Contra Anniversary Collection

Nice collection of the retro Contra games from the arcade originals to the 16-Bit era. Each game takes about 30-45 minutes to complete (even more if you go for all of Hard Corps' endings). I mostly enjoyed myself even with how ball bustingly hard these run n gun classics are. My personal favorite is Super C but only because I've beaten it so many times prior to this one. I recommend this to any fan of throwback games that are looking for a challenge in both platforming and bullet hell. BE CAREFUL though! If you're going for 100% completion, make sure to wait until the credits are over before completing each game as the final achievement won't activate if you exit too early. Learned that the hard way-

This and the Castlevania Anniversary Collection had a similar layout in terms of lazy design, they didn't even put exit button. Why can't they put it in the ESC or cancel button in the title screen. I had to play Rogue Corps from the start because Konami didn't put multiple save state unlike the Dominus Collection. Guess they were smart enough to figure it out before, I feel like a madman playing it multiple times.
Another typical Konami decision making. Great job Konami.

All the games in the collection are great. Each one takes a few hours to beat. The two best ones in my opinion are Alien Wars and Hard Corps. Pick this up on sale and enjoy your childhood again.

Good collection of old game. Got it on sale, can't complain.
I use to be able to beat these with no deaths on nes and gameboy when I was younger, now i can't even make it past 3 levels with 30 lives...

Could have used just a little bit more polish, like starting the game with full screen and a quit game option. Depending on which game you're playing and using the xbox controller, jump and shoot can be in so many different places. Honestly, they could have made it so much better by setting Jump as A and shoot as X, standardize it from the get go because I had to reconfigure all the controls. So every time you want to play this on say a big TV screen, you need to hit Alt+Enter and to hit the X mark to close the program and to reconfigure the controls depending on which game you're playing. Also two player controls is a little bit jank, it should have been easy plug and play in my opinion. So to have 2-player co-op, you must have the controllers plugged in before booting the game up. Very simple things for a PC game to add from their end, but it didn't happen.
The collection has both the North American and Japanese versions of many Contra games, personally my favorite is Contra 3 and the Japanese equivalent if this game. I beat the hard mode on PC and on the original SNES, this one for me is the best because it is hard but fair with the best music. My problem with the collection, is more so on the addition of the save state system as a fail safe for what seems like bad difficulty scaling mostly for the arcade games. The arcade games are supposed to be difficult because they were made with the intention to eat quarters. In particular, they did a bad job with how many lives you're given for Super Contra arcade. I found this game to be the hardest because of how bad controlling the character feels, the NES Super C version of the controls better, better lives count and has a cooler end boss. To make the arcade game feel more rewarding rather than have infinite lives via insert coins, it seems they have capped the amount of lives since you're not using real quarters anymore. Why do that and then add a save-state system into the whole game? When one beats the game and earns an achievement, people won't know for sure whether I beat it fair or used save-states when they own the game, they could have really made those achievements shine better by making it so everyone has to earn them fair.
At the end of the day, I can work with those small issues as I'm a huge contra fan and this was my childhood. However, it's 2025 and I think they easily could have fixed things to make this PC release much more final.

Classic Contra titles through the mid 1990's, including the Arcade and Japanese versions.

This is a killer collection and a must-have for anyone who enjoys these old run-n-gun titles.

Note: The Arcade titles suffer from slowdown and glitches, unfortunately. Each of the times I played through them, at some point the sound cut out partially or completely and did not return until I restarted the game from scratch. This includes losing my audio for my entire progress if I used the Save & Load State functions.

it very fun having all of the old contra games in one place but lets be real..I bought this to play the NES contra! and yes the contra code still works.