First a laggy Street Fighter II, now a non-playable version of the nearly-20-year-old Konami classic Contra... What’s next Xbox Live, a Pong clone that runs at 5 frames per second while installing spyware on every computer in your house??!?

Wired’s Gamelife is among the first to note the ridiculous problems that the Xbox 360’s version of Contra has been seeing. According to their story (and the pictures above, to prove it!), online multiplayer for the title is completely, unequivocally broken. Granted, getting any game to work well online is hard, but if we’re expected to drop $4 for a 20 year old game that we could get free by *other means*, shouldn’t we at least expect some quality in the production??

Click the jump for the full transcript documenting Contra‘s woes.

So I’m playing Contra with Jared just now, and he’s going, “What the hell are you doing? Stop jumping around at the bottom of the screen.”

“I’m shooting the alien tower!”

“You’re jumping around like an idiot. You died. You got a game over.”

“What? You died. You’ve had a game over for like five minutes now. I felt bad for going on.”

“...”

“Take a picture of what you see on your screen, right now.”

Mine’s on the left, his is on the right.

We played another game and told each other what was happening on our screens.

“Alright, you just died again.”

“I didn’t die! I’m kicking ass! We’re in the base right now and you just walked into the electricity.”

“We’re not in the base, we’re still fighting the boss.”

“You got a game over.”

“I have eight lives left.”