Broken Contra Breaks Out On Xbox Live Arcade

Konami and Microsoft unleashed everyone's favorite unfair arcade shooter, Contra, for Xbox Live Arcade this week and, unfortunately, the game's co-op online multiplayer mode is horribly broken.  How broken?  Let's ask Wired's Chris Kohler.  Or better yet, let's ask IGN.

Online multiplayer, simply, is broken. On the third Waterfall stage, our game became disconnected, but we were still playing. Basically, we both were seeing a different screen. My partner kept jumping at the bottom of the screen and I yelled at him to c'mon. And then he told me I had already died because I was jumping around like a crazy man and that he was fighting the boss. WTF? The happened every time we played. The tester should be canned.

This is completely unacceptable.  If it were up to me, everybody who paid 400 Microsoft Points for this broken game would get a refund and a few extra points for their troubles.  Contra should be removed from the service until such time as Konami fixes the problem.  In the meantime, save your money/points.  We should not encourage this behavior of releasing critically broken titles with the expectation that game-crippling errors can be fixed "later".