Japanese Differences!

User Rating: 8 | Contra NES

The US NES version and the Japanese Famicom version were both released around February 1988, suggesting that they were developed in tandem. However, the Famicom version had the advantage of using Konami's own self-produced VRC2 mapper, as unlike in other territories, third-party developers in Japan were allowed to manufacture their own cartridges and mappers for the Famicom instead of using only Nintendo's stock. This allowed the FC version of Contra to have many additional features, such as cut-scenes and background animations, that were not in any of the NES versions (which uses a standard UNROM mapper).