Super Nintendo Classic: All 21 SNES Games Announced - Ranked

15. Contra III: The Alien Wars

Contra was always an exercise in simple, violent fun: few gameplay experiences could nail that quite as well as the side-scrolling action of the franchise, and it was surprisingly great to walk around almost casually blasting everything to oblivion.

The third game in the series is the stand-out release: the gameplay is slicker, the level design is more complex and there are genius new additions to play like climbing and environmental destruction. And of course, it also introduced top-view stages, which shouldn't have worked, given it pushed the game out of its wheel-house, but the radical new approach worked wonders.

It was already a game well worth revisiting before it came bundled with the SNES Classic.