Virtually Overlooked: Contra Hard Corps

Welcome to our weekly feature, Virtually Overlooked, wherein we talk about games that aren't on the Virtual Console yet, but should be. Call it a retro-speculative.

With Contra 4 kicking DS Lites' asses, Contra fans who inexplicably only own Wiis are probably feeling a bit neglected, with only Super C and Contra III: The Alien Wars to play. Oh, wait, those games are awesome. Well, nonetheless, we want to talk about Contra today, specifically the one Virtual Console-eligible Contra game that is not in the direct Contra series progression, and is thus most likely to be underappreciated in the post-Contra 4 world. Consider yourself a hero and jump over the exploding post break.

Konami released a pair of Genesis action games in two of their most popular series, Castlevania and Contra, that were significant departures from their predecessors. While Castlevania Bloodlines employed an obviously different art style, non-Belmont protagonists, and a largely outdoors level design, Contra Hard Corps innovates mostly by being, well, extremely damn hardcore.
In fact, Hard Corps is probably the hardest Contra game until Shattered Soldier. Rather than rewarding practice with a perfectly designed difficulty curve as Contra 4 does, Hard Corps punishes you from the very beginning for daring to play it, putting bullets in you regularly from start to (abrupt) finish. Whether or not this is a bad thing to you depends on your patience. If you can play it for more than ten seconds, you get to experience a boss rush of a Contra game, full of screen-filling, explosive enemies. The levels themselves are extremely brief and lead to amazing boss set pieces. Combined with the unusually fast pace of the game and the four weapon slots, Contra Hard Corps feels like a cross between Contra III and another brilliant Genesis run-and-gun, Alien Soldier.
Another way that Contra Hard Corps diverges from the main series? Hell of robots all over the place -- including as one of the four selectable player characters. Where most Contra games would have generic dudes in red uniforms running around shooting slow-moving, gigantic flashing bullets at you, Hard Corps fills the levels with robot foot soldiers. This has the benefit of giving Konami an excuse to make every single enemy explode rather than just backflip to death. Of course, with the screen full of explosions, you're a lot more likely to get nailed by one of those gigantic flashing bullets.
Hard Corps' wacky character roster is pretty notable too, for including not only generic headband guy, but generic headband woman, as well, and, for some reason, a wolf guy and a robot. All of them have the ability to toggle the ability to run while firing (by pressing one of the top buttons on a six-button pad, or A+B at the same time) which is a nice workaround to the Genesis's lack of shoulder buttons (said shoulder buttons being used to hold the character in place for 8-way aiming in Contras III and 4). And all of them have multiple weapon slots. The characters differ, however, in their weapons. Ray's weapon D, for example, is most similar to the Contra Laser, a straight beam of penetrating light, but Sheena's is a homing spread-shot laser that also bounces off of things and is awesome.

Playing through the multiple paths of the game with the different characters and their wildly varying weapons would ensure a lot of replayability, if that were necessary. Since there's so little chance of getting all the way through the game once, though, there's little chance of the game getting stale.

When a few third-party Genesis games actually start showing up on the VC (Sega is totally dominating the selection now, for whatever reason, along with, uh, Ghouls 'n Ghosts) we hope to see this one right at the top of the list. In conclusion, Contra is awesome.