Buff shirtless dudes with headbands and machine guns; what else do you need to save the world? These games are all fun diversions despite their unforgiving difficulties (especially Contra III for SNES and Hard Corps for Genesis). They're at their best as classic side-scrollers, but they fall flat when they experiment with different viewpoints. The original Contra features pseudo z-axis corridor stages that feel like speed bumps to the main event, and Contra III's overhead Mode 7 stages are dizzying and unintuitive. The run-and-gun genre ultimately found better expression in Metal Slug and Treasure titles like GunStar Heroes.