Category: history

Having raised myself on a healthy diet of Contra as a child I imagined that everyone was as familiar and devoted to Konami’s iconic shooter as I was.  So, of course when I discovered that our friends across the pond never had Contra I was shocked and dismayed!  Who did children look up to when they don’t have role models like Bill and Lance?  Turns out they look up to the Probotectors.  That’s right!  Probotector, a mediocre portmanteau of the words ‘robot’ and ‘protector,’ is the name of Contra in Europe.  Konami changed the game in order to sell the game in the lucrative (?) German market, where it was (still is?)  too violent to show humanoid bad guys being sprayed with an endless supply of giant bullets, who knew?  Konami stripped out the player characters, any baddies that might look like human, and tweaked the ending; but, the game retains all the frenetic action of Contra.

I wanted to see what, if any, the differences were between the main games in the Contra “storyline:” Contra, Super C, and Contra III (I’m being generous using the term storyline.)  I decided to read through the old manuals and play through the two variants and making a note of the differences.  If this subject manages to keep my interest this should be the first of three or four entries covering the three aforementioned games in the series.

CONTRA vs PROBOTECTOR

Firstly, the game play and music are exactly the same in both games; that is understandable seeing as both of those are near perfect, anyway. The real differences start with the “story” that came in the box.

CONTRA’s:

In 1957 a large object from outer space crashed into Earth’s Amazon basin, near ruins of the lost Mayan civilization.  Scientists world-wide heralded the incident as a trivial cosmic occurrence, and thus the collision was soon forgotten.  Now, thirty years later, rumors of an evil force have swept into the Pentagon’s front office, and tales from frightened villagers of a hideous being with an army of alien henchmen are sending chills down the spines of top military brass.  Unwilling to upset current political stability, an all-out assault on the region has been overruled, and instead, two of America’s most cunning, courageous and ruthless soldiers from the Special Forces elite commando squad have been selected to seek out and destroy these alien intruders.  Congratulations, pal, you’re one of the chosen.  But before you take pride in being the best, be warned.  You’re about to come face to face against Red Falcon, the cruelest life-form in the galaxy.  He arrived on Earth thirty years ago (that’s six months time in an alien’s life) to establish a foothold from which he will attempt to conquer our world and then use it as a stepping stone toward his ultimate fiendish goal:  domination of the entire universe.  Needless to say, playing hero won’t be easy.  But you have no choice — you must be a hero.  Because if you fail, life as we know it will cease to exist, and the vile Red Falcon will rule forever.  If you succeed, well…it doesn’t matter, because I doubt you will.

PROBOTECTOR’s:

It’s the year 2633 A.D. Technology has reached a level so advanced that nature and science now exist in harmony and peace reigns throughout the world…   but beneath the calmness something beyond all imagination is discovered that threatens the existence of mankind. While conducting top secret research, a special task force of scientists find that an alien being from the Galaxy of Apocalypse is plotting to wipe out the human race.  In order to protect the Earth and its people, two combat robots (PROBOTECTOR), RD008 and RCO11, have been developed.  Their mission is to go to the alien’s fortress in the Galga Islands and see that they are exterminated.

While the future and robots are interesting… I have to say that Contra wins.  There is just a lot more meat to that story than there is to Probotector’s, even if much of it makes little sense.  In Probotector’s favor, the bad guys do come from the Galaxy of Apocalypse which sounds intense.

The next big difference between the two is the art. I’ve played through both of these games multiple times recently and I’m fairly certain I’ve caught everything  (if you happen to know I missed something please point it out to me.)  The images are fairly self explanatory but for the few of you who don’t know Contra is on the left and Probotector is on the right

Protagonists: 

Seeing as the probotector doesn’t have the grossly enormous shoulders that the humans do I’m going to say that they win, also they are robots.

Enemies (side-scrolling stages):

Enemies (tunnel stages):

I don’t understand the changes for those last two.  Neither of the Contra baddies look very human. They appear as robotic as the aiming robot from the sidescrolling stages.  So why the pointy headed robots were put in is beyond me.  I suppose they were simply playing it safe.

Bosses:

The only boss they changed was the Giant at the end of Stage 6: the Energy Zone.  Again, the Contra boss doesn’t appear to be human. Perhaps his rounded muscles and skin tight spandex pants were too humanesque?  The giant from Probotector is very blocky, because all robots are blocky… ?

The Ending:

The only difference in the ending is the vehicle in which your character(s) escape from the exploding island.  In both games defeating Red Falcon saves the universe.

Minor graphical changes:

The energy rings that the eye on the Terminal boss of Stage 2: Base 1 shoots out are red instead of blue in Probotector.  The boss at the end of Stage 3: Waterfall has had the segments of his arms changed from gray to blue in Probotector.  Finally, the weapons pods in the final stage of the game are not the standard orange/red they are throughout the entirety of Contra and every other stage in Probotector.  Instead, they are a soft pink color.

Conclusions:

The changes made to Contra to enable it to be sold in Europe appear to be purely cosmetic.  The greatest change is in the game manuals. I suspect that both the story lines were created on the spot by Konami, America and Konami, Europe employees without much consideration for the Japanese source material, if there ever was one. Graphically, the changes seem unnecessary, because many of the robots/aliens you face in Probotector are humanoid in design and one could easily assume they were human if the manual didn’t explicitly state otherwise.