Contra Tradeoff

An idea feels more meaningful when we find it on our own. Well, here is a point which took me thirteen years to understand. It is meaningful to me. Let's see what you think :-)

As a child, I liked playing video games (sometimes I still do). My machine was an 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. My first game was Contra, a simple game. All I had to do was playing my "man" to the right-hand-side of the screen while shooting the enemies and dodging their bullets. By the way, I used to call the men as Commando and Rambo ^_^;. There were some power-ups to improve my man's weapon, two of which were much stronger than the others: spreads five (weak) bullets to five different directions shots a single (strong) laser beam to one direction.

I prefered to . The reason is that there are lots of enemy soldiers running around most of the time. More bullets help getting rid of them more easily. is nice for bosses, but it is a pain to use before meeting the bosses. Moreover, it travels more slowly than a bullet.
Yes, Konami DID break physics law. The speed of a bullet IS greater than the speed of light in Contra.

On the other hand, is still powerful for bosses. It is very fortunate that Konami made most of the bosses so big that if I could maintain close enough a distance from them, I could get all the five bullets hit them. The result is not much different from using .

My overall opinion is that is better than . As simple as it was, this game actually made me think about trade-off unconsciously. I didn't realize this concept at that time. Now (at the time I wrote this for the first time), 12 years have passed. My thought has matured, now I have enough psychic power to conquer the world. Mwahahahahaha.....
Ehm.. ehm... (clear throat) Seriously, 12 years have elapsed since then. No sooner than my A-level physics (NOT psychic) teacher actually mentioned the word "trade-off" that my mind suddenly snapped and I had the complete picture of this idea.