Video Games: Keeping My Neck Unbroken Since 1982

As part of GameFly’s new “surprise you by sending the ninth game in your queue” business plan, I’ve been playing a lot of EA’s skate. I’ve never really liked skateboarding games in the past, and even the venerable Tony Hawk series managed to slip past me. But there’s just something about skate’s physics and seemingly unorthodox controls that make it so damned satisfying to pull off a complicated trick; it really feels like you–and not the controller–are the one who’s doing all the work. Despite its casual content, skate has a strange zen-like quality that’s hard to find in a video game.

Of course, if I even attempted anything from skate in real life, I’d be eating through a tube for the rest of my life–so I’m grateful that Electronic Arts has provided a way to live out my skateboarding fantasies without so much as a fractured tibia on my part. For as much as people like to complain that video games keep kids fat and inside, they also allow the uncoordinated–and even the disabled–to do things that would end up getting them smeared across the asphalt in real life.

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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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Monkey Island to Hit XBLA?

When we uber-nerds aren’t busy bitching about Nintendo’s lack of effort on the Virtual Console front, we have another pointless, unbeatable power to fight: LucasArts and their complete disavowal of a good decade’s worth of gaming. Since 2000’s Escape from Monkey Island, the company hasn’t so much as thought about the point-and-click adventure genre that earned them money and merit throughout the late 80s and early 90s. Even with all the fan clamor and many platforms available for the re-release of their old hits, LucasArts has been incredibly stingy about making easy money; which is why it’s a little surprising that news has leaked of an XBox 360 (presumably XBox Live Arcade) version of the original Secret of Monkey Island.

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Games I Shouldn’t Have Liked: Blue Dragon

As both a nerd and someone who writes about video games on a daily basis (I assure you, the two are not mutually exclusive), I’ve played my share of stinkers; and I can tell you there’s nothing more cathartic than ripping a terrible game to shreds on the Internet. But sometimes, I don’t experience the typical reactions of boredom and disgust when faced with mediocrity. Sometimes, even when I’m fully aware of a game’s fundamental flaws, I can’t pull myself away. Like a moth drawn to a flame, I’m inexplicably drawn to something that will hurt me terribly–so thankfully, it doesn’t happen often.

When it happens with a game like Blue Dragon, though, I can only look back and curse the missing 50 hours of my life.

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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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Where Is L.A. Noire?

Rockstar Games, home to all games controversial and critically-acclaimed, have seriously started promoting their wild west sequel Red Dead Redemption. During my weekly Hulu fix the other day I was offered completely commercial-free viewing if I watched the Red Dead Redemption trailer once. The same trailer took the place of an entire commercial break during the premiere of last night’s new Breaking Bad (a program which I am quite familiar with). It’s refreshing to see a game get this sort of mainstream push so early, especially in a franchise that precious few people are familiar with, and the trailer never once drops the words “Grand Theft Auto”. Still, watching the CG spaghetti western teasefest unfold, I couldn’t help feeling like I was forgetting something. Oh, that’s right, L.A. Noire!

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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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Trailer Review: Dead Rising 2

It begins.
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