I love this series so much, it's my favorite thing on this website and I've been here a long time. I sincerely hope Dan and Vinny manage to beat it, but they need to get to into the Treasure mindset. This isn't just a Konami Contra, this is a game by the people that later left and formed Treasure and put out Alien Soldier and Gunstar Heroes back to back on the Mega Drive -- which I hope they get to play in this series and not just stick to the canonical Konami games.
So, as a Treasure game in disguise, the only way they'll beat it is if they cross that border of terror and reticence "oh my god, a new boss/stage, what will happen THIS time?" into pure madness and glee, where they see a new boss and they just eat it up, they're excited for the chaotic (and often super-dumb) creativity that'll come flying at them.
Treasure knows what they're doing, even before they were Treasure. So you have to expect:
1. There's always more bosses. If you think you're done, you're about to be hit by the Seven Force. Sometimes you think you're in a level but you're actually in a boss. Therefore, the lesson is: treat everything like a boss. Bosses have patterns and there's always safe(ish) spots or the right time to do the right thing to survive. There's nothing unfair in this game after you've seen its patterns. Whenever the game throws bullshit at you like a full screen attack out of nowhere, it KNOWS it's throwing bullshit at you, I know it's infuriating but that's that kind of punk rock edge to Treasure games where they're like 'I'm going to make you so angry right now' that, when the next time it happens you now know it and just slide through it you feel like you're as cool as a cyberpunk future laser werwolf wearing mirrorshades with a minigun for an arm.
2. Bosses will mainly be made out of sprites jointed together in code. Treasure made their mark doing this shit on the Mega Drive and it doesn't even have a sprite scaler, they're doing it all with their own internal tech. They're proud of it and they're going to show it off for 3-4 games on the MD in a row. Give them some love for doing things on the Mega Drive that nobody else could do, new things for the 16 bit generation altogether that paved the way for the future. Do you think the man who came up with Shadow of the Colossus would have necessarily been inspired to make a game with huge, multi-segmented bosses had he not in his earlier years played Treasure games filling a 320x200 screen with huge, chaotic and rotating bosses doing mad shit? This was cutting edge at the time and the lesson is to get in that futuristic mindset when you play it so you can anticipate what the new boss will do. Hence:
3. Bosses with segmented body parts flying around everywhere do not behave like regular Contra NES bosses which are usually just a sprite moving in a linear fashion and spitting bullets to jump over. This is a very chaotic game on the surface, and that's why Vinny and Dan are having more trouble. The lesson here is: most of it is just sturm und drang and doesn't kill you: learning what bits of the bosses have actual hurtboxes and where to stand is basically the Contra dna left in this game. This design concept has not aged well, I will grant that.
4. Treasure gave you two tools to survive this game. The first is the slide with i-frames. Stop thinking in real-world terms where bullets are something you have to avoid. In this world, bullets are something you melt through and you materialize on the other side, stronger for it. Embrace this insanity. Slide through everything, even when you can just avoid bullets with normal platformer movement, learn to slide through everything just for style points. You guys are still playing the oldschool rolling platformer stage with popcorn enemies parts of this game like it's regular Contra when you can instakill most popcorn enemies and go through their own bullets with the same verb: slide. When you're styling in Treasure games, you're surviving. Good things will start to happen for you (we've seen this in the last few episodes too) when you get in the mindset of 'relax, I got this. I am a laser werewolf from the future and I am immortal because I have credits'. There's no cowardly way to finish this game.
5. The other tool that Treasure gave you to beat this is that this is a very deterministic, memorization-heavy game. Our runners have already picked up on that and through repetition they're getting the handle on a lot of patterns, but to see this through they'll have to fill up that mental rolodex and know when to switch from 'Imma slide through whatever you throw at me on reflex' to 'I'm just logically going to stand on the one bit of this pattern where I am 100% safe'. Learning this game is just this, knowing when to switch from 'embrace the chaos' slide mode to 'my mind has to rest on this safe spot' mode. This skill transfers, then, to all action games. If you beat Hard Corps, you'll be a better gamer if you internalize the broader concepts you learned from it, not just remember the specific patterns of this game. Go back and play Bayonetta after this, for example, and see how easily you'll eat through normal difficulty.
This isn't Contra, this is just Gunstar Heroes in disguise. To finish it you have to learn to love the chaos and then memorize it until it seems internally consistent. There will be more bosses. They will do mad shit that nobody had seen before on a 16 bit videogame. You can slide through them all. Unless you can't. Embrace the madness. In the spirit of this for example, why on earth isn't one of the two of you the gunwolf guy? This isn't the game for humans, this is the game for a tiny robot that goes 'DAMN!' and a mirrorshade wearing werewolf with a minigun for an arm.
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