"Contra: Rebirth" a.k.a. "Contra 4"?

If a developer who's previous best game had "Justice League Heroes" somewhere in it's title could make the best Contra game ever, then why can't every developer make a good Contra game? The answer is that Wayforward Technologies hadn't been given a fair chance before Contra 4. But let's give some other random dev a chance and publish the game on wiiware. Developers who happened to like NeoContra. A Ps2 Contra other than Shattered Soldier. Sniffle Sniffle.

But the developers didn't do as bad a job as I thought they would. Sure, the voice acting's worse than it was in Hard Corps (that took quite an effort), some songs on the soundtrack are painful to listen to, and the graphics feel primitive, but the level design was passable. Unlike Hard Corps, Rebirth understood that Contra isn't about being hard, it's about being fun by challenging yourself. I rarely felt like a death was cheap or because of bad design, and when I did, I eventually realized that it was wrong of me to think so. The game is the good kind of difficulty all the way through.

Although I feel a bit dishonest about calling it "difficult". I don't really think the infinite continues is the issue; that's a change I welcome. The real issue is that the game on nightmare with seven lives is about as hard as Contra 3 on easy with, say, five lives? Not exactly difficult enough to be called Contra, eh?Sure, this makes it better to play with with you Contra-inept friends, but, considering how little difference in difficulty it feels like there is between the four different settings, I think this co-op friendly design could've been implemented better.

However, some of the gameplay aspects annoyed me. I liked how Contra 4 had two different levels of power-ups and made your starter weapon next to useless; that's what made the game so intense (you lose your power-up when you die). Rebirth scaled your arsenal of power-ups down to three, all of which have one level. None of them have the rate of fire of your standard machine gun. And what are the three lucky power-ups? Obviously, spread shot's in them. Homing found its way into the game, much to my delight. And, last but not least... LASER!!!! A power-up hated as much as spread shot is loved. All it does is damage, but spread shot at point blank does more, and laser is slower than any other weapon, making it less than useless. So two power-ups. No big deal.

I'm happy to have another Contra game that doesn't feel like a travesty, but I also feel like it could have easily been better. Maybe this will truly mark a Rebirth of the Contra series, or maybe it'll be a repeat of what happened on the PS2.