I haven't played the game in over 2 decades and don't even have an NES to play it on anymore, I'm afraid. But the one I'm talking about is when you'd fall into a ditch and die and if you had lives remaining, then sometimes you'd directly start the next level. On the first level you could trigger it somewhere right after the water ended. But it wasn't that useful since you'd lose your special weapons and playing base without the laser or spread gun was a chore. The one level I would do it somewhat frequently on was the snow one since I absolutely hated that level with the random pipebomb things being thrown.

Made an account just to ask this. Recently discovered speedrunning and have been watching videos of games I used to play as a kid in the late 80s and early 90s. Contra was one of my favorite NES games. Sure did spend a good part of my childhood defeating Red Falcon lol

Anyway, in all the videos I saw on here, everyone seems to be playing the entire game. And nobody was using the level skip glitch possible in the non-base levels. You know, the one where it lets you skip most of the level when dying by falling. On the super mario bros leaderboard I could see separate categories such as those where glitches are allowed and those where it's not. And so I initially thought it was because Contra too had a separate category for this and I was probably looking at the glitchless category. But couldn't find any such category at all. So is this glitch banned outright? And if yes, why? Why not at least include it as a separate category?