Yea, I don’t like to normally do these, but I wanted to let people know I am not dead.

PersonalDNA

Concerned Inventor

Contra Valentine
Originally uploaded by Shapermc.

Well, since I am 700 miles from my wife it won’t be too happy for me, but I invite all of you to have a most glorious and happy Valentines Day. And happy FKW’06!

I feel like I want to update this but there is so much that it is not really possible, so I am just going to start with a recap of small things and then in the future expound on them more if the mood strikes me.

I finished up Gitaroo Man on Saturday… I think. It was over the weekend, whatever the exact day was. I had to stop playing the game a few weeks back because LCDs really suck for playing rhythm games. I know this now. They are literally impossible to play them on. So, anyways, I picked it up and replayed the only level I was able to beat, the first one, and kept going from there. The game starts out exceptionally cheesy and over the top, with some terrible voice acting. At a certain point the game starts to take itself far more seriously than it should and for that it results in some truly moving moments. The end battle has a ton of energy and most of it is built up out of emotions for the characters. While still remaining a bit silly even to the end, it just goes to show that any kind of game is capable of producing some great results. I now know why so many people love this game.

I recently traded some games for FFVIII. I did this for two reasons 1) Rud13 raved about it and even claims it to have one of his top 10 game moments. 2) Sergei wrote a great and moving article about it for issue 2 of The Gamer’s Quarter. So, as of last night I am still loving it. It is a bit over the top, but it is a FF game. I finished the first disc and my time is clocked in around 19 hours. There are a few things I don’t like about it unfortunately, but I am learning to deal with them. I have 2 people now on AIM that I get my tips from (so I don’t have to read a FAQ, but I don’t go around doing things the hardest way possible). I think I may end up drawing like a mad man in a little bit. But I like it. Seriously, I am not joking. Squall has surprised me a few times and is growing on me. Possibly one of the best FF characters ever. Perhaps even better than X-Death (which is mainly only cool for his damn name).

Still playing Contra: Hard Corps about once a day. I can get to level 4 now on one continue and level six with everything I got. This just makes me wonder what all the “hardest game ever” are about. It just feels like people stopped after one or two games of it. It has a very gentle learning curve, it just starts out higher than most games. This game has also nudged out Gunstar Heroes as my favorite Genesis game, and is climbing the ranks towards best action game ever.

As of last Saturday I now have episodes 1 - 74 of Hokuto No Ken. Let’s do a little bit of background on this. When I was much younger a friend of mine had this “cool” new game called Fist of the North Star for the NES. I remember it being confusing and difficult, but playing through a lot of it anyways, because it was pretty cool. A few years later anime started to become more popular in the US. By this I mean that if you go to enough comic shops and movie stores you might bump into some, but most stuff is still only available fansubbed on VHS. This is the second time I ran into Hokuto no Ken. The movie was released by Orion (the company that brought the better dub of Akira to the US) and to this day remains one of my favorite animes no matter how silly/cheesy/clichéd it is. It was part of me at that time and I will never forget it. The unfortunate side effect is that I have watched it so many times now that it no longer holds any surprises for me. So I hardly watch it. But the TV series is great because it is like watching the extended (and not quite as violent, yet I am still surprised that it was aimed at young teens and on TV in the 80s… then again we are talking about Japan) version of the movie. I think I am up to episode 7 now and am attempting to watch about one episode a day. It should follow me through most of the rest of the time I am in this city. Although there are a total of about 154 episodes, so I have no idea what I am going to do once I run out of episodes half way through. I can also see why this game has so many gambling games in arcades. A lot of people who were the teens watching this on TV are at the age that they are using these gambling machines. If I were in Japan gambling I would turn to the Hokuto No Ken machine myself.

Contra is a series that I assume most people are slightly familiar with if not intimately. In Europe it was released as Probotector with all humans changed to robots so that it could clear the sensors about “realistic violence” at the time. I was first introduced to the game by a friend (later turned enemy) named Patrick Hammick.

On a sunny Sunday after noon, upon returning from church, I went over to my friends house to play some NES games and possibly ride our bikes over to the arcade and check out some comics on the way. All those plans changed when I got there and he showed me his new game: Contra. We spent the next 5 hours just playing Contra in a daze. Try after try, stolen last life after life: We never really got very far though. Perhaps level 5 at best. We tried and tried the game for weeks. Eventually, while flipping though a game magazine at the drug store, I came across the Konami Code. With a pen from the desk I wrote out the code on my arm: UUDDLRLRBASlSt. That night was the first time we beat Contra.

After that we would only play to attempt to beat it in less lives (we could get to the alien hive with only about 5 lives used at one point, but that level always handed us our asses). Our interest slowly waned in favor of other games. I eventually ended up trading Rampage for his copy of Contra. This is when I learned that the game is a completely different beast when you try to tackle it alone. I ended up using my Game Genie to beat it by myself as the Snow Fields usually sucked my last bit of life out of me. I still have this copy of Contra, but I have a hard time playing it: turning it on chokes me up with nostalgia.

My next system was a Genesis, which I got for Sonic 2 and Golden Axe. After playing Super C and not enjoying it to the extent of the original I never returned to the series of Contra until Shattered Soldier. I also never owned a SNES until late 2000. I really missed out on something here.

Contra: Hard Corps. I just received this the other day in the mail after long searching and getting it dirt cheap. Toted as one of the “hardest games ever” I was not only hesitant, but it just added to my feelings of Konami not having the juices left to make a good successor to the original Contra. Around the time I was playing a lot of Gunstar Heroes (no, I had no idea who Treasure was) with my friend Michael-John in his grandmothers basement. He said he played it at a friends house and that it was “too hard.”

Ignore all these people who say this. If it is too hard, well since most people who have not played it are emulating it anyways, get the Japanese version, as it has a 3 hit life bar. But that is really too easy. Contra is not about being easy, it is about being hard core. Playing this game last night for the hour and a half I spent with it I could make it to level 4. I also found a secrete in level 3 which is very Treasure like and completely excellent.

This game is the culmination of the best action elements a game can offer, as well as some of the greatest music ever. This could possibly be Konami’s greatest and crowning achievement in action games. This far surpasses any expectations I had of the game and the music that the Genesis could make. Bravo and kudos Konami and SEGA, there still are some gems left in your system that I have not found yet. This with Castlevania: Bloodlines will bring more hours of fun than one person should have with just 2 games.