Operation C Area 1

## Overview

*The whole Operation C speedrun portion wiki is under construction. If you have questions, for now join us on the Contra Discord. We will gladly answer all your questions.*

Stage 1 is a side-scrolling level from left to right.

Power-ups (in the order they appear) : 2 Spread Guns, 1 Homing Gun, 1 Fire Gun and 1 Spread Gun.

This level is in four parts: (1) beginning, (2) elevator, (3) sewers, (4) boss.

## Beginning

Start timer when medals appear on the top left of the screen.

Go right. Shoot two trolls in front of you.

Two snipers are on top of structures, shooting at you (optional kills). If you keep moving, their bullets won’t touch you. Shoot two more trolls in front of you, and shoot the next two snipers on structures.

Make sure to shoot the weaponbox, and grab the Spread Gun for now. You can do so by shooting up at an angle at the 4th sniper, you will shoot both the sniper and the weapon box, and the S will fall on you as you are running.

First speedrun strat : two trolls are coming from the back, and a turret is moving on a horizontal poll as you walk up the hill. Jump and shoot down without stopping to kill both trolls. Visual cue : jump at the line on the floor at the bottom of the hill.

Run up the hill. Two trolls are coming from the back again, and another sniper is on top. Again, use the line on the floor as a visual cue to jump and shoot down at the trolls without stopping. You probably want to shoot that sniper as well, to make room for your jump.

Another weaponbox is coming from the back. Another Spread Gun is in it, to upgrade your gun to « rapidfire spread ». You can grab it if you want, but it’s not essential. You will be grabing another weapon soon.

Lag : There is a lot of items on screen there (trolls, sniper, weaponbox, bullets), so be careful with lag already.

Two trolls are running on that top platform, you can ignore them. Keep running.

First gaps with turrets. You can just ignore the first turret, keep running and jump the gap, it won’t have time to shoot. Jumping in Operation C is tricky. Jumps are super high and short distance. So try jumping at the last second.

The second turret will have time to shoot. You can shoot it, and it will only shoot one bullet and explode. Or you can play it pacifist, simply jump at the precise time over two bullets. Jump again when you reach the gap, and keep running.

## The Elevator

Hop on the elevator and the screen will lock, the elevator will start its movement down. There is an enemy coming from the sky and extending laser arms or something. Killing it or not doesn’t change the time of the elevator ride. We usually kill it to avoid having to deal with its lasers. If you kill it, another one respawns. You could play it pacifist there and it doesn’t technically affect the speedrun. Usually, we shoot 4 of them. The last one spawns on the right side of the screen (around 56 seconds in the run if you did everything correctly).

The important part here is the transition to the next scroll, or « leaving the scene ». Your position and when you start walking right will determine the rest of the level.

There is an optimal point to start from, and not lose any frames all the way to the boss. But the trolls and enemies will be harder to deal with, and lag will be harder to control. It’s mostly a TAS route.

The cue for « leaving the scene »

Usually, runners would run all the way left and start walking right to be in line with the scrolling. This is an OK strat, but not garanteed you will have the same position everytime, because of your turn around reflexes.

You can simply choose a pixel and wait for the elevetor to come back up, and start walking at the good time.

My strat of choice now is to go to the extreme right of the screen, and do a full jump left. This way, I’m always at the same pixel.

I press right when the elevator reaches a certain point. [VISUAL CUE NEEDED].

## Sewers

There will be different gaps to jump over, always try to jump at the last second.

Two trolls are already coming from the back and a weaponbox with an H is flying by (you don’t need it, but you could use it for safer strats). The submarine is coming. Here, try to avoid lag (don’t shoot too much, maybe avoid killing the submarine). You will need to jump and kill both trolls shooting down, and jump over the gaps. Depending of your position coming out of the elevator, you might have to adjust when you jump and when you shoot down at the trolls.

A weaponbox with an F is flying by. Grab the F. It will be the weapon of choice for the run. You can ignore any other weapon.

Careful, 3 trolls : there is one troll right after you grab the F, there is another troll when you jump the next gap, and one last troll right after that.

Jump the last gap. Ignore the weapon box with an S. Keep running and fall down the wall.

There will be two trolls on this floor, and a turret section with gaps (like at the beginning).

Depending how you got out of the elevator, you might have to kill the turrets or jump over their bullets. Ideally, you just want to walk through without shooting.

Keep running, jump the gap. Two trolls are coming from the back. Jump the last gap. Keep running until you reach the boss. You can either kill the trolls or jump back over them (to avoid shooting them, and lag).

The boss is spawning. And a last troll (an actual troll) will come running from the right.

## Boss

Avoid the bullets from the cannons. You can kill the cannons or not. To kill the boss you will need to destroy 3 bunkers in the middle, and then 2 bunkers on the left.

Position yourself on top of the 3 bunkers. [VISUAL CUE NEEDED] Simply jump straight jump and shoot twice (two fire balls) for each bunker. Timing doesn’t really matter, because you can’t kill the boss before the last bunker spawns on the left anyway. But try to do this quickly though, to get into position for the 2 left bunkers.

The important timing part is the very last bunker on the left.

You want to jump and shoot down, but you want the two fireballs to be as close as possible to each other, so the bunker takes the damage as fast as possible to finish the stage. Basically, you want to shoot one fireball during the ascent of your jump, and one fireball during the descent of your jump, so they both line up and look like one big fireball.

So jump up. Just before the peak of your jump (that you won’t see because Lance jumps off screen), hit the B button during the ascent. You can either hold the B button, the next fireball will come out 7 frames later. Or you can try to tap-tap. This part is tricky. An optimal kill is basically frame perfect.

Once all the bunkers are destroyed, the submarine will explode. You can walk to the right side of the screen and wait for the end jingle.

If you want to split at loss of character movement, you can either hold DOWN or UP, and hit the split when Lance starts running.

DON’T FORGET TO MASH START DURING LEVEL TRANSITION SCREEN.