Super C is among those rare NES titles that replicate arcade games while improving them. Many games of similar origins cheated a little: Bionic Commando, Rygar, Ninja Gaiden, and others were superior to their arcade counterparts, but they were also radically different. Super C and Contra replicate the looks and layouts of the arcade, and in exchange for less detailed graphics they play better and go further into their commando-versus-aliens warfare.
Yet despite the new stages and enemies that Super C added to the base ingredients of the arcade Super Contra, the most memorable sight for me is something brought from the arcade game: the level six boss.
The stages of Super C steadily advance players into alien territory. They’ll start by blasting humanoid soldiers and mechanized tanks in bombed-out bases, but the opposition steadily grows more monstrous, and after blasting apart a skeletal hovercraft in level five, players march into the giant purple duodenum of a xenomorph-grade alien hive. Giant maws erupt from the floor while spidery creatures scuttle around and spit bullets, and after braving a gauntlet of cyclopean bats and floating spiked blobs, we reach the apparent level boss.
It’s a wall of creepy, blended faces that spew shots at the player, yet it’s not long before a few shots (and even fewer if you’re using the Spread Gun) destroy the beast and call up the game’s little staccato beat that normally signals the end of a level boss.
And then the screen shakes. Out of the empty ribcage a giant monstrous face emerges, filling the screen and releasing a demonic snake to harry the player.
It’s a nice little surprise, and it’s offset only a little by how easily this Gigeresque titan goes down. His projectiles are easily dodged, the snake can be neutralized, and he absorbs the usually amount of gunfire before exploding. If one has the ever-useful Spread Gun, it’s possible to just stand still while the snake loops around and the skeletal visage’s bullets are destroyed before doing any harm. I prefer to run around a little, though, just to appreciate how the giant face’s eyes follow the heroes around the room.
This was straight from the arcade. Super Contra ends with a similar battle against the same creature, who is apparently named Gava. His second incarnation is a little more challenging here, as he gets two serpentine limbs and the Contra stars are larger targets. Once he’s done, however, that’s the end of the game.
So the sixth stage’s big reveal works well either way. If you go in cold, unacquainted with the arcade Super Contra, it’s a total surprise when the presumed level boss evaporates and a massive, blood-eyed horror thunders out like a chestburster in Alien or the parasite queen in that unexpectedly graphic first-season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. If you recognize this from the arcade, however, you’ll expect it to be the final boss. And it’s not.
Super C continues for two more stages after this. Stage seven is an arduous descent through a warren of pulsating walls and hatched alien eggs, with a giant skull-faced mecha monolith at the bottom.
The final stage is a brutal fight through a pixelly hellscape of mouths and xenomorphs and floating embryos, culminating in a fight with a grotesque, bony crab with a human face at its center. I realize that just about every action game of this period borrows from Giger, but I think that he had elected to sue any of them, he’d have the best case with the Contra series. Yet any legal risk was worth it, I think, to deliver some of the most climactic boss battles of the age. Most NES games struggled to deliver memorable final encounters, but Super C did it twice.
Sadly, Super C doesn’t have the arcade game’s biggest draw: the opening scene of its macho heroes glancing around and asking “What is this place?” in semi-German, semi-existential tones. You can’t have everything.
