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.

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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.

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PlayStation Eye Support in echochrome: Lousy Idea, or the Lousiest Idea?

echochrome holds a special place on my Playstation 3, the only game in my trophy collection to have 0% of the trophies collected. It’s not that I don’t like the game, I really do, I just apparently haven’t succeeded in it enough to warrant any of the meaningless iconic awards. The quicky art-puzzler does, though, succinctly sum up everything I love about the Playstation in one frustratingly challenging piece of beauty that would likely never have been published anywhere else.

Word broke today of an impending update to the downloadable game, one that brings support for cloud sharing of user-created stages, weekly corridor challenges, the curious sounding invisible quiz mode and Playstation Eye support.

Wait, what was that last part? Continue reading »

Trailer Review: Critter Crunch on PSN

Developer Capy already had a hit on their hands with unique puzzler Critter Crunch, the award-winning mobile phone game ported to the iPhone for the App Store’s launch nearly a year ago. If Lumines and Tetris have taught us anything, though, it’s that addictive portable puzzle games are still awesome on a big screen at home, and so we have this trailer for Critter Crunch’s hi-def debut on Playstation Network. Continue reading »

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.

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T-U-R-T-L-E Power: A Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Request to the Powers That Be

I see you’re remaking TMNT: Turtles in Time there, Konami. T’was a mighty fine game back in the day. Mighty fine. Colorful it was, better fightin’ than that there first TMNT arcade game to boot. Reckon I liked it when Donatello threw them Foot soldiers into the screen, gave me a start as a tot that did. This three-die-mensional makeover’s fetching as well, kind of graphics to warm a man’s heart but invite in the young blood as well.

The rumor goin’ round camp is that Turtles in Time is an Xbox Live exclusive at the moment. I understand your line of thinking there, I do. If it ain’t too much trouble, though, I’d like to ask you a kindness.

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Waggle to Live: Feel and Survival Horror’s New Nintendo Home

Both the old-guard and the new school of survival horror have, like a zombie-plague infected lab assistant, transformed on high-definition consoles. While Sony’s remake of Siren and Konami’s close-but-no-cigar Silent Hill: Homecoming stuck close to Shinji Mikami’s classic formula of limited-resources, limited-mobility scares, everyone else has upped their ammo count and gone with action as their template. Resident Evil 5, Condemned, Dead Space and even the granddaddy of them all, Alone in the Dark, have left behind flight and embraced fight on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. It’s interesting then that classic survival horror is enjoying something of a renaissance on a console best known for low-impact exercise and county fair simulations.

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Noby Noby Boy 1.1 is Love, I Mean Live

I told my friends I was turning on the Playstation 3 last night so I could download the Marvel vs. Capcom 2 demo, and I did, but my true intention was to try the new update to Keita Takahashi’s Noby Noby Boy, the fabled version 1.10.

The changes are noticeable instantly. Boy’s house has new hair styles. The internet-connection parrot has struck a different pose. The cloudlike text wafts into existence with much more bounce and strut than before. But these changes are about as important as Google’s iPhone app’s recent upgrades “longer version name” and “Ninja”. As soon as the game starts, that’s when the additions become truly apparent. Continue reading »

Trailer Review: PixelJunk 1-4 Revealed, Name Pending Your Input

A lot of people (myself included) expected a grand unveiling of Q Games’ fourth title in the PixelJunk series of HD 2D PSN games at GDC last month. Didn’t happen.

This morning, however, Q Games mastermind Dylan Cuthbert proudly announced on his Twitter the PixelJunk 1-4 Naming Contest. The game appears to be just about complete from this new trailer, the only thing the kids at Q are missing is, well, what to call their game. Trailer just after the break. Continue reading »

Whatcha Playing: Earth Day Edition

April 22nd, the day we all take off from work and gather at our local mosques and synagogues to solemnly pay respects to our mother Earth on the anniversary of her creation… or something. So do your part and take your game time today away from blasting zombies and chainsawing aliens in half, instead playing games all about helping mother Earth. Here are the four games that I’m playing for Earth Day:

Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol for Nintendo DS

Rather than cleaning up a house and helping with domestic troubles, this Chibi-Robo has been tasked with turning a barren field of sand into a lush flourishing public park. Like SimCity, you get to design your own world, laying paths and streams, rocks and hills, even benches, fountains, clock towers, statues, and mini-games to your liking. The nicer your park, the more visitors it gets each day. You also have to befriend local toys (including Molly Mapletree, seen above) to help you build up your park and battle smoglings who aim to pollute all the beautiful nature you’ve brought to the park, but the majority of gameplay is planting flowers. It’s actually a lot more fun than it sounds, thanks to the charm and playfulness found in all Skip-developed Nintendo games. Continue reading »