I really liked Grin's new Bionic Commando game. Apparently the swinging mechanic has split people into two camps, and I fall into the 'this feels easy and great to use' side of things. The scenery could look fantastic at times, causing me to stop zipping about like some amphetamine-fuelled Cyber Tarzan so I could soak it up.

The challenges added a welcome - if sometimes distracting - amount of depth to the action. Meeting certain requirements, like defeating a specific amount of enemies with a particular weapon, usually garners an Achievement and unlocks more challenges to try your detachable hand at. I loves me some Achievements, and the obsessive completionist in me enjoyed unlocking them through these different tasks.

It's not a flawless piece of entertainment, obviously. The game's inhibiting conceit is that some radioactive 80s neon-blue special effect coats the city, limiting the amount of exploration the player can engage in. While poorly explained (by them, not me) and initially frustrating, it doesn't take long to get used to what the game's trying to get you to do. Once you've got your head around the fact that this isn't as open a world as your first leap from a ruined skyscraper would suggest, the whole experience hangs together better.

When (certainly not 'if') you die, the game forgets the collectibles you've picked up before the next checkpoint. Usually you'd expect enemies to respawn upon your demise, but tricky-to-reach bonuses should be a one-time deal. Oh, and those challenges which I said were a nice addition? They're also afflicted by the same post-death amnesia. If you die, you've got to rack up those stats again. I eventually excused this by comparing it to the old school ethos where slipping up meant being thrown back to a checkpoint, sans power-ups, so you could do it all again. Not a perfect gaming experience in this day and age, but at least this game has ties to that era.

As you can see, I was willing to overlook the problems this game had because the overall experience was so great. However, there is one design decision (read: kick in the nuts) that has left the lustre a little lacking. I'd finished the game and thought I'd check out the Level Skip feature that allows you to revisit the environments. After all, there were some collectibles I'd missed and my gaming OCD was making my brain itchy.

Problem is, you can't keep anything you get in this mode; it's merely a way for player to muck around in the levels. Challenges and collectibles have zero worth when playing in this way. The upshot of this is that to get the missing pieces of your collection, you have to play the whole game again. And you have to get everything along the way. Again. Oh, and the game also auto-saves, meaning you cannot return to a previous point to mop up the remainder of the Achievements.

Here's where I'd write some closing paragraph to neatly wrap up this post. Instead, I'm going to make a nice calming cup of tea and hopefully stop grinding my teeth long enough to drink it.

BONUS: Here's a dubstep Bionic Commando remix and, as an extra treat, it uses the old Commodore 64 version as the intro! Wheee.

I really liked Grin's new Bionic Commando game. Apparently the swinging mechanic has split people into two camps, and I fall into the 'this feels easy and great to use' side of things. The scenery could look fantastic at times, causing me to stop zipping about like some amphetamine-fuelled Cyber Tarzan so I could soak it up.

The challenges added a welcome - if sometimes distracting - amount of depth to the action. Meeting certain requirements, like defeating a specific amount of enemies with a particular weapon, usually garners an Achievement and unlocks more challenges to try your detachable hand at. I loves me some Achievements, and the obsessive completionist in me enjoyed unlocking them through these different tasks.

It's not a flawless piece of entertainment, obviously. The game's inhibiting conceit is that some radioactive 80s neon-blue special effect coats the city, limiting the amount of exploration the player can engage in. While poorly explained (by them, not me) and initially frustrating, it doesn't take long to get used to what the game's trying to get you to do. Once you've got your head around the fact that this isn't as open a world as your first leap from a ruined skyscraper would suggest, the whole experience hangs together better.

When (certainly not 'if') you die, the game forgets the collectibles you've picked up before the next checkpoint. Usually you'd expect enemies to respawn upon your demise, but tricky-to-reach bonuses should be a one-time deal. Oh, and those challenges which I said were a nice addition? They're also afflicted by the same post-death amnesia. If you die, you've got to rack up those stats again. I eventually excused this by comparing it to the old school ethos where slipping up meant being thrown back to a checkpoint, sans power-ups, so you could do it all again. Not a perfect gaming experience in this day and age, but at least this game has ties to that era.

As you can see, I was willing to overlook the problems this game had because the overall experience was so great. However, there is one design decision (read: kick in the nuts) that has left the lustre a little lacking. I'd finished the game and thought I'd check out the Level Skip feature that allows you to revisit the environments. After all, there were some collectibles I'd missed and my gaming OCD was making my brain itchy.

Problem is, you can't keep anything you get in this mode; it's merely a way for player to muck around in the levels. Challenges and collectibles have zero worth when playing in this way. The upshot of this is that to get the missing pieces of your collection, you have to play the whole game again. And you have to get everything along the way. Again. Oh, and the game also auto-saves, meaning you cannot return to a previous point to mop up the remainder of the Achievements.

Here's where I'd write some closing paragraph to neatly wrap up this post. Instead, I'm going to make a nice calming cup of tea and hopefully stop grinding my teeth long enough to drink it.

BONUS: Here's a dubstep Bionic Commando remix and, as an extra treat, it uses the old Commodore 64 version as the intro! Wheee.

Hot damn, bionic commando dubstep!!! You just made my day!

Great blog dude :D

This game and Prototype have me saying no, until the price drops and then we'll see... if I pay to play.

BC is going on sale on GameStop for $20.
http://www.gamestop.com/gs/landing/sumsale/default.aspx

I thoroughly enjoyed Bionic Commando...so much that my first playthrough was on Commando and I busted about 820G from it.  The multiplayer was well-done also, but the maps and weapons weren't memorable enough.  Even then...the damn rocket launcher and its locking-onto-humans bullshit breaks the multiplayer SOOOOOO much.  Still, excellent game.  Nonetheless, I can kind of see why you say it hates achievement whores...except the controls are easy to use (so long as you up the sensitivity on your right analog stick) and you can get the challenges and collectibles on the lowest difficulty.  Therefore, dying at that point means almost nothing.  It just sucks that you have to play through the campaign to unlock all the stuff, even if you've beaten the game already on the hardest setting.  Level jumping doesn't lead to achievements.  That is DEFINITELY a "fuck you, achievement whores" type of move.

It's a bit of a frustration, but you can get every single achievement on a single playthrough, and none of them are particularly hard to do. Doing them isn't the hard part, it's being good enough (or lucky enough, in a lot of cases) to keep them, which is a strange design choice in a game filled with strange design choices.

Bad dialogue?  Yeah, I guess...but I also wasn't walking into a game about a dood with a mechanical arm attached to him that allowed him to swing from almost any surface he wanted for hundreds of feet at a time while fighting giant robots and mechanical worms...and expecting it to be a perfect story, nor perfect acting.  What was there worked well for me.  = D  I'm sure anyone can pull out multiple paragraphs of problems with it.  I could, too.  However, I also know that this is a game based on something very simplistic in design.

God I couldn't agree with you more! I CAN'T BELIEVE LEVEL SKIP DOESN'T KEEP ACHIEVEMENTS!!!! WHY should I have to play the ENTIRE GAME AGAIN just to get the rest of my achievements :(