Contra nes cartridge
All of the levels and weapons are present, the placement of enemies are the same and if it worked in the US version then it applies here. No one should feel as though we were gipped as Contra is an excellent game, graphical enhancements or not.įrom a gameplay perspective both versions of the game are near identical.
In the grand scheme of things it’s fairly minor but a curiosity that I felt was worth pointing out. Konami’s VRC2 mapper allowed more animation to be displayed during the game that had to be cut.
Which brings us to Contra, which is one of the many unfortunate victims of said policy. As you can imagine this presented problems when bringing games overseas since the Japanese side would have to reprogram them, resulting in the months long delays between the Japanese and US debut of many games. On that side of the world it was all gravy but for America everyone was forced to use Nintendo of America’s own MMC chips (MMC 1-5, fun fact, PunchOut! is the only game to use the MMC2). One of the most notable would be Castlevania III its Japanese counterpart ( Akumajou Densetsu) had a special mapper called the VRC6 that added 3 sound channels to the NES for better music. Since Nintendo allowed publishers in Japan to print their own cartridges (only Acclaim and Konami had that privilege in the US) nearly all publishers created their own specialized mappers. At its heart the NES is simple platform that was enhanced by Memory mapper chips embedded in the cartridges. Sometimes the changes made were for technical reasons, others due to a license. Nintendo of America were notoriously bad with the edits and to an extent deservedly so the market had just come back and they were cautious about ruffling any feathers. It’s only natural what might fly over there certainly doesn’t always apply in the good old USA. In the early days of the video game industry when most games came from Japan it wasn’t uncommon for them to see massive changes before release.