Play Super Contra Online

Summary

Super Contra drops you back into the frantic world of Bill Rizer and Lance Bean, this time battling an even larger alien onslaught. The arcade cabinet mixes classic side‑scrolling run‑and‑gun action with top‑down, eight‑direction stages that feel like a nod to the 1980s sci‑fi movies that inspired it – think Aliens‑style corridors and Rambo‑level firepower. Each level rewards you with weapon capsules that swap your default rifle for a spread gun, bomb gun, laser or machine gun, and grabbing the same capsule twice upgrades the weapon, while a rare “hyper shell” wipes the screen clean in the overhead sections.

The hardware is pure JAMMA: a vertically oriented monitor, a joystick and two buttons per player, making the game easy to convert to other titles. Two‑player co‑op lets Bill in green and Lance in purple cover each other’s backs, and the arcade’s DIP switches let operators set the credit cost anywhere from four to six per continue. The Japanese version, titled Super Contra: The Alien Strikes Back, even restarts the loop after the final stage, carrying over score, lives and weapons for a relentless high‑score chase.

Since its 1988 debut, the soundtrack rearranged by Hidenori Maezawa has resurfaced on modern platforms – from Xbox Live Arcade in 2007 to the Contra Anniversary Collection and the recent Arcade Archives releases on Switch and PS4 – keeping the retro gun‑blaze alive for a new generation of arcade fans.

Storyline

In Super Contra, a year after defeating the Red Falcon Organization, Bill Rizer and Lance Bean are dispatched on a new assignment. The timeline is set in December 2634, and the alien menace has seized an allied military base, turning its soldiers into hostile forces. The duo must battle not only their former comrades‑in‑arms now under alien control, but also a newly mutated strain of the same extraterrestrial creatures they previously encountered.