ROMhacking tools have existed since the days when DOS was the most common operating system, and they have only gotten more common and more feature-rich since that time. ROMhacks are tricky to talk about and even trickier to review. Should they be judged in comparison to their original game, or should they be judged by their own merits like a totally original game? At the same time, there are many different types of hacks. Some hacks are practically entirely new games with many new features coded from scratch, while some hacks look like they were thrown together in just a few minutes by someone who was very bored. Which category does this fall under? I'll let you take a guess from the score. (Hint: it's the latter)

The graphics are mostly the same as the original game. Why do they get a 1, then? Well, there's two major reasons. The palette hasn't been altered very much, but it has been altered, and the alterations look very ugly, especially alongside the original palettes. The more important reason, though, is that they clearly received no testing at all - if you finish the first level, most of the second level's graphics have been overwritten, resulting in a revolting mess of random tiles. How could you possibly miss something like that unless you didn't playtest your hack? On a more positive note, though, the music and sound haven't been altered, so the developer was nice enough to not violate my ears while violating my eyes.

The gameplay has been altered in the worst possible ways, which is very unfortunate. First of all, the level design was altered...but only for the first level, so that's a bad sign already. The first level has now been filled with difficult jumps and poorly-placed obstacles, along with extremely illogical water. The illogical water just seems to do what it wants, and it's very easy to end up in a situation where you have no choice but to fall through it and commit suicide, which should never happen in a game like this.

If you thought the illogical water was bad, you haven't seen anything yet. A lot of the enemies have been given a massive boost in the amount of damage they can take, which breaks the gameplay of Contra. You know those guys that stand still and shoot at you? Well, they can now take as much punishment as an armored turret. The foot soldiers have also been given just as much health, which makes things just peachy when you have four of them running at you at the same time while trying to fight snipers and turrets. Contra's gameplay is meant to be done with you running through and blasting the foot soldiers out of your way effortlessly, so to say that this change feels wrong is a gross understatement.

This change also makes the game stupidly difficult for all the wrong reasons. If I didn't abuse emulator cheats, I never would've gotten past the first level, simply because of the awful level design and incredibly durable enemies. It's clear that the person who designed this game didn't bother to playtest it at all, and it shows very well. This is a great example of the worst kind of ROMhack: the kind that was thrown together in a few minutes and not playtested at all before being uploaded to the Internet.

Pros:
+Uhh...what pros?

Cons:
-Awful level design
-Ugly palettes
-Broken gameplay
-The second level's graphics are completely scrambled

Final Rating: 0.1 illogical rivers out of 10

NovemberJoy :  LOL The noxious visuals of this game makes me want to try it. I've played a lot of bad NES games, but not many bad ROMhacks. There is a lot of talk about the first two stages, did you make it further? 

endings : I made it up to stage 6, and there were no changes at all after the first stage aside from the scrambled graphics in stage 2, which were probably unintentional. Thank you for the feedback, though - I can see where that question might be asked.

NovemberJoy : I tried it out, man this game is pretty horrible! Lol