Contra: The Alien Wars (Game Boy) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Konami's 1994 run-and-gun shooter for the Nintendo Game Boy, Contra: The Alien Wars.

Played through on the normal difficulty level.

Contra: The Alien Wars was a valiant attempt at bringing one the SNES's biggest action games to the original Game Boy. Clearly, it doesn't ever quite reach the heights of the original, but for a monochromatic 8-bit machine, it does far better than you might expect.

Like Operation C did with Contra and Super C, Contra: The Alien Wars (notice the missing 3?) recreates many of the original's stages with varying levels of fidelity per the Game Boy's ability, though the amount of content has been slashed. The entire jet bike stage, along with big chunks of the remaining stages, have been cut, but what is left still feels like a fair facsimile of the SNES game.

The top-down stages no longer do any Mode 7 rotation tricks, but the game's sprites and backgrounds make a very good showing despite how scaled down they are. Somehow, Factor 5 even manage to effectively mimic some of the SNES version's special effects - just check out the bomber scene in the first stage for an unexpected bit of wow! It also manages to one-up the later Game Boy Advance port with its intro and ending.

Those cutscene images, though... I feel like Jimbo and Sully look more like Toxie than macho action-movie stars in some of those shots.

The sound doesn't fare quite as well being squashed into 4 channels, but the music is present, recognizable, and very listenable - more so than you usually see with SNES-to-GB conversions. There are even some fun arpeggiated chords thrown into the mix!

The gameplay feels a lot like Operation C's did. Weapons can no longer be swapped at will, though you still do get access to a screen-clearing smart bomb attack. There are generally fewer enemies on-screen at once, but they seem to absorb more damage than in the SNES game which helps to make up the balance.

And finally, the difficulty scales surprisingly well with the skill level you choose to play on. I'm playing it on normal here, so if it looks like a cakewalk...well, that's because it pretty much is. Put it on easy and you could probably finish it while in a coma. Bump it up to maniac, though, and you'll learn the meaning of difficult.

Overall, Contra: The Alien Wars does an amazing job at recreating a game that really had no business being on the Game Boy to begin with. Sure, there were the inevitable compromises that had to be made, but for a 1994 Game Boy cart, you couldn't have expected any better. And you probably were shocked by how not-butchered it was. I know I was.

Just don't be a tool and go play it on the Super Game Boy. I mean, of course you could - it actually offered some limited enhancements in SGB mode - but if you have an SNES, why would you when you could just play the original instead?

*Recorded using the DMG shader in Retroarch.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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