So being mobile back then was a legitimate selling point. Much like how a lot of console ports of arcade games were shit BUT you could play them at home, there was something to be said for "here's Contra. It's compromised but you can play it on the go." There's a lot to be said for historical context when it comes to portable games from 1991.

Anyway this is still kinda shitty in 2022.

The good: I honestly think this looks great. I'm playing on the classic collection, so it's a little clearer than it would on the green hell screen that real hardware came with, but the details transferred very nicely to the tiny screen. I think this can be chalked up to the fact that the NES Contras have very small characters and use the space for big bosses and environments. Tiny Bill Rizer is blown up on the GB screen but he looks basically the same, only monochrome, and the enemies come through as well. The environments are obviously the part that suffers, but you still have little waves on the water in stage 1 and cool tubes of alien-growing goop in the final level.

The fact that everything is SO ZOOMED IN obviously affects a ton of other stuff, though. The obvious one is that I ran into enemies popping out of nowhere that I couldn't react to in time a lot. This is particularly true in vertical segments, which don't scroll until you're almost at the edge of the screen. You can also run PAST enemies more easily in some sections due to them not activating until you're right on top of them. The levels feel way bigger than the NES games at first but shrink down in your mind after a couple of plays once you understand where you can just run through. Your starter weapon is the machine gun in this one, and since there's so much less screen real estate to cover, every gun ends up feeling good enough. Spread is still nice, as is the new Homing gun, but the explosions from the fire weapon take up a ton of space and do a lot of damage, so any of them does the trick.

Operation C only has 5 levels, and once you get used to the above issues and the surprisingly complex bosses, you can blow through it very quickly. The last boss has a ton going on so that's the hardest part but it's just a matter of seeing the simple pattern you need to complete. It's a cool robot though so that's neat. IDK buds it's baby Contra, not especially great but I enjoyed the act of thinking about it more than playing it.