Ng+100%

Compared to a clean file, new game plus allows for more powerful weapons to be used to absolutely crush the enemies, as well as some different characters. For this run, I (MURPHAGATOR!) used Katana Jaguar with weapon set D, and Mr K used Lucia with weapon set F.

Katana Jaguar moves slower and has a larger hurtbox than the other characters, but has unique katana attacks which completely destroy anything he is capable of getting into swinging range of. In general, the katana replaces the more powerful weapon in the standard weaponset, so I select weapon set D entirely based on the lock-on weapon, the Heaven Laser. This is by a wide margin the most powerful and accurate lock on weapon in the game, and chews through most of the things the katana is unable to reach. The other primary weapon is the lighting bolt, which does minimal damage but chains off of enemied and pierces through sheilds.

Lucia has a smaller hurtbox and does (slightly) less damage than the other characters, but makes up for it with a faster move speed. This lets Mr K pick up stragglers without falling behind. Weapon set F is used primarily because of the GV laser, which is extremely powerful in the situations that Katana Jaguar is incapable of doing. In addition to doing huge dps, its can be swept to clear out large numbers of small enemies, and it passes through sheilds which screws up some of the expected bosses defenses. The downside is that the alternate weapon, the Ring Laser, is basically useless, and the lock-on Variable Laser, while fairly powerful, is not particularly fast and sometimes tends to orbit targets instead of hitting them.

Unlike the NG run, I generally take out airborne targets and K takes out ground targets during the movement sections. This is because of the extreme strength of the GV laser and heaven laser making those the easier targets for us to attack. In addition, Lucias faster walking speed meant that K had more time to clean up enemie while Katana Jaguars slower speed means he had to move more continuously to keep the screen moving. It was important to keep our character selections to K being Lucia since hitting bosses with Katana attacks safely would have been impossible for K to learn in the time we had for this.

We start with stage 4 because the boss is one of the most difficult fights to do with our team. The stage itself requires a lot of circling around in order to hit all the tragets necessary for 100% hit rate, but otherwise doesnt have much of note. The boss' arms both have to be destroyed before finishing him off, and doing so without killing the boss or having Jaguar ram into him is more difficult than it really should be. The rest of the stages are played in order, and theres really not much detail to elaborate on here other than saying that all of our detours were necessary to get the hit rate up. For more detail on the specifics of the AI, see the single player NG 100% commentary.

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Mr. K's comments:
This run took place during the third Contra Conference and it was my first Contra run on a non-Nintendo console. My loyalty to Contra runs very very deep.

Most of my comments here will match my comments about the other runs. I picked up this game in a very short amount of time and I did so for the sole purpose of doing a co-op run with Murphagator. The game is significantly easier with two people, although we had a very small window of time to work on the run. Murph runs this game single player and I'll defer to him for most of the explanations.

This category was quite weird to say the least given how broken Katana Jaguar is. Heaven't laser is ridiculous and that katan is even more ridiculous. Playing as Lucia meant running faster than Murph as Katana Jaguar which meant I could dally for a bit and we wouldn't lose time. All in all the weapons are broken and it was a fun and short little outing.

Ng+ any%

This is the last of the Neo Contra runs we did at the conference and it is probably the least optimized since it is a bit of a silly category. Any% ignores hit rate in favor of simply going for the bosses directly, which is pretty trivial when katana swings kill most bosses in a single strike. The downside is that we do not get to play the ending stages since a minimum amount of hit rate is needed for that. Any% this way does give its own complete ending, albeit a rather glorified bad end.

Once again, K takes Lucia with weapon set F and I (MURPHAGATOR!) take Katana Jaguar with set D, since Lucias faster walking speed gave K more leniency in his movements to make up for his relative lack of experience with the game, and the pressing issue of the difficulty in using the katana.

This is in many ways the least optimized run we did of this game at the Contra Conference, but its also the silliest and least interesting category we did.

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Mr. K's comments:
This run took place during the third Contra Conference and it was my first Contra run on a non-Nintendo console. My loyalty to Contra runs very very deep.

Most of my comments here will match my comments about the other runs. I picked up this game in a very short amount of time and I did so for the sole purpose of doing a co-op run with Murphagator. The game is significantly easier with two people, although we had a very small window of time to work on the run. Murph runs this game single player and I'll defer to him for most of the explanations.

I need to apologize for this run. It was literally the night before we had to leave and I was DEAD tired. We decided to do this for the heck of it just to see how fast it was. It's the sloppiest of all of our runs by quite a large margin, but the category is just stupidly fast. I don't know what else to say, really.

Ng 100%

New game Neo-Contra uses only the characters and weapon sets that are available from a clean file, which means we have only Bill and Jaguar for characters and weapon sets A B and C. Bill, controlled by Mr K, and Jaguar, controlled my me (MURPHAGATOR!), have no differences other than their color, so K uses Bill since he is the true Contra hero while I just dabble with this silly entry to the series. It also made our colors more consistent for the NG+ run.

Weapon set C is used primarily because of the spread gun, which has both high utility due to the area coverage and high damage output by point blanking enemies to hit the entire spread. The secondary classic fire shot is unfortunately useless compared to the spread gun and is used only briefly during autoscrollers. The lock-on lighting is a nice weapon since, while it has low damage per shot, it gets a large number of locks and hits nearly instantly instead of spending a lot of time traveling to or even circling around targets. Lighting also generally avoids hitting walls or unintended targets on its path to the intended target.

To complete the category, we have to seek out and destroy all of the preset targets. Many random enemies can spawn but can be ignored if they are not in our way. K and I coordinated who would persue which target to go through the stages as efficiently as possible, and Im happy with the results. As a rule of thumb, I cover ground enemies whenever possible while K takes out airborne threats since ground enemies tend to be more threatening. I had significantly more experience with the game than K, so this plan of attack gave us the most leeway to move agressively without losing frequent attempts.

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Mr. K's comments:
This run took place during the third Contra Conference and it was my first Contra run on a non-Nintendo console. My loyalty to Contra runs very very deep.

Most of my comments here will match my comments about the other runs. I picked up this game in a very short amount of time and I did so for the sole purpose of doing a co-op run with Murphagator. The game is significantly easier with two people, although we had a very small window of time to work on the run. Murph runs this game single player and I'll defer to him for most of the explanations.

Of call of the categories, this is definitely the most interesting and it serves as the best representation of what the game has to offer. I was definitely the most proud of this run of all the runs that we did for this game.

No author's comments provided.

No author's comments provided.