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These don't add much to the game overall, but as I said, it's the little things that count, especially in detail. It showed that it did have a storyline, albeit small - but it adds personality to an otherwise vanilla game on the overseas version. The small animation of the title screen, the small cutscenes with dialogue (skippable too!), the map showing your level progression, all that stuff - it's rather refreshing to experience after knowing the original NA version for quite a while which omitted those details. Even more so when you play them on original hardware (I did it on a flash cart) - it's like finding a memory that has been long lost to time.

I think this translation is definitely better than the one by Quest Games. The intro text scrolling in that one isn't implemented very well. However, the logo here is missing some colors compared to the original and its animation could use some more work, so there's still some room for improvement.

Contra, in my opinion, is one of the greatest video games ever created.

Every few years, I re-visit it for a few playthroughs, and every time I do, my appreciation for the game, and the people who created it, grows.

When I played with this patch, I got the sense that the people who made the patch, feel similarly. Like the creators of the game, much care and attention was put into this project. It is evident.

Just the fact that they did it, considering the following paragraph, speaks to this. As does the accompanying 'readme' file.

The Japanese version of Contra isn't drastically different from the US version. There are a few minor graphical 'upgrades', and in between levels, there are little sort-of cut-scenes with dialog, and a progress map. Nothing major, but it adds to the game.

In this patch, you get all this, with the Japanese translated to English. I don't speak Japanese, but the resulting English is clear, makes sense, and has proper grammar. So that's perhaps a sign that the translators knew what they were doing.

In addition, at the title screen, the "Contra" logo has been given some animation. I don't know if this was in the original Japanese version of Contra (I don't think it was), or if it is original to this hack, or a previous one, but in any event, it is cool. A nice little touch.

Thank you for this patch, and for doing a great job on it.