Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Select Start

I know you read the title of that post and immediately thought of Contra, one of the best games ever created for the original NES. (Incidentally, did you know that the "select" was only necessary if you were going to play a 2 player game?) This post is not about that, but, tangentially related, is about Vampire Weekend's new album, which came out today, entitled, wait for it, Contra. (I've reread that senctence about 5 times and I'm pretty sure it holds up despite all the tangents.) You may remember Vampire Weekend from Awesome Music Week a while back.

Vampire Weekend gained the bulk of their success from internet buzz and, as such, continue to have a strong internet presence. You can listen to their whole album online and you can even embed the album into a blog post to listen to it from here. I don't know if Vampire Weekend is everyone's cup of tea, but man do I love them.


5 comments:

Open Bar said...

If you didn't use the code, Contra was definitely one of the most challenging games ever. A single shot that hits you anywhere kills you, and some of those boards had bad guys everyfuckingwhere.

Also, the Spread Gun = Best Weapon Ever?

ChuckJerry said...

Spread gun was definitely the best weapon in the game, possibly in the history of video games.

There were times when the flame thrower was especially useful.

The most overrated weapon upgrade was the laser. You couldn't shoot more than one beam at a time. and if you shot while you still had a laser on the screen the preexisting one would disappear.

I eventually got so good at Contra that I could beat it without the code. That was back when you could just memorize a video game to beat it. Remember the old days?

ChuckJerry said...

Also, it's amazing how effusive that code was among the 10 year old community. How did something like that spread back in the day? If memory serves, this game came out before the Nintendo Power magazine started. A lot of those things were spread through the magazine.

Also, how did everyone know how to beat King's Quest? It's not like there was a primer or anything.

I remember back when I first bought Myst, I also had to get a little handbook in order to ultimately solve some of the puzzles. When I got stuck on Myst 3, I just looked up the walkthrough online.

The Commodore said...

Isn't there an additional "B-A" missing in the title?

Up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-b-a-b-a-select-start?

Correct me if I'm wrong.

ChuckJerry said...

Common misconception.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_Code