The 61FPS Review: Bionic Commando, part 2
Be forewarned: Here be spoilers.
GRIN made a bold statement when they announced Bionic Commando, saying that this dreadlocked, be-wifebeater-ed fellow with the hotdogs all over his metal arm was the very same Radd Spencer from twenty years ago meant this game was a bonafide sequel. For most players, the story in a videogame is inessential, a throwaway. You and I, being the devoted weirdos we are, might care about the thousand-year continuity from Mega Man to Mega Man Legends 2, but the average hardcore videogame player doesn’t give it a second thought. The Legend of Zelda’s on to something. The series’ creators know that it’s character, setting, and a sense of history that’s most important for giving your tale weight, not an actual history.
Bionic Commando begins ten years after the NES game. Radd’s in jail and has been stripped of his bionic arm. He was, we are informed, married at some point in the past and his wife went missing. Super Joe, the legendary soldier Radd rescued back in the day, is now a disgraced figurehead. Turns out he ran the TASC, the military branch in-charge of making bionic soldiers like ol’ Radd. Those same soldiers, once relied on to blow up Hitler’s head, are now enemies of the state, feared by the powers that be for being too powerful and unstable. When a terrorist military made up of “bionics” blows up Ascension City, Radd is sent into the wreckage to retrieve an unnamed weapon of mass destruction the terrorists are after. In exchange, he gets his freedom and Super Joe promises to tell him where his wife is. By the end it’s revealed that Super Joe, in league with old Bionic Villain Gottfried Groeder (introduced in Rearmed,) was behind the evil scheme all along. More than that, it turns out that bionic enhancements like Radd’s arm were made from organic parts. The most effective soldiers were those augmented with organic parts they had a strong sentimental attachment to. Yes, Super Joe made Radd Spencer’s arm out of his murdered wife.
Now, all of this is told through mercifully brief cutscenes, text retrieved from hacked communicators, and in-game radio transmissions. There’s a lot of story given to the player and it doesn’t, for the most part, interrupt the flow of actually playing the game. It doesn’t, however, make a damn lick of sense. No character’s motivations are properly explained and while continuity is shoved down your throat throughout, the details of history are left out completely. When Super Joe turns evil, it’s never really explained why. He just wants the WMD MacGuffin to activate some giant secret base that’s never even mentioned until the last twenty minutes of the game. It is mindnumbingly stupid. Of course, the story in the old NES game was mindnumbingly stupid as well. This story’s offensive not because it’s hamfisted camp, but because it keeps you from actually playing throughout the game’s beginning and its finale.
Comments: (0)
Tags: ben judd, bionic commando, bionic commando rearmed, capcom, grin, kenji inafune, mega man, metroid prime, nes, ninja gaiden, playstation 3, shigeru miyamoto, super mario 64, team ninja, xbox 360
The 61FPS Review: Bionic Commando, part 1
Ever since Shigeru Miyamoto remade Mario into a bouncing mass of yelping polygons in 1996, game designers across the world have been asking the same question: how do we bring our old 2D games into the third dimension? This has never been a creatively bankrupt ambition. Videogames are, and always have been, an iterative medium funded by familiarity. The rules of a game are polished over time and mascots, franchises, brands are insurance on their evolution. Taking the fundamentals and characters of classic games to explore the potential of three-dimensional design wasn’t selling out; it was buying in.
Over the past thirteen years, only a handful of designers have effectively translated two-dimensional games into 3D. More often than not, old franchises have been modernized as completely different games. Team Ninja’s Ninja Gaiden games are about weighty melee play, not the vicious platforming gauntlets of the original series. Mega Man’s first polygonal outing was a kart racer, not a speedy run-gun-and-jumper. But games like Super Mario 64, games that truly capture and add a new dimension to their predecessors’ play, are rare. Retro’s Metroid Prime did it, managing to translate the rules, architecture and style of its 2D parent series perfectly, even while sacrificing the thrill of seeing Samus onscreen. GRIN’s Bionic Commando gets it right too. But in their effort to recreate the rock solid rules of 1987’s Bionic Commando, GRIN failed to make a complete work of art.
Comment: (1)
Tags: ben judd, bionic commando, bionic commando rearmed, capcom, grin, kenji inafune, mega man, metroid prime, nes, ninja gaiden, playstation 3, shigeru miyamoto, super mario 64, team ninja, xbox 360
The Evolution of Radd Spencer, Sort Of
If, like me, you’re sitting and waiting ever so patiently for Mr Constantine’s review of the new Bionic Commando, you might do well to just relax for now over a cup of tea. You should also take the time to go over The Albatross on Parade, a Bionic Commando art gallery put together by Press The Buttons.
Like many 8-bit heroes, Radd Spencer was born under a colour palette restriction, meaning Capcom had gave him a few very strong defining traits instead of a whack of lesser design choices. Radd has sunglasses, and a green jumpsuit. His flaming red hair would make Little Orphan Annie grovel like a beta dog. He has a steel arm that can shoot out and grab things. There’s nothing very complicated about his looks, but as The Albatross on Parade proves, America, Europe, and even Japan had a hard time settling on Radd’s looks, especially as far as advertising was concerned.
Comments: (2)
Tags: artwork, bionic commando, nadia oxford, Radd spencer
Bionic Commando is Love: Spoiler Warning
SPOILERS
So. I finished Bionic Commando last night. I’ll save the nitty gritty for Monday’s review, and believe you me, there is more than a little nitty gritty to cover. The short version is that the middle of Bionic Commando is one of the finest unfinished 3D action games ever made and its sandwiched between a sloppy beginning and a borderline nonsensical ending.
The story in Bionic Commando makes less sense than the one in the original. Hideo Kojima will scoff when he plays it. But there’s one part of the story that I wanted to share with you.
This is Radd Spencer.
Apparently he was at one time married to a woman named Emily. She appears briefly in the game during abrupt flashback sequences. I would like to show you a picture of Emily.
Comments: (2)
Tags: bionic commando, capcom, john constantine, Radd spencer
Bionic Commando is Love: Atmosphere and Theme in Game Soundtracks
Just two weeks ago, Brandon Sheffield wrote an excellent editorial on the failings of modern videogames soundtracks. As games have become longer, more complex, and, yes, more cinematic, their accompanying music has become more atmospheric than tuneful, more intent on creating a mood than a memorable melody. Sheffield made the point that the beloved songs from gaming’s 8- and 16-bit glory days are remembered first and foremost because players were forced to listen to them so many times. The technology available at the time afforded game composers only so much space and range so their songs were simple and short. Games were also played in shorter bursts and their difficulty was more demanding so repetition was an inherent aspect of sitting down with a game. We remember the Mario theme song not only because Koji Kondo was an excellent composer but because we heard it many, many times. If you were forced to listen to that brief a melody repeatedly while wandering Fallout 3’s nuclear wasteland, chances are you’d lose your damn mind.
Bionic Commando’s music strikes a careful balance between old and new. GRIN’s Simon Viklund, who composed the soundtrack for both the new Bionic Commando and last year’s remake Rearmed, is a man who remembers when videogame songs stuck in your brain. He actually used to hold a cassette player up to his television to record the soundtracks off his NES games. The new Bionic Commando’s doesn’t preserve the NES game’s tunes as faithfully as Rearmed’s club-beat-infused remixes, but it does house almost every original melody inside its sweeping songs. At the beginning of Bionic Commando, music is rare, fitting into the common mode of providing atmosphere. It was quite a disappointment. As the game has progressed though, particularly in its third level The Park, the music has become more constant and tuneful. The music that plays here shifts back and forth between a lilting piano melody and driving alterna-rock with very little dead silence in-between, and it does wonders for the overall tone of the game. The next level, a forest area preceding a boss fight, features a melancholic orchestral reimagining of the theme from Area 5 of the NES game.
Sheffield said in his essay that the key to memorable game music is to defy a player’s expectation with strange music unusual to games broadly, his examples being the licensed period-specific songs in Bioshock and Katamari Damacy’s eccentric J-pop. Simon Viklund has created another solution with his Bionic Commando soundtrack, songs that serve both atmosphere and theme, marrying the best of the past with today’s technology.
Comment: (1)
Tags: bionic commando, Brandon Sheffield, capcom, fallout 3, gamasutra, grin, john constantine, koji kondo, mega man 2, OST, simon viklund, super mario bros
Why So Serious, Bionic Commando?
I’m a little troubled by Lord Constantine’s first date with Bionic Commando. It seems that Bionic Commando is quite frigid.
Being about as rational and steady as a thoroughbred going up a narrow mountain path, I’ve decided to start complaining about the direction Bionic Commando is taking before actually playing the game. Namely, I’m not sure why Grin decided to turn Radd Spencer into serious business when Bionic Commando Rearmed pointed out the similarities between the first game and a decorated, stone-faced soldier standing waist-deep in a pink cake.
Flaming red crew-cuts, sunglasses, midgets riding death machines, dollar-store brand Nazis who can’t find the garbage dump…these stoked the furnace that kept Bionic Commando warm in the hearts of gamers for a full generation.
Why is it being exchanged for yet another gorilla-sized hero with a sneer as broad as a truck bed? Why do I have to listen to “That’s gotta hurt!” instead of, “Oh quiet, you noisy little chatterbox?” Did Grin decide, “Okay guys, the joke’s over,” and crack open their maiden barrel of video game cliches? I thought they understood us. I thought we were friends.
Comment: (1)
Tags: bionic commando, bionic commando rearmed, nadia oxford, Radd spencer
Bionic Commando is… Hmm: A Troubling First Date
You’d think that after some twelve months of orgiastic pontification on Bionic Commando, I’d be telling you how my first two hours with the game helped me to lose weight, see the face of God, and to understand the fundamental nature of the universe. It didn’t. Of course it didn’t. I am going to shatter my character a bit right now… I know Bionic Commando is just a game. And I can say that, based on my first dabblings with it, it’s a good game. I’m just worried that it isn’t a great one.
A few bullet points.
Comment: (1)
Tags: bionic commando, john constantine, Radd spencer
Bionic Commando is Love: T-Minus One Week
This morning, I got to work and an envelope was sitting on my desk. I opened it. Then I saw this inside of it:
Then I was all:
And, well, after that… after that was private.
We’ve waited twenty-one years for each other. The bond of true love transcends decades and distance and now, once again, Bionic Commando and I will swing across the roof-tops declaring our undying devotion to the world. The game’s official release date is May 18th, which means that you’ll be able to walk into a store and buy yourself a copy twenty-four hours after that. Last summer, I wrote one post a day the week leading up to Bionic Commando: Rearmed’s release on Xbox Live Arcade and PSN. I’ll be doing the same for Radd Spencer’s rebirth for the next seven days.
To kick things off, I’d like to discuss the recent multiplayer demo released on XBLA.
Comments: (4)
Tags: bionic commando, capcom, grin, john constantine, nes, playstation 3, psn, Radd spencer, XBLA, xbox 360
John Constantine, our superhero, was raised by birds and then attended Penn State University. He is currently working on a novel about a fictional city that exists only in his mind. John has an astonishingly extensive knowledge of Scientology. Ultimately he would like to learn how to effectively use his brain. He continues to keep Wu-Tang's secret to himself. 
Derrick Sanskrit is a self-professed geek in a variety of fields including typography, graphic design, comic books, music and cartoons. As a professional hipster graphic designer, his recent clients have included Nerve, Pitchfork and MoCCA, among others.
Amber Ahlborn - artist, writer, gamer and DigiPen survivor, she maintains a day job as a graphic artist. By night Amber moonlights as a professional Metroid Fanatic and keeps a metal suit in the closet just in case. Has lived in the state of Washington and insists that it really doesn't rain as much as everyone says it does.
Nadia Oxford is a housekeeping robot who was refurbished into a warrior when the world's need for justice was great. Now that the galaxy is at peace (give or take a conflict here or there), she works as a freelance writer for various sites and magazines.
Based in Toronto, Nadia prizes the certificate from the Ministry of Health declaring her tick and rabies-free.
Bob Mackey is a grad student, writer, and cyborg, who uses the powerful girl-repelling nanomachines mad science grafted onto his body to allocate time towards interests of the nerd persuasion. He believes that complaining about things on the Internet is akin to the fine art of wine tasting, but with more spitting into buckets.
Joe Keiser has a programming degree from Johns Hopkins University, a tiny apartment in Brooklyn, and a fake toy guitar built in the hollowed-out shell of a real guitar. He writes about games and technology for a variety of outlets. One day he will stop doing this. The day after that, police will find his body under a collapsed pile of (formerly neatly alphabetized) collector's edition tchotchkes.
