pickhut's Contra Rebirth (WW) review

This was a good review. You did a great job of making the game sound like something I would want to play, despite the score you gave it, while making your reasons for awarding that score easy to appreciate. Your writing throughout was quite polished, too, with clear and effective sentence construction and word choice. First rate!

Appreciate that, Venter. I really wanted to love the game more than I actually do, because of the humor and because the game actually played like a normal Contra game. But I just couldn't, especially after experiencing Contra III and Hard Corps.

Nice job, Pick. So Contra III>Rebirth? Cuz Contra III is hella cool, but still inferior to 1 and 2. I hated Hard Corps: Uprising, btw. It just didn't FEEL right. I even preferred Operation C for the GameBoy.

Anyway, I look forward to your Castlevania: Rebirth review. I have that game, and should play and review it, but haven't gotten around to it.

Hey, hey, hey, what makes you think I'm planning on revewing Castl... ok, yeah. Thanks for reading the review, Masters, and yeah, Contra III is better. I enjoy playing the game, and I used to have (horrific) co-op sessions with bluberry on an emulator a few years back with it. I remember us always having the worst luck when it came to basic platform jumps for some reason XD.

Btw, you talking about the arcade or NES versions of 1 and 2?

NES versions, for sure. I rate them thusly: Contra>Super C>Contra III>Contra Hard Corps>everything else to come out.

A lot of people will disagree with me and call me a SNERD for having C3 above Hard Corps, but Hard Corps has ugly colours and has weird heroes, despite being a blast to play.

Here's the right list...

Contra Hard Corps > Super C > Neo Contra > Gunstar Heroes > Shattered Soldier > Contra > the 3D Contra games on PSX and Saturn > Ethiopian Alien Invasion > Contra III

//Zig

These Sega Genesis sympathizers always get things backwards.

Your last statement struck a chord with me, because it's been the standard complaint I have for WiiWare games. They're good, but for the same price or lower, you can download a VC title that's better and has more content. Why play Jett Rocket when you can download Super Mario 64 for the same price? Sure, Jett Rocket has crisper graphics, but SM64 is a much better game.

Great review, pickhut.

I think most games that are released now days (aside from the obvious exceptions) are good. The problem is that "good" isn't enough when we have so many superior options waiting to be explored. If a new game catches my eye, it's probably an improved sequel, or a retro reboot based on an old favorite game, or it has amazing polish or I've just never seen something like it done before (or at the least, in such an ambitious style). There's less and less room all the time for the competent games that are released all the time and offer none of those things.

Well said, Venter.

Yeah. Even "bad" games released now tend to be at least technically superior to bad games of the past. Like that Clash of the Titans game I got a year or so ago was technically sound without the sorts of horribly unresponsive controls and blocky, muddled graphics you'd get in the old days from games like Heroes of the Lance and Hydlide. Its flaws were more along the lines of being a rip-off of God of War that was nowhere near as good as that game. That's usually what you get from the average "bad" title (average being the key word, as there are some games that just flat out suck, but they're rare): a game that's fundamentally decent, but just pales in comparison to the better games of their genres.

I definitely agree. It's been a while since I've played a legitimately bad game in the newer generation, or even in the previous one. I've played some that are pretty meh (some of which are actually WW games, too), but nothing absolutely horrible.

I read an article about this recently. The gist of it was that there are now literally thousands of game releases a year (not many thousands, but still thousands) and most of them are competent, so we increasingly have to choose carefully what we want to play. It used to be that you could play all the 'essential', top-of-the-line games for a given system, plus a selection of others that you personally just fancied trying. Now there are too many 'essential' games for us to even play all of those. The article compared games from now-ish onward to films: you'll have mainstream, predictable popcorn-fodder on one side, groundbreaking indie output on the other, and a slew of competent stuff in the middle, from which you'll choose whatever stands out to you for some reason.

The article was coming at it from a journalism point of view though. Its emphasis was on the growth of specialists. As the field becomes too large, we won't have gaming journalists anymore; instead, we'll have FPS journalists, RPG websites, RTS columnists...