Hamster has revealed today that this week's Arcade Archives release will be Konami's 1988 run 'n gun classic Super Contra. It will be released for the Nintendo Switch & PS4 on January 18th (thanks Famitsu!).
The second game in the Contra Series, Super Contra follows the military soldiers Bill and Lance as they attempt to fend off another invasion from the alien organization Red Falcon.
Like the original, it can be played with one or two people controlling either hero and features plenty of sidescrolling, run 'n gun action. However, notably, this time around the game does away with the pseudo-3D sections that were present in the original, instead introducing top-down vertically-scrolling segments similar to other arcade games of the period like Commando.
The game was later ported to the NES/Famicom in 1990 (as Super Contra, Super C. or Probotector II: Return of the Evil Forces depending on the region), in addition to the Commodore Amiga and MS-DOS computers.
Both the arcade version and NES version have been reissued a few times in the past, including as part of the Contra Anniversary Collection in 2019 for Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PS4, and Switch. But, as the Twitter user Gosokkyu notes, the version of the arcade game that was included in that collection lacks the original arcade voices, so it will be interesting to see whether Hamster can get those in.