update: i messed with some settings in FCEUX
this successfully gets rid of the lag in Arc Hound Contra Force
but the game’s still a slog
but it takes place in neocities so it’s impossible to say whether it’s good or bad
anyhow
guess which character pressing right once on this menu will select:
If you guessed BEANS, then congratulations! You have what it takes to work at one of Konami’s C-Teams! (I, for one, thought my keyboard bindings were busted.)
The game looks decently nice, at least:
I immediately had an allergic reaction to how it messes up Contra’s gamefeel. While walking, you cannot aim diagonally downwards, despite there being many situations where you would want to. Also, jumping works more like a traditional platformer, where releasing jump cuts your jump height short, and letting go of left/right in midair halts your forward momentum — these changes feel a bit more understandable, but just feel icky to me in the context of this game.
One neat thing is the amount of destructible objects in the environment. Besides crates, there are a surprising amount of cracked walls and other greeblings you can destroy (I’m sure this is responsible for at least 50% of the game’s lag normally):
Destroying any of these background objects has a random chance of dropping a power-up. You can scroll the stage back about a screen and a half to respawn these objects, allowing you to farm your characters up as desired.
The power-up system is Gradius-esque (Gradiesque?): collect boxes to move the selection cursor forwards, and press select to cash out on your reward. Each character has the short range starting pistol in the 1st slot, two unique weapons for the next 2nd and 3rd slots, a shot-limit upgrade for the 4th slot, and the screw attack (!) for the 5th slot.
The screw attack sucks because touching anything in mid-air with it kills your jump. Also, your main weapon is forced to be the starter pistol when you have it.
Aside from the shot-limit upgrade, all weapon upgrades are mutually exclusive, so you never have the feeling of gradually getting stronger like in Gradius (for better or worse). Barely any of the weapons feel good, and none of them are the spread gun. The flamethower, homing missiles, and bombs are particularly bad.
Pressing start brings you to the character selection screen, cutting the level music to a different song, and taking an obnoxious amount of time to fade in and out. The UI for this screen is perversely unintuitive:
You would think that switching to a different character would just be a matter of something like pressing A and then Start to confirm your choice, but actually you press left or right to select between multiple different options. You can select which character is player 1’s, which is player 2’s, or between 6 (six!) different CPU AI options.
Choosing an invalid option (e.g. with more than 2 characters in play, or with multiple player 1s), results in this error message:
AI CPUs are weird. They are fully kitted out, invincible like Tails from Sonic 2, but only last for like 5 seconds, but also are infinitely spammable provided you have the patience to sit through the pause fadeout a bajillion times.
Also pausing grants you an extra mid-air jump for some reason (not complaining).
Now, regarding the level design: I’ve only made it to the end of the first stage, but I think I can say it’s Not Good! While there are a few neat gimmicks, there is a very poor sense of flow and movement, and the enemy placement seems a bit suspect, especially with the limited range of the starting weapon.
After a few attempts I made it up to the first boss, died, and decided I was done with the game. Supposedly there are top-down stages in this as well.
Contra Force: It has a lot more problems besides the lag!