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?

I'm not sure what glitch are you referring to. Can you make a video with it or share a link?

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.

Oh, I remember I've seen it once in twitch clip, the guy felt in the pit at 1st stage and that triggered end of current stage somehow. benefit from such glitch is questionable for Any%, but most likely it would speed up non-main categories like Low%. You can download NES emulator and game rom to your computer or even play online and try to replicate this glitch if you remember how it's done.

@reagancontra - If you figure out how to do it, please shoot a post on here. I know what ANGEL_UNDEAD is talking about.. the only clip I know of that the skip is recorded was from the legendary DK. Check out SummoningSalts Contra WR progression vid via YouTube if you get a chance.

@ANGEL_UNDEAD wasn't that a hardware failure? I thought someone scoured the code and determined there was nothing that indicated it was feasible code-wise.

Also, I've never heard of the skip glitch @reagancontra is talking about. Have you? Is it something that's been rumored to exist?

The glitch you're speaking of is indeed the one DK ran into and it has been looked into. It is a hardware glitch and not part of the code of the game. If it was a part of the code I wouldn't see why it couldn't be used as any% as it would pertain to reaching the end of the game using the game's code parameters. For instance, getting the 1 round kill on the base 2 boss. I believe it was Mr. K who looked into it. I could ask him about it.

I've been curious about this since the Summoning Salts video.