Bionic Commando: Rearmed is awesome, but shouldn’t it be?

I was up pretty late playing the challenge rooms. I had over 100 attempts in one room, and I couldn’t help but think about Flywrench while torturing myself. And that’s just the challenge rooms. This game has a lot to offer and I’m still excited to play it tonight. For me, that’s really rare these days. Why is that? More on that later…

The remake is flawless, and any additional work that went into it only added to the experience that was Bionic Commando for the NES. NOTE: I may be a bit biased here, since Bionic Commando NES is one of my favorite games of all time, so giving me a super-fun, faithful and semi-nostalgic revitalized experience got all my circuits going. GRIN did an excellent job with the menu system, the execution of the gameplay and the added features of co-op multiplayer, and multiplayer deathmatch.

That all said, I want to touch on the bigger picture here. The title of this post. Why shouldn’t a remake of an awesome game, taking all the fine-tuned gameplay elements verbatim be awesome? The NES version was just as awesome. When remaking a game verbatim, updating it, the only way to go is down. But this is a great case study in what makes games fun.

It isn’t the 3D graphics, the remixed music, the improved interface and usability, or even the added features like challenge rooms or co-op. It’s the core gameplay. The feel of your avatar swinging from the grappling hook, and your ability to control that and own the sprite’s movement on the screen as your own. That’s what the original had, and it’s emulated to perfection in the remake. But why is this lost on so many games today? They’re simply too complicated. The Halo series is a perfect example.

Halo: Combat Evolved.

A perfect example of relatively simple gameplay. Two races of weapons. A single player mode and same-screen/LAN multiplayer. It was obvious that Bungie went to great lengths to fine-tune the feel of the game. Halo was the first FPS to get that right on a controller. Both thumbs attached the player with the avatar’s movement completely. And with only a few options for direct action [grenade, gun, melee, switch] all things were available at all times to the player. This is something hard to explain in words, since the balance is so delicate, it’s a feeling better felt than heard.

Halo 2

Much of Bungie’s effort here was probably centered on the net-code and revitalizing the IP with a new race. The brutes. Enter duel-wielding, swords, completely new weapons almost entirely across the board, and an expansive multiplayer ranking system with gamecast features. The energy was put into the added features, not the core gameplay. But that would have been fine if the gameplay stayed the same. And to the untrained eye, it did. But the feel had been lost. Play felt more frantic and jittery now that there were way more options.

Halo 3

The latest installment. It seems here that Bungie decided that Halo 2 most certainly was better, probably because it sold better. But that’s largely due to artificial features such as the multiplayer architecture, given X-box Live making its way onto the scene, giving players a huge reason to come back day-after-day. Halo 3 added items. And didn’t change much else from Halo 2. Also, notice how the marketing grows more and more fascist and iconic as the series progresses… Ok, that was unfair.

Now this is all well and good. Features are good. They make players happy and keep them around longer, and I’m all for that. But the Halo series is a great example of the core-gameplay, that tiny nugget of immaculate worth, being drown out by easy-to-design features. Super fun games are hard as hell to design, and when we find/develop that, never compromise the fun for anything. It is paramount.

Back to the BC:Rearmed review. There’s only one thing I don’t completely love. The graphics. I know I’m crazy, and I do like the graphics. They are really well done. I just… I dunno, 3D models in a completely 2D game. Kinda weird… But this doesn’t really have any bearing on how awesome the game is in my opinion.

ps. On that note… Diablo III looks awesome. If you don’t think so, then please never come back here again, I don’t want your kind here. I am not one of those, nor will I entertain them at this blog.