This is what I meant when I said I didn’t play enough Konami games as a kid. I had never played Contra 3: The Alien Wars until last week. I had played Contra on the NES, but it didn’t really click with me. I don’t think I quite understood how it was meant to be played. I wanted something like Mario or Mega Man, and Contra wasn’t that. I didn’t make much of an effort to play any Contra games after that admittedly brief encounter years ago. After playing Contra 3, I have realized what a mistake that was. Contra 3 is a game that earns its reputation as one of the best on the system.

Contra 3 is a game of escalation, where each level gets bigger as it goes and starts bigger than the one before it. You start running down a ravaged city street, shooting aliens and move on to climbing buildings and eventually hanging off the sides of missiles as they shoot across the screen. The game starts a crazy awesome and amps up both the crazy and the awesome as it goes along. There are some times when the game stops to show off fancy new SNES tricks, but otherwise it puts the player directly in control of fighting an ever growing threat. It is a short game, but it is just perfectly paced and the intentionally high difficultly level makes the game have more of an impact than most hour long games would have.

The story of Contra 3, such as it is, is basically a mash of most sci fi action movies of the 80’s. You play as Arnold or Sly and fight Xenomorphs and a Terminator and there is the barest touch of Star Wars. It doesn’t hide these references, those references are the game. Better than any licensed property could ever hope to, Contra 3 puts the player in the action and lets them be the hero of these movies. There is something undeniably charming about how shameless Contra is about ripping off its inspirations. It is the epitome of that era of gaming.

The warts are the top down mode 7 levels that are largely forgettable and really just north of being straight up bad. There are only two of them and they are over relatively quickly, but they really just aren’t that much fun to play. The game would be better off if the simply weren’t there, they seem to exist to pad out the rather brief playtime. Still, they are only minor blips on what is otherwise a completely excellent game.

I’ve always been more of a Metal Slug fan. Those games lack the punishing precision of Contra, or at least the Contra games I’ve played, giving the player all the spectacle not matter how sloppy they play. There is something to be said for the Konami’s series more exacting style of play. Even with the Konami code, which is unfortunately absent from the American version of this game, it is still difficult to get through the game. It makes the player learn the game, makes you take a little time and assess the situation before going guns blazing, though once you’ve handle on things guns blazing is the way to go.

I don’t know that Contra 3 will ever be among my favorite SNES games, but I can clearly see why it so frequently shows up on such lists. It is a blast. Brutal, epic and unforgiving. It is this sort of run and gun game executed perfectly.

At least one more time (and likely two) I am going to have to push Super Mario RPG down the line and move on to another game. This time it is the much underrated Sparkster from Konami. Rocket Knight Adventures for Genesis is something of a cult classic, one of the few good games to come out of the overwhelming desire to copy Sonic the Hedgehog in the wake of that game’s release. Unfortunately, while RKA has a darling critical reputation, I don’t think it stuck that well in terms of sales. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago, when Konami put out the largely very good Rocket Knight for PS3 and 360, that I learned that not only did the game have a sequel, it had two separate sequels, one for the SNES and one for the Genesis, both named Sparkster.

Sparkster for the SNES plays very much like the original game. That is a very good thing, because Rocket Knight Adventures was a very good game. This time Wolf people have attacked the possum kingdom and Sparkster must fight them off. Sparkster can jump, swing his sword and charge up his jet pack and shoot across the screen. It is a simple, yet very effective moveset. Most of the game can be accomplished with a the simple ‘A’ jumps, ‘B’ shoots style pf play, but to truly get the most out of the game you have to master the rocket pack. This is a game made for mastery. One can set the game on easy and get through it with only a vague understanding of its mechanics (that is largely my strategy) but learning the ins and outs of the controls is necessary. Plus, the game does that terrible thing where it hides content behind difficulty levels. Not just the ending or something, which is understandable, but full levels of the game are inaccessible on certain difficulty levels. That fact made me switch from easy to normal after my first attempt at the game, but even playing on normal is not enough to see the true ending. (Which I watched on youtube because fuck that) I would assume it is an attempt to hamper the rental market, but it mostly just punishes players and games these days have wisely moved away from this sort of thing.

The level design is inventive and built really well on the protagonists powers. The big one it the ricochet with the rocket pack. If you boost into a wall, you will bounce off. If you boost at an angle, you will bounce off at a corresponding angle. Knowing how to angle your boosts are necessary to getting the most out of the game. There are a few levels that abandon the traditional control scheme or set up. On had the player riding on the back of an ostrich or something as it speeds through the level with limited control of where it goes. Another is just a full on vertical shooter that morphs into two giant robots punching each other in space. They aren’t what the player came for, but they are amazing on their own way and more entertaining than frustrating. Otherwise, it is just pitch perfect escalation of the concept.

It looks and sounds great, though. The graphics are truly outstanding, especially the backgrounds. The sunset in the pyramid stage is the SNES aesthetic at its finest. The game looks and plays like pure joy.

Honestly, I like Sparkster more than the other two games in the series I’ve played. It isn’t quite the Mega Man 2 to Rocket Knight Adventures Mega Man, but I do think it improves on that game (which I haven’t played in years) in several ways, not the least of which is graphically. It is also better than the 2010 game, which had its heart in the right place even if it didn’t quite capture the magic. I have yet to play the other Sparkster, though. It seems unfair that this game has been all but forgotten in talk of the SNES’s great games. It does not quite belong in that top echelon with Super Mario World or Mega Man X, but it slots nicely in that next level down with Donkey Kong Country and Kirby’s Dreamland 3.

It has been a while, but I’m back with another game from my bread and butter genre: the side-scrolling platformer. Magical Quest starring Mickey Mouse is the first of three Mickey Mouse SNES games from Capcom. The overwhelming quality of the Capcom’s NES games made me eager to try out some of their SNES output. Magical Quest, while largely enjoyable, does not quite live up to that pedigree.

In Magical Quest you play as Mickey Mouse, on a quest to rescue his dog Pluto from the villainous Pete. Along the way he gets some outfits that give him different powers, like a Wizard’s costume that lets him shoot magical bolts or a fireman’s costume that gives him a hose. It looks good and plays good, but it feels somewhat lacking. A lot of that is due to the fact that game can be beaten pretty easily in an hour and a half. Magical Quest has six levels split into four stages each, none of which are particularly long. The only part of the game that does feel long are the bosses, all of which take about 4 hits more than would feel natural to beat. It is not that the bosses are particularly hard but that they are tedious because you have to repeat the pattern so many times.

The outfits are a great conceit for expanding and limiting Mickey’s powers. The problem with them is that the game doesn’t do enough with them. The game is more than halfway over before you get your full array of powers and it doesn’t really build on them in any real ways. It gives the player the abilities to do some things, but it doesn’t ever require the player do them. Sometimes you need to be a magician to shoot magic, sometimes you need to spray things with water, and sometimes you need the last outfit’s grappling hook. Rarely, almost never, do you need to use them in any sort of conjunction with each other. There are grappling levels and fire levels, but no levels with some grappling and some fire. It ends up feeling like the first half of a game. Unlike something like Mario, Magical Quest never really builds on its mechanics. They just are. I realize comparing this game to some of the absolute best ever isn’t really fair, but it is obvious that it just doesn’t compare to the depth that those games offer.

This is just the kind of game I wanted to go back and experience with this project. Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse is a good game, but not a great one. It is the sort of game that is easy to miss at the time, but is a game that is worth playing. It looks good, sounds good, and plays fine.