Some, like Bahamut Lagoon, Sweet Home, and Mother 1 and 2 finally gave me the chance to have translations for games I always wanted to play but couldn't due to the language barrier. Well, after being incredibly impressed with the game and the quality of the cart, my eyes opened and I began looking for other eclectic repro releases. I didn't even own a Famicom at the time and the price was reasonable, so I took a chance. At first all I saw were interesting fan-made hacks that didn't interest me much (no offense to anyone's hard work, there are really impressive fan-made projects, but they weren't my thing at the time.) But when our own RFGener Crabmaster recommended Recca, a shmup for Famicom, all I could find was a NES repro cart. I can still get about as far as I ever could in Hard Corps, but for years it seemed like the game was destined to share The Adventures of Batman & Robin as another Genny classic that defeated me.Ī few years ago, I saw reproduction cartridges popping up at the annual retro video game conventions we attend. I don't have to tell fellow gamers with four or more decades behind them that our reflexes just aren't what they were half a lifetime ago. I cleared the SNES's Contra III: The Alien Wars on the hardest difficulty, but Hard Corps lived up to the name by keeping me from getting all the way through one of the branching paths (although I stumbled into an alternate path a few stages in and got an obviously silly cut-short ending.) I really, really wanted to get all the way through more stages but time and other games pulled me away, not to mention controller-breaking frustration. (Hey, at least NEC had Hudson!)Ĭastlevania: Bloodlines and Rocket Knight Adventures are in my top ten for the system, but I sunk the most time into Contra Hard Corps.

In those days few companies crafted as many great gems as Konami, and they blessed both major 16-bit contenders with their own evergreen classics. While I still consider the SNES close to my gaming heart, I have full respect for the Genny and its spectacular library. I came to the Genesis a couple years after the SNES, though I had played many of Sega's best at friends' homes. How this was accomplished makes it an inauthentic accomplishment for some, but it represents an interesting angle on modern and retro gaming and collecting.

Download contra hardcore