Sensory overload! Fun in every way and a lot more forgiving that previous Contra entries.

Love all the weapons but still defaulted to the spread shot as my favourite. All the levels look great. Amazing boss fights once again.

It’s short, but the want to play again is there once you’ve finished a run.

It still has bullshit moments, however. There were times where you would have to do a perfect sequence of movements or be at exactly the right point on screen to avoid being hit. But this didn’t bother me too much as it was expected.

I'm beginning to think that the first Contra is the only great one. I remembered this being a lot better: the switchable weapons, the goofy special attack, the climbing, the numerous minibosses. It seems to point towards something expansive, where movement and creativity are what's being asked of the player.

In practice, it's usually the opposite. This is a very rigid, cramped game. It constantly forces the player into small areas, to wait, to occupy just this part of the screen and no more. When you know what to do it feels like a solved equation instead of a fight. And the interstitial non-sidescroller levels were always an issue with Contra games, but those top-down Mode 7 levels are the worst. Ugly, disorienting, and simplistic. Also what's up with that legacy-obsessed last level? It's more than a little embarrassing fighting watered-down bosses from the two prior games.

Yeah, it's still Contra. The sidescrolling levels had never looked as good. It's responsive to be sure, and when the game encourages movement (like the stage 3 boss) it can be a pretty good time. But going back and playing this was a really disappointing experience.

Ever since my first review, I think I’ve replayed this game about 20 times (mostly on normal), so I decided to just log a replay already.

Great on easy, one of the best run & gun games oat on normal, and fucking mind numbing on hard. Don’t let people trick you into thinking Hard Corps is tougher than contra 3 on hard.

Hard mode is just goddamn impossible man, I had to use the Japanese version with infinite continues just to get far in it, and that second checkpoint in stage 6.. holy shit.

Play this on easy or normal, don’t even bother with hard unless it’s on the Japanese version. still love this game even if the stage 5 boss exists

Contra III: The Alien Wars brings the Contra series into the Super Nintendo!

And in terms of presentation, it shows! The amount of detail present on screen is great, and the music is really good too!

Problem is, the game is even harder than the last two entries, in spite of having only 6 stages, as oppossed to the previous games' 8 stages.
There's a lot of moments where the game just kicks you in the balls, and Stage 4 can go fuck itself, that was one of the most annoying stages in the game.

I also found the bosses a bit more dissapointing this time around, as they really drag out and feel more like endurance rounds, than a fun challenge.

Stages 2 and 5 feature heavy use of the SNES' Mode 7 technique, and they're fine stages. It's a bit weird to control your character with the shoulder buttons, but you get used to it quickly.

All in all, while Contra III: The Alien Wars does the jump to the Super Nintendo in graphics and sound, the game just got too hard for me to not like it as much as the other two.

Mais um jogo da minha infância ao qual resolvi jogar outra vez, um clássico da série que nunca canso de revisitar.

Contra 3: The Alien Wars é um jogo de plataforma com ação do inicio ao fim, é uma oportunidade de enfrentar inimigos, subchefes e chefões que já deram as caras em jogos anteriores porém aqui com gráficos melhorados (estes muito bem detalhados) e em cenários também muito bem feitos.
A trilha sonora nos mantém no ritmo empolgante do game principalmente durante as batalhas com os chefes que em minha opinião, é onde se encontra a melhor música.
É um jogo em que não vejo muita dificuldade (talvez porque eu já joguei tantas vezes que aprendi os padrões e tudo mais), porém que já me deu bastante dor de cabeça para avançar no passado.

Run ‘n Gun-a-thon — Part 2

Contra III starts off with a bang. As soon as the music starts, your instinct is to move right and blast everything in sight. Within 60 seconds, you’re jumping into a tank and annihilating fortification posts. Then a combat plane swoops in and sets the entire street ablaze, forcing you to grab steel beams to navigate the conflagration. After that, a gargantuan alien turtle bursts through a wall, eager to murder our ripped heroes.

All of this happens within the first level, making you think the rest of the game will be similarly energetic and fun. You are greeted with the map of level 2 and realize it’s a top-down level. Okay, no big deal. The top-down levels from Super C and Operation C were tolerable. Then you start playing it and realize you have to control the camera to aim because some nutjob at Konami thought making your head spin during a shooter was a brilliant idea. I rarely get motion-sick, and yet I found these levels to be borderline nauseating. My heart goes out to those who played this on original hardware and needed to vomit after playing. I found out in level 5 that you can hold L to lock your aim in place to counter the quicksand that spins you around. This is nice, but good luck beating the boss without dying.

The other levels are hit-or-miss. Level 3 has some cool setpieces and was just as fun to play as 1. 4 on the other hand is very dull until you’re hopping between missiles in the sky. 6 was also underwhelming with how similar it was to the original game’s alien lair.

So much of the experience is style over substance. In that sense, it has some parallels with Super Castlevania IV. Both titles were technical showcases for the SNES, but I had much more fun hanging out with Simon Belmont. Its atmosphere has yet to be equaled by any 2D platformer and it retained a healthy degree of challenge despite some mechanical tweaks that favored the player. The only reason I would replay Contra III is the first and third levels.

Pensa num jogo FODA que muitos vão deixar de jogar por conta da dificuldade?

Contra é uma franquia que já carrega um certo peso a mais em sua volta e é difícil não se assustar olhando pra esse jogo aqui em especial, mas como muitos outros jogos da época também há um segredinho que muda tudo. A versão japonesa de Contra 3 (que se chama Contra Spirits) possui continues infinitos, algo que muda completamente a dinâmica do jogo. Sério, joguem sem medo esse jogo, aprender cada coisinha sobre ele é divertidíssimo e não ter que se preocupar em começar de novo desde o começo faz total diferença, impressionante como uma simples mudança feita por americanos sem noção pode alterar tanto um jogo.

Talvez a única coisa que perde um pouco a mão seja no boss final por exigir um desafio um tantinho mais abusivo, mas absolutamente tudo aqui tem um truquezinho simples de se compreender e gostoso de se descobrir. Curto como mesmo quando você pensar que já dominou tudo que o jogo tem a oferecer, você ainda terá uma experiência totalmente diferente e insana no modo hard.

É um jogo que no mínimo vai te entregar um espetáculo de ferver o sangue com sua ação deliciosa que até hoje não perdeu nenhum pouco da adrenalina, com cenas incríveis como você tendo que pular de um míssel até outro enquanto destrói um alienígena voador te perseguindo nos céus. Jogaço!!!

One of the biggest examples of "style over substance."

First of all, I want to give this game some credit for all the great things it does. The gameplay has converted into the 16-bit in probably the best way possible, just like earlier games controls are responsive; sounds and effects makes it pretty juicy. Overall it's pretty fun to play. Visually it's one of the best-looking games on SNES and just reading about the technical wizardry behind it makes me respect even more to all the details. As you can guess, music is great too.

I don't want to get too much into the details that were good in previous games so I'm going to talk about one of the most surprising things about this game for me: cinematic presentation. It has many over-the-top scenes and they're great, on presentation, it feels like a cheesy B-movie and that's what I want to see from Contra.

So what makes this game a disappointment for me? As you may expect the difficulty and stages. Earlier games weren't all that fair we all know that but their difficulty comes from their goal to push your reflexes to their limits. They're hard but you just have to learn how to dance with the controls, you need to think about your character's hitbox and your play style. But Contra 3 wants you to memorize levels not learn them. Unlike its predecessors, you probably won't understand how to react against certain obstacles at first and you will die then you will restart and play the sections you've played before over and over again, trial and error can be an amazing thing in games if you do it right but it's also something like a dangerous lab equipment, you can always blow it to your face just like this game does, you have limited continues and you just get sick of the game after a while, you must play it with save states or else it will become a torture (that is if you playing for completing it of course, it's fine for few minutes fun).

Also, these stages aren't as great as before, the first stage is iconic, and classic run and gun ones are fine but the remaining ones, or what I call "idea levels", are just some "You know what would be cool?" style levels were not handled in a good way. That grappling mechanic had so much potential but it isn't as responsive as it should be and the learning curve of that isn't some perfect line it's just a messy graphic.
I'm not a big fan of top-down sections in Super C, I still prefer the pseudo-3d mini game-like sections in Contra but I think that was implemented pretty well. In this, it's one of the most frustrating top-down shooters ever. Surprisingly they're pretty bad with graphics and like I said before there are ideas, most of them just plays with characters' position in a pretty stupid way, and of course, they're not implemented well therefore they are just confusing and frustrating to play.

Bosses are nice, while they're also trial and error based, they're much more acceptable than overall stage design because all of them are beatable with fast reflexes but you won't get them on the first try so it's the same thing in the end. I think we can see that certain elements don't come together very well in these bosses like climbing of course. Also to see the real final boss you need to beat this game hard so... Just forget about it, it's not worth it.

Another thing to note is the lack of codes, IIRC there aren't any codes in the NA version and while I don't like to use it except Konami code I think it hurts the "brainless fun" part of the game

I think with that you can now understand why I called this a "style over substance" game, you can just go on and play it for fun, you're in for a visual and auditory treat but you won't get the depth of previous games, it's clear that they did tried to make the scope bigger so they just sacrificed the depth but in games like this I think less is better most of the time and sadly this is one of the biggest proofs of that.