this was the sickest shit i had ever seen on an ipod in 2010. shame that you can't play these anymore.

mobile games are a joke now. they're made for the sole purpose of harvesting as much cash as possible - whether that be from casual audiences, kids, or the 'people' who play gacha games and let themselves become more beast than man. but for a brief time, mobile gaming had promise. quick, cute, arcade-styled games ruled the market and weren't squarely focused on scamming you, but there wasn't really a substantive, impressive title for mobile. until THIS came out. this shit was nuts, at the time. it had atmosphere, actual gameplay, cool visuals - at the time i thought this was the future of mobile games. this was a bright, shining testament to the ingenuity possible in the mobile games market. now, it isn't even playable any more. lost to time in a sea of fuckin kim kardashian wait 14 hours to build a store games, banished into nothingness while anime girls get slightly naked if you pay several hundred dollars. shame, really.

This kind of feels like you’re playing a secret unlicensed knockoff Mario game by a really talented third party developer. Everything is technically here but it just doesn’t have quite the right vibes? The jump feels good but it’s not a MARIO jump. The music is top of the pop but it’s not MARIO music. The enemy designs are sick but they’re not MARIO enemies, or when they are they’re like fucked up weirdo Mario enemies, like turtle shells turning into timed explosives instead of projectiles. There’s a distinct sense of actual geography to the level progression in this game as you track through obvious recreations of real life Africa and Asia. Worlds end in rail shooter levels, and this is the final boss as well?

And all of this stuff fucking slaps this game was made by some of the all time great Nintendo legends and it shows but it’s interesting to compare its unique vibe to that of its sequel, which is a slavish recreation of the look and feel of Super Mario World, or as close as you could match that on a Gameboy.

My dad’s side of the family has an annual reunion on Christmas Eve and I occupy a weird position in the family timeline as the youngest son of the youngest son where I’m a generation younger than my next-oldest brother and cousins but a generation older than my next-youngest, so as a kid I often spent these parties in a corner somewhere on a Gameboy, and I very distinctly remember the year that I finally beat this game for the first time, and upon realizing that the game was extremely short and the only one I had brought that evening, just played it over and over and over (we would be at my aunt’s house from like 5 to 11 PM) until I was beating it in what I have today realized was times rivalling modern world record speedruns. I did not do that today but I did have a blast running through it. My fingers remembered exactly what to do, all the little nooks and crannies you can force Mario into, the secret blocks.

Feels good to revisit, but even if it was my first time I’m pretty sure I would still think this game was sick.

Everyone knows Nintendo Entertainment System games had a tendency to be overly difficult due to their recent ancestry with arcade cabinet design, and Contra is the best example of the difficulty curve somehow strengthening the appeal of a title. Even a play-through that takes advantage of the now famous Konami code, leaves the player wondering, what if? What if I played the game without the extra lives, what if I didn’t have the continues, what if I was actually feeding quarters into a machine for each mistake? The intensity of the bullet hell that is Contra shines through, and is a compelling play even today.