Contra III: The Alien Wars SNES

Contra III: The Alien Wars is Konami’s 1992 run-and-gun, moving the series’ side-scrolling shootouts onto SNES hardware and adding top-down overhead stages between the traditional horizontal levels — segments that let you rotate aim in any direction rather than firing along a fixed axis, and even drive vehicles through some of them.

It kept the series’ signature one-hit-kill difficulty and weapon-pickup system while taking advantage of the SNES’s Mode 7 scaling for some of its boss encounters, layering rotating and zooming enemy sprites over the usual bullet-dense chaos. It’s widely regarded as one of the strongest entries in the Contra series and one of the SNES’s better run-and-guns.