NOTE: I actually played through the NES port of this game, but I accidentally logged the arcade version back then, so yeah.

Contra is known as one of the hardest games of all time, and I think that it definitely deserves that title. The cheap one-hit deaths and fill-the-screen-with-enemies approach to game design was commonplace in the NES era, but something about the way that Contra did it made it much more fun, satisfying, and especially frustrating than its competitors.

I’ve been trying to beat Contra since 2018, and it not only took me this long because of how hard the game is, but because I was playing it through a web browser. I’d usually play it whenever I got free time during class, and the furthest I ever got before losing all of my continues was the snow level. No matter how frustrating it got, something about the run-&-gun gameplay made me keep coming back for more, and I think it was the idea of finally beating the game that made me play it from start to finish throughout these past two weeks.

Although the journey to beating Contra is one of the most frustrating, unfair, and unpredictable experiences I’ve ever had with any game, getting to actually beat the game is probably one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done in a video game, and while the satisfaction doesn’t excuse how the game is difficult to the point where beating it without the infamous Konami code is impossible, I’ll still treasure Contra forever.