I dunno, I thought other than the overly-easy pseudo-3d levels, the difficulty curve was reasonable. The hangar and the energy zone were significantly more difficult than the jungle and waterfall. The ice field was good middle ground.darryl.revok wrote: I feel that Contra has a very arcade-centric difficulty curve. .....
If there are any Contra fans out there I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the game and/or genre.
Really, I think part of the reason the game felt easy is that we played through it a million times with the 30-lives code, until we knew the game backward and forward. That made it really easy when switching to non-cheating, as we already had figured out the best ways to handle each challenge.
(and really, most action games at the time could be mastered in a day or two)