Get a taste of what it’s like to play this classic NES game on the Vive.
It seems like indie VR developers are in overdrive this month, reimagining some of our favorite childhood NES games in VR. We were already having a great time coming across a demo of Duck Hunt for the Oculus Rift, with grenades and all.
Now Konami’s run and gun classic, Contra, has popped up on the interwebs — and you can download it right now for the HTC Vive. The short demo transports you into the boss battle of Level 3: Waterfall. The unforgettable mechanical alien with fireball spitting arms will have you ducking and dodging, concentrating all your firepower on one arm at a time to destroy it as quickly as possible.
Just like the NES game version, once you destroy both arms, you can stand slightly to either side of the alien head and start blasting the mouth with your rifle. Once you’re victorious, Mr. Alien will go up in a 8-bit ball of fire, opening the entrance to the second base.
Although this Contra VR demo only includes this one boss level, it’s worth every second and kept us wanting more. Hopefully we’ll continue to see developers reimagine more classic NES games just like this in VR.
Contra VR was created by the developers of the PP Gun, a VR controller for the HTC Vive. We got a first glimpse of the Vive peripheral hardware at CES, when Vive announced their Tracker and showed off PP Gun’s rifle as a use case for the new hardware. The PP Gun was one of the first gun-shaped Vive Tracker integrations, sharing a similar size and weight as a real rifle, and even included recoil feedback. The batteries of the gun can also supply the power for the Vive tracker.
We didn’t get to try the PP Gun with this Contra VR demo, but as you can see in the mixed reality video we shot, it was still a blast with the standard Vive controllers.
You can download a build of the demo here (Dropbox link), or visit their Indigogo page.
