You Are Not Hard Corps.

Hard Corps: Uprising's a game for those who cringe at their character catching a stray bullet, a retro-hard fantasy for the person who's not satisfied by games unless they master a challenge that will rip so many others apart. It's a game that's deviously efficient at separating the wheat from the chaff. Between all the lives you'll lose, all the times you screw up -- an offense punishable by death -- and the letter grades at the end of each level, Hard Corps' secret motto is clear: you can do better.

I had more C's and D's in my time with the game than a Victoria's Secret catalog, but that's the point. The game is supposed to be hard, because it calls back to Contra, and Contra was hard. "Rising Mode" lets you upgrade your stats (including your health and starting lives), but you're still just as likely to suffer death after death, until you've upgraded every possible part of your character and you're tearing the levels apart.

So yes, it's incredibly hard, even in co-op. But at times, I felt it crossed the line from "Hard for the sake of it" to "Poorly designed." The levels Six boss essentially takes a life with every hit (even with the game's three blocks of health) due to you falling off the edge of the train you're riding on. And the last boss has three stages, which must be tackled all at once per credit. It's Arc Systems sticking to their guns, and while that stubbornness works for most of the game, I can see several places could have been better and still hard if they hard just fixed what was essentially broken about the old-school game they're inspired by.

But the Rising Mode does do a great deal of leveraging the frustration. I know for a fact that I'll never beat Arcade mode, which offers none of the upgrading. And I'd like to meet the person who can, honestly.