Bionic Commando Pc Requirements
Giordano Thibault
My wife mentioned today, upon seeing the Super Mario Bros. 3 shirt I was wearing, that it was bad enough that I was going out in public with my awesome paleo hat on, but that I was also wearing a shirt that 7 and 8-year-olds wear. I called shenanigans--unless they've been purposefully exposed to it, I'd bet my bottom dollar that the majority of gamers born after the year 2000 (feel old yet?) never played that landmark NES title.
Why do I bring up this seemingly random conversation? Because it provided some inspiration for this newest exclusive bi-weekly NWR feature: Retro Revival. Well, that and Neal Ronaghan's excellent "Extra Life" feature, which you should also be reading.
For this feature, however, I intend to search out and play an older game every two weeks, then discuss its merits in a humorous way. My "older game" backlog is considerable, though you probably won't see many NES games, since my NES has been on the fritz for years. Still, it's my esteemed hope that you enjoy this feature as much as I'm going to enjoy recounting my childhood.
One caveat: since my NES has been on the fritz since Clinton's re-election, you won't see too many 8-bit classics here. I apologize for that, but I can offer some good news: my cabinet is packed with crunchy, nutritious Game Boy and Game Boy Color games. I also have a healthy collection of SNES and N64 games, which is often inflating due to my complete lack of financial responsibility. One more thing: this feature can be seen as the younger, more attractive sister feature to Neal Ronaghan's "Extra Life" feature, which has a great personality. Props to Neal, who largely inspired this...retro revival.
With that said, let's swing right into our first title: Bionic Commando: Elite Forces, an excellent late-era Game Boy Color game from 1999 developed by Nintendo Software Technologies. In it, you assume the unassuming role of a cybernetic--one might say bionic--commando out to stop a tyrannical madman from destroying the world with an ancient alien weapon called Project Albatross!
But it's not as simple as running around and shooting things while also swinging around large environments and sometimes sniping guys in little sniping minigames. Actually, that's exactly what you're doing, but it's not simple. In fact, swinging from tree to tree (or ledge to ledge) requires some modicum of effort and skill...and also lots of luck. You see, kids, the game often requires you to grapple small, almost inconsequential pieces of scenery that requires precise timing and extensive use of The Force. Failure to deploy your freakish claw at the opportune moment often results in death. There's a reason there are only two "elite" commandos.
Basically, the game is a run-and-grappler: you choose your loadout at the beginning of every mission, then high-tail is through jungles, cities, caves, and the occasional graffiti-laden sewer system. In between perilous swinging sessions, you'll find yourself accosted by armed soldiers--some of whom can actually fly--and alien life forms. You may defend yourself with armor and BFG's. Your loadout choices expand with every stage you manage to beat, although this certainly isn't Metroid; there's never a reason to revisit a stage. Your journey merely becomes easier...sort of. You see, the difficulty ramps up along with your artillery, so there's never a dull moment.
Luckily, in addition to handing you new guns, armor, and useless decoders, the game also lets you "level up" by upgrading your health points through experience. Every enemy you kill drops a little canister. Pick up enough canisters, and your maximum health increases.
Luckily for the player, you can totally return to previous, easier levels and farm canisters to your heart's content. Additionally, should you require extra lives (you will!), your commando can visit roving enemy ships that move around the map and earn up to two extra lives per visit in these bizarre, loosely-handled overhead segments.
The most frustrating sections of the later levels involve the timing and precise aiming necessary to string together a group of successful swings. Often, you will not only need to hit that grapple point within a very limited window, you will also need to hit it with just the right amount of grapple line out so that you can actually swing to your next target...which is usually off the screen entirely.
Death, like taxes or new versions of the original Star Wars trilogy, is a constant, looming threat. The second most frustrating aspect of the game are the boss fights. Remember those old NES games where bosses didn't really have patterns to learn? They'd just basically run toward you, causing death by smothering? Most old Castlevania bosses fit this mold. It's similar here, except the bad guys don't just run after you--they also shoot you. Relentlessly. Often, the only way to kill them is to take hits and shoot at them at a higher rate. In one encounter, you'll need to keep the sound up and the boss' sprite off the screen entirely so that you can tell you're hitting him, but his AI is unaware of you.
Despite its shortcomings, Bionic Commando: Elite Forces is a great game. It's very pretty, sprites animate with surprising fluidity, and if you're a fan of Radio Trivia: Podcast Edition, you already know that it has a kickass soundtrack. If you don't listen to that particular podcast, I'll just say here that it has a kickass soundtrack. Also, listen to Radio Trivia: Podcast Edition. Just be aware of Elite Forces' old-school difficulty, and you should be fine.
Bionic Commando is a third-person action game that likes to tease you. It dangles endless possibilities in front of you, only to snatch them away and replace them with limp gunplay and extended stretches of nothing. There are some good ideas here, and when they coalesce, you glimpse the great game struggling to escape from the shackles of averageness. You see it when you fling automobiles at a crowd of troopers; you see it in the exciting, high-flying concluding sequence. More often, however, you get the idea that developer GRIN didn't know what to do with its clever ideas. Early glimpses of a big world to explore tantalize you, but your progress is restricted by annoying clouds of deadly radiation. You'll come across new, more powerful weapons, only to discover that shooting them is just as lame as firing your default pistol. Moving about the world with your bionic arm is fun, but even that mechanical wonder isn't strong enough to carry the entire experience.
That bionic arm is the gameplay's backbone, and it's the source of every positive feature found within Bionic Commando. Most importantly, it's your standard form of transportation. Using it as a grapple hook, you can fling it onto posts, tree branches, and girders and swing and climb toward your destination. Stringing swings together can be satisfying, though you don't have Spider-Man-like freedom to glide about as you please. Your arm has only limited reach, so you can latch onto something only when the targeting reticle indicates that the surface is available. Furthermore, swinging has a lot of weight behind it. You must release your grip earlier than you would expect to keep the momentum going, which leads to a bit of clumsiness in the first hour or so as you become acclimated to the mechanics. Eventually, you'll be able to swing with ease, though certain levels (city-based environments, a tree-laden park) are more enjoyable to navigate than others (rocky caverns, underground passages) because they offer a bit more elbow room.
A glimpse of a futuristic metropolis may at first lead you to believe that there's a lot of room to explore. However, while Bionic Commando does afford you occasional, minimal leeway, you're generally pushed down a linear path. In this case, the modern replacement for traditional invisible walls (though there are some of these as well) is radiation. These blue clouds of instant death choke the city streets and coat the sides of buildings and are to be avoided at all costs. Radiation is one of the game's most common sources of frustration, because it imposes an artificial limitation on movement. You might fling yourself onto a seemingly safe rooftop only to be welcomed by this fatal mist, or reach out toward a wall but find that radiation keeps you from grabbing it. The restrictions have a big impact on the pace, and the scattered enemy encounters are far too tepid to energize the experience.
These encounters are lifeless mainly because it isn't any fun to shoot Bionic Commando's lousy weapons. Pistols are often referred to as peashooters, but no other game in recent memory provides a firearm that lives up to this name so aptly. It gets the job done, but the hollow pop of each shot and the minimal visual feedback make it boring to use. Subsequent additions to your arsenal aren't much better. From an unexciting grenade launcher to a boring shotgun, every weapon lacks punch. The only exception may be the rocket launcher, which allows you to fire off multiple rockets at once, a handy feature when facing a heavy-duty aircraft. Most of the time, however, you'll be facing sporadic squads of armored grunts. They don't exhibit the most advanced intelligence, but firefights can still result in your quick death, since you can take only a few shots before needing to duck away and let your health replenish. The low point of this mediocrity is a protracted, unrewarding shooting sequence within a library that will make you long for more energetic weapons and tighter shooting mechanics.
Fortunately, you have other offensive tools that are far more interesting to use. You can latch onto foes with your arm and zip-kick them, which sends you leaping backward through the air, letting you finish off your target with your pistol or perhaps another kick for good measure. You can also grapple certain environmental objects, like cars, boulders, and barrels, and fling them at your enemies--a technique that is especially enjoyable against a towering mechanical worm that stars in Bionic Commando's best boss fight. Additionally, you can launch the same objects in the air and punch them into opponents, which is equally fun to do. There are also a few set-piece levels that put the bionic arm to good use. In one of them, you take down a series of aircraft as you leap from one to the next; in the game's final scenes, you use similar techniques to memorable effect.
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