Ray has the familiar standbys like Spread and Homing, while Sheena's Axe Laser combines the two. From the beginning, players may choose from Ray Poward, the quintessential Contra Man Sheena Etranze, the one-woman army Brad Fang, the mutant cyborg werewolf and Browny, the robot with a double-jump.Įach character has his or her own advantages and drawbacks, most of which are embodied in their exclusive sets of weaponry. But most interesting are the new advancements, particularly the freedom to play as one of four distinct characters. Others are expanded dramatically while Contra III allowed you to carry and switch between two weapons at once, the number is now doubled to four. Many of the previous game's features are intact, including the climbing and hanging mechanics and the ability to save screen-clearing bombs to use at will.
#Contra hard corps sheena sprites series#
Earlier games took their inspiration from Alien and First Blood, and Hard Corps offers its own blatant references - namely to Blade Runner and The Road Warrior.)īeyond its aesthetic aspects, Hard Corps also evolved the gameplay of the series as the direct successor to Contra III. The result is almost nightmarish, cleverly keeping in tone with the game's setting, a dystopian urban hell. The color palette is sparse, but the designers made the best of it with gritty sensibilities, casting the scenery in unnatural purples and reds and letting black fill in the remainder. There are even a few scratchy voice samples in there.
Konami must have realized the Genesis sound synth is inescapably poor rather than try to repeat the moody ambience of Contra III's score, Hard Corps' soundtrack sticks to straight rock and even some electronica, where downsampling is a good thing. Even static cloud sprites shooting across a one-color sky successfully imply a high-speed flight scene, and in one memorable boss fight, a giant robot chases you down a winding road that convincingly recreates the SNES's vaunted Mode 7 perspective effect. The game's enormous bosses are composed of numerous small sprites whose movements relative to one another convey complex gestures and transformations normally thought impossible with 2D graphics then, when defeated, they burst into hundreds of apocalyptic explosions that twist around themselves in intricate patterns while white and photonegative flashes threaten seizures. And when that fails, the artists step in by actually drawing a new sprite for every angle they want an object to turn. Rotation - something ostensibly impossible on the system without a Sega CD or, failing that, the help of Treasure - is employed to some rudimentary extent. Given the famously expressive nature of the Contra ? series, Hard Corps is actually the perfect example to showcase Konami's underdog accomplishments on the Genesis.
Even on the Sega Genesis, with specs generally a step or two behind those of Nintendo's machine, they pushed the available technology to its limits with games like Castlevania Bloodlines ?, Rocket Knight Adventures. And for evidence that developers didn't just fall slack once they had suckered in enough early adopters, Konami themselves kept this same new-generation enthusiasm stoked constantly throughout the 16-bit era. Coming from your average snarky gaming pundit, this implies that style was given preference over substance, or that this technical finesse was only used so extensively because the technology itself was new and novel.īut as anyone who has played either title will tell you, they're solid games beneath all that gloss. When looking back at the first generation of SNES games, Konami titles like Super Castlevania IV ? and Contra III: The Alien Wars ? are the ones most frequently upheld as the titles that took conspicuous advantage of at-the-time esoteric visual effects like layers, semitransparency, rotation, and scaling - to the point that terms like "tech demo" often find themselves thrown about.
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