bags, or really anything sexy except stuff that’s about sex. And even that I could take or leave. Not once have I scrolled through the Ikea web site for the perfect furniture video clip to use as a “nightcap.”
Sheena Etranzi!
A female soldier and guerilla specialist.
There was something about this era that involved an excitement about guerrilla warfare in games, which was weird because the gameplay didn’t allow you to engage in this in any sort of way. It’s not like you had the option to put crushed up leaves or pieces of cork in the giant robot skeleton’s gas tank. No, you were just running forward and shooting it in the mouth.
And of course, her outfit. I think this would seem more outrageous if we hadn’t been playing games that involved shirtless men for all these years. Let’s face it, these titles have always played the skin game. There must be at least a few boys and girls out there who had their sexual awakenings based on the shirtless acrobatics and sheer aerobic fitness of Lance and Bill, and I can prove it too. If you don’t think there’s some insane slash fiction out there from the era predating Sheena, then you haven’t spent much time googling the most regrettable things on the planet.
Brad Fang!
“A genetically” –yes
“and cybernetically” –Yes
“altered” – YEs
“wolf-like humanoid” –YES
“with a cannon for an arm” YES!
Every time you get a character selection screen, there are clearly some characters who pretty much sucked or were pointless. I’m sorry, but Lisa Simpson in a Simpsons fighting sidescroller? Eat my shorts, assholes.
What I don’t understand is why you would pick any other character, horniness for combat or no.
What really stands out about B. Fang here is that he is not only genetically enhanced, cybernetically enhanced, and a wolfman, but he has a cannon for an arm. It just wasn’t enough until he had an arm cannon, and then someone felt alright about walking away from the canvas.
We used to do this activity in elementary school where one kid would write an opening line for a story on a sheet of paper, then pass the paper to the next kid who would have to write the second line. That kid would then cover the first line so that only his line was showing and pass it on to the next kid, who would write the third line based only on what he saw in the second line. This would go on and on until each kid wrote a line or the teacher remembered that we should probably be actually learning about things.
I think this same process may have been the primary method of character development for Brad Fang. I can definitely picture a 9 year-old boy writing, “And instead of an arm, he had a cannon, The End.”
Oh, and as if he needed the sunglasses.
Browny!
A small-sized combat robot. Officially knowns as CX-1-DA3000
You know, I’m always complaining how the big mistake in these sci-fi dystopias is that scientists make robots about 1000000000X stronger than they need to be. How strong does a robot have to be to make me breakfast in the morning? My grandma used to make me breakfast, and I would not put her even NEAR the top 25 strongest humans I’ve known personally.
Yet somehow, they make a tiny combat robot instead of a regular-sized one. Fantastic.
Contra: Legacy of War
Ray Poward is back!
Why Ray Poward is back as the least interesting of 4 possible options is beyond me, but here we go.
This time he has to stop an army of soldiers, robots, and alien mutants.
I don’t really understand what possible goal human soldiers, robots, and alien mutants could have in common. If I were Ray Poward, I would be super tempted to sit back and watch this army collapse from the inside based on the internal problems that come from having too many disparate parties involved. What do aliens eat? How much time does it take to recharge a warbot? What are the major religions of all 3 groups, and how are those mashed together?
Luckily, Poward isn’t alone. He’s paired with [girl], [robot], and an alien named Bubba. Because let’s get real, a cybernetic werewolf with a cannon arm is sort of silly and takes away from the gravitas of the series.
C: the Contra Adventure
CCA, as the cool kids call it, starts where the last game left off when a metoerite containing alien bugs hits Earth somewhere near South America.
Someone at Konami has a real thing for South America. Based on what I know about South America, it’s likely that some programmer’s lover was stolen away by a dashing, crafty South American with abs, and this is a programmer’s best form of revenge. Hopefully most kids who play Contra only paid as much attention to the story as I did and therefore won’t grow up thinking that South America might be looking for an ass-kicking here in the near future.
Contra: Shattered Soldier
It’s 2642, and aliens are back!
The only one who can stop them is Bill Rizer from the original Contra games.
Unfortunately, he’s in a cryogenic prison because he played a part in a weapons malfunction that killed 80% of the world’s population. Oh, and also because he murdered his partner, Lance Bean.
I would say if you kill 80% of the world’s population by accident, plus one guy on purpose, it really shouldn’t have all that much effect on your sentencing. I mean, let’s have a sense of scale here, people. Lance seemed like a great guy, and a real inspiration for overcoming the reverse vitaleggo or whatever turned him from white to black between Contra 2 and 3, but 80%…that’s a B in terms of annihiliating the human race. So probably jail forever, regardless.
It doesn’t specify how Bill finished Lance, but my guess would be that Bill was speeding through one of those vertical climbing levels and Lance was victimized by that endless plague, “Bottom of the Screen.”
Of course, it turns out that once Bill is cut loose, he discovers Lance is NOT dead but instead turned evil in an odd twist of fate. What a sigh of relief. I’d hate to think that Rizer, who we’ve led along murderous campaigns all over the world that involve killing literally hundreds of beings, was responsible for killing someone inappropriately.
My understanding of these cryo-prisons, based on a couple of sources, is that their purpose is to put people away, but then we can unfreeze them if it turns out that we need their unique skills. Which is sort of cool, although I’ve never honestly heard of anything remotely like this in real life. But if I ever get stuck in a cryo-prison for a crime I didn’t commit, I’m asking everyone reading this to try and create a scenario where the fate of the world will be determined by one person’s ability to play through the entirety of Metal Gear Solid on the original Playstation. That’s the most likely thing I could see them unfreezing me for.
Neo Contra
This is actually my favorite, story-wise. I’m going straight from the Wikipedia entry on this because I can’t seem to select anything about it that doesn’t need to be expressed:
Neo Contra takes place during A.D. 4444 when the Earth has been transformed into a prison planet, home to criminals and political rebels. From this underworld society rises a new order called “Neo Contra”. This government quickly showed its true colors, as it has other plans than bringing back normal civilization. Carrying out this new threat are four renegade Contras (elite warriors), who are called the Four Elite, united under the command of mysterious Master Contra. Thus, Bill Rizer is partnered with Genbei “Jaguar” Yagyu, a samurai, and the two are sent to Earth to deal with the Neo Contra threat. After defeating the Four Elite, heroes discover the truth behind “Neo Contra”, which is a facade for “Project C”, a plan to create half-human AI from Bill Rizier’s DNA, to be an ultimate weapon, which is now Master Contra. Bill Rizer himself is just a clone of original one, a side-objective of “Project C”. With the help of Mystery G, an elder Contra operative, the heroes managed to defeat Master Contra and put an end to “Project C”.
Bill Rizer, the supreme Contra warrior, is once again awoken from his cryogenic sleep of nearly two thousand years. He is now ordered to destroy the “Neo Contra” threat, a new organization that poses a much deep threat to the world. He is, in fact, a clone of original Bill Rizer, a side result of military “Project C”.
Wow.
First of all, they put Bill BACK in the cryo-prison after he saved the goddamn world? But wasn’t he exonerated for the murder of Lance Bean?
Oh, right. The whole thing where he killed 80% of the world’s population all at once. Shit.
I don’t know. If it was me, I think I would ask them to make a decision about this thing. Awke or asleep. It’s clear the government hasn’t figured out how to avoid these intensely bizarre military conflicts, so maybe they should just let me be. Or possibly leave me out long enough to train a couple other guys.
Part of the problem with this Contra world is the same problem I have with a lot of zombie fiction. In zombie stuff, they have to decide early on if the world is the real world, and therefore all the characters are familiar with the term “zombie” if only from a Cranberries song, or if this is a world like the real world, but sort of an Elseworlds situation where zombies have never existed in a fictional form, and therefore the characters kill 20 minutes trying to figure out what the fuck is going on.
The Contra world has the same thing going on, except instead of a world devoid of zombie fiction it’s as though no action movies were made between the years 1980 and 1999. Prison island? Did we learn nothing from Escape from L.A., and to a lesser extent, Escape from New York? Cryo-prison? How did we all miss Demolition Man?
There’s that saying about those who know nothing about history being doomed to repeat it. I’d say that these games pose a very broad version of that warning that include Sylvester Stallone vehicles as a relevant part of history.
Contra Rebirth
It’s 2633, and an evil force sends troops back to the 70’s, the time of the original Contra, to kick Earth’s ass because they figure Earth’s defenses will be garbage.
So, the Galactic President sends 4 people back in time to stop the entire evil force.
Sigh.
I don’t get this time travel business. If I was going to time travel to take over the Earth, rather than sending an army back to 1973, I’d probably just send them back to, I don’t know, 2? Then they could just do whatever they wanted with the earth. Whatever plans you have that involve decimating the human race, how about you just go way back and then do whatever it is you’re planning with Earth? Unless your plans involve Arby’s or casinos or Martin Scorsese in his prime. Then I guess you’ve got no choice.
And seriously, won’t it be super embarrassing when you go back to 1973 and then get your ass kicked by a couple dudes with no shirts and a robot designed to look like a little girl?
Contra Hard Corps Uprising
Weirdly enough, this is basically the other side of the story from Contra Hard Corps. You play the bad guy from that game during his rise to power.
I know the world doesn’t work this way, but shouldn’t you, upon losing, get a message that says, Congratulations, you lost this game, but you sort of won Contra Hard Corps, so that’s something!
It’s kind of like Super Mario 2 where the ending is that you wake up and it’s all a dream. I’m fine with that, but shouldn’t you also wake up if you lose all your lives? You don’t finish, but shouldn’t it just show a cut scene of Mario waking up and saying, Shit, I guess it was just a dream. Good thing because that dinosaur spitting eggs was owning my ass, big time.
And thus, the brief history of Contra.
Oh, wait. I would be remiss if I didn’t include this thing:
Yeah, whatever this thing is, it has been the source of multiple nightmares for yours truly. Seriously, is this not the worst thing ever created?
Oh, and I couldn’t help but notice that the poor bastard in this screenshot is using the LASER. Good luck, asshole.