I put this one off for a very long time.

The name Contra came up again and again, but getting around to the series took years. That was partly because I was never especially drawn to run-and-gun shooters in the first place. Fast, noisy, hugely popular games built around spraying bullets everywhere were never really my thing. As a kid I played them because choices were limited. Mostly, though, because they were absolutely everywhere.

Before getting to Hard Corps, it helps to sort out the series genealogy, because the early Contra family tree is messier than people remember.

For Chinese players born from roughly the 1970s through the mid-1990s, the two best-known Famicom entries were both arcade conversions: the original Contra and Super Contra. Those names are straightforward enough. Around 1990, an arcade near my home had a Contra cabinet. At the time I could not even tell whether it was the first or second arcade game. What I do remember is that it was brutally difficult. It sat there gathering dust because hardly anyone wanted to touch it, and within about half a year the owner replaced it.

What many people in China think of as the definitive first Famicom Contra was not especially highly regarded in Japan. Judging by sales, it was not a major hit there at all. It sold under one million copies in Japan, which was not enough to make any meaningful ranking list; it would have landed somewhere below 75th place. Creatively, it was not exactly subtle either. Bill and Lance were blatant riffs on John Matrix from Commando and Rambo, while the alien threat followed the global popularity of the Alien films.

The Famicom version of Contra launched in the ferocious release year of 1988. That same year gave players Final Fantasy II, Dragon Quest III, and Konami Wai Wai World, among other giants, so Contra only wound up somewhere around ninth place in the pecking order. Famitsu gave it 27/40, which is about as middle-of-the-road as it sounds.

Ask Japanese players to name the greatest Famicom games and Super Mario Bros. probably still takes first. After that, though, the field gets crowded: Dragon Quest IV, Super Mario Bros. 3, The Legend of Zelda, Dragon Quest III, Final Fantasy III, Tetris, even Duck Hunt all have a case. Saying the representative Famicom games are Mario and Contra would sound a bit like telling someone the representative face of Hong Kong cinema is Jackie Chan and Shing Fui-On. In the United States, though, where players traditionally took more readily to fast action games, Contra was much better loved—somewhere around the lower end of the top ten or around fifteenth, depending on who you ask.

Its popularity in China is easier to explain. Among the many heavily pirated games circulating at the time, Contra had standout controls, standout music, and cooperative play. And when the competition around it was weak, those strengths mattered even more.

In 1991, the Game Boy got a title simply called Contra, known in English as Operation C. To distinguish it, players in China usually called it Contra GB. Story-wise it followed on from the first two Famicom games: after defeating the aliens twice, Bill and Lance were sent back to stop another group trying to revive them. Its popularity was even lower. I did play it on the actual Game Boy brick back then, and with the Konami code you could set yourself up with nine lives, but my memory of it is faint. I never cleared the last stage. For whatever reason, Konami did not count it as part of the mainline series.

Then came 1992. The Super Famicom received Contra Spirits, released in North America as Contra III: The Alien Wars. That is the real Contra 3. In the same year, the aging Famicom got Contra Force. By then the numbering around Contra had already been used and abused so thoroughly that this authentic Konami game was bizarrely labeled “Contra 6” by Chinese bootleg distributors. It is actually a pretty enjoyable game, with four playable characters that can be switched freely—a relatively unusual feature for an Famicom title. But because it only received an American release, Konami still classified it as a side story.

So, to make it clear: on the Famicom there are only three actual Contra games—Contra, Super Contra, and Contra Force. Everything else people attached the name to was either mislabeling or substitution.

That brings us to 1994 and the real subject here: Contra: Hard Corps. For a long time this was widely called Contra 4, and just as often praised as the strongest game in the series.

That title did not survive. In 2008, Konami released an actual game named Contra 4 on the Nintendo DS and effectively stripped Hard Corps of that fan-given status. The likely reason is that the leads of Hard Corps are not Bill and Lance. As a side note, in the story of 2002’s Neo Contra on PS2, Bill kills Lance.

So the game many people once called the strongest Contra is not, officially speaking, part of the numbered mainline.

Like the “Hard” in its title suggests, the Mega Drive entry is every bit as severe as the series reputation implies. I first ran into it in 1998, very late in the Mega Drive’s life. At the time, local game shops would often let you swap cartridges for a small extra fee, about ten yuan for anything that was not text-heavy. I took in a thoroughly awful copy of Spider-Man and X-Men hoping to come back with something better. The shop owner happened to be playing Stage 4 of Hard Corps when I arrived, and just watching him left me stunned. The game looked far too difficult for me.

After he finished a stage, he finally dealt with me and asked whether I wanted to trade for the one he had just been playing. I shook my head. Too hard. Fortunately, I stuck to that answer. He was playing the U.S. version, which does not have the weapon-refill code available in the Japanese version. On pure ability, I would never have made it past the third stage.

After three relatively similar rounds of shooting aliens, Konami had a major shake-up. Masato Maegawa left the company at age thirty to start Treasure, taking several core Konami programmers with him. In 1993 Treasure released two major action shooters on the Mega Drive: Alien Soldier and Gunstar Heroes. That clearly got under Konami’s skin. On one side they pursued legal complaints against Treasure; on the other, they quietly borrowed some very good ideas for themselves.

That is why Hard Corps feels strikingly similar to Gunstar Heroes. The slide move was almost certainly one of the things Konami copied. As for the parade of oversized enemies and giant mechanical threats, it is harder to say who first pushed that idea furthest.

Music had always been one of Konami’s strengths. Here, the compositions themselves are not the problem. The rhythms and melodies are solid, with a heavy-metal blend that fits the game well. The issue is the sound compression on certain stages, which gives some tracks a rough, abrasive quality. One piece that stands out is the mini-boss music in Stage 2—tense and forceful. The final stage theme is an arrangement of the Castlevania theme, which raises an amusing question about what exactly they were hinting at. Aliens were not enough—did vampires need to get involved too?

One genuinely unusual feature for a run-and-gun game is the choice of four protagonists. The default male lead is balanced across the board. The werewolf-like character has a powerful build, jumps higher, and hits harder. The robot is small and gets a double jump. The female lead uses homing weapons.

Naturally, I picked the woman.

Regular enemies are not what left the deepest impression here. The real effort clearly went into giant vehicles and bosses. A lot of those boss concepts feel extremely close to Gunstar Heroes, to the point that the resemblance gets uncomfortably specific.

To encourage replay value, this action shooter also experiments with branching routes and multiple endings. There are four endings built around a 2×2 route structure, plus a hidden bad ending if you flee midway through Stage 3.

The catch is that three of the four main endings are not especially good. They either end in mutual destruction or in alien domination. Only one route gives you the proper result: defeat the enemy, escape alive, and disappear quietly afterward.

But choosing that route means giving up the game’s most dazzling showcase, a highway chase sequence that uses 2D tricks to simulate a 3D sense of speed and depth.

Starting with this entry, Contra finally gave players a life bar instead of killing them in a single hit. For someone clumsy like me, that was wonderful news, because it also meant I could abuse invincibility cheats.

When you lose a life, the weapon you are currently carrying disappears. The Japanese version, however, includes a code that instantly fills all four weapon slots whenever you want:

pause up down up down A up down up down B up down up down C

Hard Corps also inherits a feature from the Super Famicom title: a setting that lets you switch whether your character can move while firing. I think this option is useless and only gets in the way. A Contra game where you jump and cannot shoot hardly feels like Contra at all.

The route branches themselves are not especially exotic. Most of the time they simply determine whether you fight a boss first or an alien threat first.

And honestly, even the best ending is only fine. I got what I wanted out of it. I was never going back for a second run.