Retro Games Beaten

Yeah, I know that the GBA game ports Contra III over, and swaps out the overhead stages with a few from Hard Corps. Not sure it's the ideal way to play, but I'm sure Contra fans probably appreciated it at the time.

I beat a bunch of random fighting games... Fighting Vipers, X-Men vs. Street Fighter, and Groove On Fight. X-Men was the best, Fighting Vipers was good but not as good as Fighters Megamix, and Groove On Fight was just weird. Weird characters, weird windups on moves... it's just not very fluid. So many unsafe moves saw me get to the end abusing light kicks. And the last boss, if you let him, will absolutely rock your world. Some kinda vampire and he's got all sorts of ridiculous specials, as you'd expect from a lot of fighter bosses.

I love how the Amstrad CPC version looks. It doesn't play all that well, but it's a lot better than the C64 version. I should look up if there are any codes. At any rate, disappointingly there's no sound at all in the stages, just the "poomf poomf poomf" of your Nerf gun.

I think they handled the aiming and jumping better here, too, although it certainly isn't ideal. If you hold the button down, you can fire in all directions, but if you let off firing, you'll jump when you hit up, or drop when you hit down. And the way the screen scrolls reminds me a little bit about how the MSX version did it, but the MSX version is far superior. Now to see if there's a ZX Spectrum version... of course there is.

EDIT: Oh, man, the DOS version looks like trash. C64 looks like a brilliant masterpiece compared to that.

Konami seemed to go overboard when it came to porting successfull arcade games: Contra, Gradius, Track & Field, ect.

To be exact, Konami wasn't responsible for most of those Western computer ports, nor did they really farm them out (which would mean contract developers to port them instead, a common practice). Same for Technos with Double Dragon, and all the major Japanese arcade hits that got a lot of those ports. Instead, they just sold the rights to Western companies, often European companies like Ocean Software, and those companies did whatever they wanted with it on the platforms they had the rights for. That's why you sometimes have weird Western-only sequels like Target: Renegade (which is one of the worst beat-'em-ups ever released on console, btw). This had the advantage of reducing the risk for the Japanese company, so they didn't have to enter markets they knew nothing about (ie developing and publishing a game for the ZX Spectrum in the UK), but it also greatly reduced their income when it came to these ports. IIRC, Technos got a bad deal when it came to all overseas distribution rights of Double Dragon, so they didn't really get rich off of it like they should have. That partly explains their eventual bankruptcy.