Contra III: The Alien Wars

Three, two, one — and the world around you crumbles in a fiery apocalypse. Contra III: The Alien Wars opens with a burning city, a helicopter and such a density of explosions that you immediately grasp why this game earned its reputation as the most intense run & gun ride on the Super Nintendo. In 1992 Konami didn't come out with a sequel, but with a manifesto of action.

Conceptually it's the pure essence of the genre: you run from left to right, jump and shoot at everything that moves, while enemy fire floods your screen. The novelty was carrying two weapons at once with the ability to switch instantly, so you could combine the iconic spread gun with a laser or homing shots. Added to the horizontal and vertical levels were also top-down sections, where the entire arena beneath you rotated thanks to the famous Mode 7 effect — the console's technological trump card, serving here purely for spectacular mayhem.

The difficulty is notoriously infamous. Contra was always a series where a single hit means you're dead, and the third installment didn't disown that tradition. The bosses are huge, multi-phase and demand both the memorization of patterns and lightning-fast reflexes. That's precisely why the game still shines today in two-player co-op — the shared curses and triumphs, when you make it through a particularly hellish passage together, are among the best that retro multiplayer has to offer.

Konami was firing on all cylinders at the time, and Contra III is regularly ranked among the best action titles of the 16-bit era. It became the yardstick against which all later run & gun games are measured, and its DNA shines through in modern titles like Cuphead or Blazing Chrome. The series continued through many installments across generations, but for many players this one remains the peak.

Why play it: It's brutally fast, perfectly tuned action that tests your reflexes to the bone — and in co-op it offers one of the best shared experiences of the SNES era.