Contra Vs Probotector

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.

First Fruits

“…Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till though return unto the ground; for dust thou art. and unto dust thou return.”

Genesis 3:17-19

It wasn’t nearly as hard as YHWH makes it sound but it wasn’t easy either.  We did have to plant the things and then protect them from every manner of pest.  This chard is the first fruits of the garden we planted this year, the first of many I hope.  There are 5 more plants of it left in the box but considering how little is actually there once you cook the plant I imagine that the all the chard will be gone by the end of the week.  If the temperature spikes though it could kill the plants, as their a winter crop and we planted them fairly late in the season, so we might have to pull them before we need them and hope that the crisper in our fridge keeps them long enough.

I never was much of a fan of chard until the CSA we subscribe to started sending us a head or two of it and its close cousin kale all winter.  I discovered that if you boil or saute the stuff it can go into just about anything:  pastas, stirfrys, a side with garlic and butter.

Tonight after pulling the chard, removing the root and cleaning it.  D chopped  and sauted it in olive oil and finely cut garlic with a dash of salt and pepper.  Once it was cooked I simply put it on top of the leftover Pad Kee Mao I had lying around in the fridge.  As I said though it would have been just as good on its own.  Hopefully I’ll be writing a lot more of whatever is coming out of the garden!  Or what I manage to get out of other’s!

What’s Unique about Mother? (Thoughts on Earthbound)

When I played Earthbound I saw a lot of things, some good some bad, but not amazing and mostly I saw a typical JRPG. Earthbound is Dragon Quest with a setting swap. This isn’t an insult to the game. It’s simply an acknowledgment that the game isn’t genre defining, revolutionary, or paradigm shifting.

It’s hard to say when I became a “nerd” who played video games.  Acquaintances in grade school might have pegged me as a “nerd” but it was because I took a great deal of enjoyment out too many think fantasy novels.  I got the Nintendo early on in its life cycle but never had more than  two or three games for the system until everyone had upgraded to 16-bit systems and were getting rid of their “obsolete” NESs.  I was there to accept or purchase cheaply their unwanted games.  Games like Bionic Commando, Final Fantasy, The Legend of Zelda, Kabuki, Castlevania, Metal Storm and others.  I even scooped up a copy of the NES Game Atlas.  It was with these 8-bit hand me downs that I became a “nerd”  who played video games, or just a gamer.  But, while all the other nerds were playing and talking about Super Mario World, I was exploring the intricacies of  SMB2 and 3.

I certainly heard people talk about Final Fantasy 3 and Chrono Trigger but I never played them until after the SNES was yesterdays news and people were talking of Saturns, Playstations, and N64s.  My earliest experiences with the SNES were at friend’s homes with games like Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest, Star Fox, and Super Punch-Out.  I missed out on Final Fantasy 3, Secret of Mana, and the Lufias.  I sold my NES and all those games, nearly 50, to get enough money to buy a SNES when it started being bundled with Donkey Kong Country (’95 or ’96, I think.)  Again, many people were moving over to 64-bit systems and just giving away their games, move rental chains too were selling carts at a heavy discount to make way for Saturn and Playstation CDs. With people beginning to talk about 3d gaming and witnessing such early attempts as Jumping Flash, and later more refined ones as Resident Evil, I could only be jealous.  Luckily, I had such familiar, and phenomenal games, as Chrono Trigger and Super Metroid to sooth my gamer’s lust.  Those games that took my breath away and still do.

In 1997, I  succumbed to the marketing blitz of Final Fantasy 7 and sold my SNES and games to buy myself a PSX and that game… I can’t really say I became a fan of the series or JRPGs until then…  That is a different story though, and this introduction has gone on long enough.  What I’m trying to say is all of the above might have something to do with why Earthbound just doesn’t do much for me.

There are a number of games on the SNES that I can play again and again.  All of them I played for the first time more than 1o years ago though, the same is true for many NES games.  On occasion I pick up a game I’ve never played and play through it but I find that a lot of the charm I see in these old games must be supplied solely by me and the personal emotions that are tied up with them.  NES and SNES games I play now are not accompanied by any such emotions and so, the flaws and limitations of the them are much more apparent to me.

Earthbound fans love to talk about the game, and they love to tell you how amazing it is.  I believe them when they tell me these things, but I also believe that much of that pleasure is not in the game itself but tied up in their memories of it.  When I played Earthbound I saw a lot of things, some good some bad, but not amazing and mostly I saw a typical JRPG.  Earthbound is Dragon Quest with a setting swap.  This isn’t an insult to the game.  It’s simply an acknowledgment that the game isn’t genre defining, revolutionary, or paradigm shifting.  Someone I know stated that the Mother series was all about evoking nostalgia but when you have no emotional attachment to the game, and not much to its genre (circa 1995) there isn’t an fuel for the Earthbound to ignite and player’s without a specific history, a cultural reference, are left in the cold.

Did you play Earthbound when it came out?  Did it blow your mind?  How so?  I’d really like some other people’s thoughts on this…

How My Garden Grows!

It’s been just over a month since we first planted the garden and I figured it was time to give all the readers an update.

It’s been just over a month since we first planted the garden and I figured it was time to give all the readers an update.  First, we might have planted things a little too early as there was some rainy/frosty days in April that took a toll on the plants.  The eggplants seem permanently stunted as do the peppers.  Second, slugs really like to eat tender plants and eat them they will!  We’re giving the eggplants and peppers another week or two before we pull them and put something else in.  The nice thing about growing things here in this part of northern California is that you can get in two or three “crops” per season!  One of the small perks, I suppose.  The slugs were a different matter and we lost several of our pole beans, cucumbers, and soy beans to the little suckers before we looked up how to deal with them:  beer traps.  The traps worked great, though just to be careful we spread used coffee ground around the younger sprouts to keep the slugs away, these two measures appear to have worked.

The plants that look best right now are the tomatoes and zucchinis which are growing at a great clip.  I already mentioned which ones looked the worst.  The cantaloupe never came in.  We replaced the cucumbers that were eaten with some cucumber and bean sprouts we picked up at a local nursery store and put them in.  Our chard is just about ready to be harvested and we’re hoping to have tomatoes and zucchinis by the end of the month.

Sadly, the vegetables that we planted in the front of the house (tomatoes, onions, beans, and peppers) were all either devoured or simply failed to thrive in the front yard.  The beans sprouted and then were promptly eaten, the tomatoes grew a little, turned a sickly green color and then immediately bloomed, the peppers and onions seemed to simply wilt away.  I don’t know if the plants weren’t getting enough nutrients, they did have to compete with a tree and several large hearty hedges, or if we didn’t transplant them with enough compost and fertilizer.  In the end, we ended up pulling out all of the vegetables in the front and planting annuals.  We won’t be able to eat anything growing in the front but at least the yard will have a little more color in it.

I also discovered that wild strawberries are growing in the backyard but they’re competing with the lawn grass and a fruit tree.  I don’t know whether to pull the plant up or try to clear the ground around it and see if it thrives.  Are wild strawberries any good?

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