First off, let me just say that Bionic Commando was one of my favorite games on the NES. When I learned that it was being remade with new graphics I had to get it. Now that my brother and I have played through most of it, I have to wonder just how sadistically difficult NES games were back in the day because Bionic Commando Rearmed may be the least forviging game I’ve ever played in recent times. The last game I can remember being this unforgiving was Battletoads on the NES.

Of course, we were playing the game on Hard difficulty, but I don’t see it being that much more different than on the NES. The gameplay revolves around the use of a bionic arm – there’s no jump button, so you need to use your bionic arm to grapple onto platforms and swing where you need to go. Of course, one error in the swing and you’ll fall to your death in the spikes below. The game is brutally unforgiving, giving you only 3 men per stage and when you die, even at the boss of the stage, you have to play through the entire stage again. (This was considered normal back in the days of the NES though.)

We gave up on the final “stage” of the game, which composed of five lengthy and challenging areas and then the boss. If you died at any point en route to the boss, you would have to play through all of the five areas again and hope you can even get to the boss with some life left. This final stage (and I guess a lot of the game) was almost like a sidescrolling “bullet hell” game, where you’re a ship shooting from top down and dodging bullets all over the place with limited lives. In the case with Bionic Commando Rearmed, you’re swinging and killing enemies, hoping not to get hit by bullets as well. And there’s even one more difficulty that gets unlocked after you beat it on Hard mode!

I must not be the only one complaining about the extreme difficulty in the game, because Capcom released a patch a couple months ago allowing for infinite spawning on Easy and Normal difficulties. Think about how games have changed in this day and age. Since when did we still have “men” or lives remaining? These days it’s all about checkpoints and save spots, not a total of 3 men to try to clear through an entire stage. Thankfully, at least Easy and Normal will now allow me to beat the game.

Those of you that start the game now post-patch, I highly recommend just playing it on Normal. The game is quite imaginative and feels very classic if you don’t have to replay the same stage over and over if you die (which still remains for the Hard difficulty setting). The bosses are quite imaginative and provide for some innovative encounters, and I even thought it was nice how their difficulty was balanced more for co-op play (with 2 players, the bosses would often require both players to be in sync in order to do damage to the boss, and each player only did half the damage that one player playing solo would). If you felt Shadow Conspiracy was too easy, I dare you to try Bionic Commando Rearmed…

Capcom has been riding high with the phenomenal sales of Street Fighter IV and Resident Evil 5, but how did their latest game, Bionic Commando, fare? Terribly. 27,000 copies sold for both the 360 and PS3 versions in the month of May - its release month. Compare that with Street Fighter IV selling almost a million in its release month, and Resident Evil 5 selling almost 1.5 million. 27,000 copies may be expected for a completely new franchise, but Bionic Commando has quite the following. After all, the downloadable Bionic Commando Rearmed title sold more than 130,000 copies in its first week of release so it definitely had a fanbase.

What went wrong? Potential reasons could be:
- Lack of marketing
- Poor multiplayer demo
- Boring main character
- Frustrating single-player

Maybe it wasn’t quite accessible enough for the casual gamers either, so when the hardcore gamers aren’t really liking it and the casual gamers can’t even play it, no one is going to buy the game. Some blame the main character design: a generic white guy with dreadlocks. I still blame the multiplayer demo being terrible. I wonder if the game would have sold more if the multiplayer demo wasn’t released?

It’s a shame too because it was released during a time where there weren’t any “monster hits”. The last monster was probably Resident Evil 5, but that was back in March. Think about the wave of enthusiasm that Capcom had with their recent big titles…it would have been natural for Bionic Commando to continue the Capcom love but instead it brought the train to a screeching halt. I’d hate to be Grin right now.

Ever since I relocated and have such little time to play nowadays, I’ve come to the realization that I am no longer a fan of Achievements. I just don’t have the kind of time to hunt down every little thing these days, and if I had the option to, I would probably now turn off all Achievements for my 360 games. Then I could simply play the games for the sake of playing. But, I guess for now I’ll do my best to just play without caring about Achievements any longer.

I bought Bionic Commando: Rearmed a little while back when it was on sale for $5, and have spent maybe an hour or two playing it. But I can’t even get past the first level! Granted, I picked Hard difficulty and I’m still getting reacquainted with the fact that I can’t jump and have to use the grappling arm for everything, but man, it’s tough. It made me think two things: “Wow, I really beat this game when I was a kid?” and “I guess I’m getting a little too old for this since I can’t even beat the first level.”

Instead, I spend my evenings now playing Guitar Hero World Tour, EA Sports Active, and Punch Out!! What the heck has happened to me?! Who would have thought that I’d be spending more time playing the Wii than the 360. Dark times indeed…

Guitar Hero: World Tour – Had to start playing it last night since Stan Bush’s “The Touch” just hit the marketplace as a free downloadable song. It’s actually a pretty good song to play with the guitar. Of course playing it with plastic instruments is not quite the same as tearing through Decepticons as Optimus Prime, but it does give me some good memories of the Transformers movie. Now if only we could also get “Dare” from the Transformers movie and Karate Kid’s “You’re the Best Around” – I’d be all set with the ’80s.

Sins of a Solar Empire – Starting to play more advanced scenarios lately. The longest game I played so far was a 4 hour FFA with 3 AI on normal difficulty. That one certainly took a while but it was pretty enjoyable. I even ended up allying with one of the AI to finish off the other AI. But as soon as it was down to just the two of us, the AI broke off all relations and I had to kill him to win. I’m probably going to try 3v3 with the AIs next, but I’m scared that’s going to be like a six hour game.

Conan – Just finished it, but now I have to go through on the hardest difficulty as well as do any of the menial Achievements if I want to get the 1000. I’m practically ready to move on to the next game, but I’ve always gotten all of the single player Achievements I could in games I own so I don’t think I should set a precendent with this one.

Bionic Commando: Rearmed – Ended up getting it due to its $5 sale price this week. I’m sort of excited to play it, but I’m also a little worried that it may be harder than I remember. After all, even with all the fond memories I have of the NES version, games back then were a lot tougher and less forgiving. I’ll probably start it up this weekend.

Bionic Commando Rearmed is on sale for 400 MS Points ($5) this week for Gold members. I don’t usually buy Live Arcade games but at that price I had to get it. Shame the developer didn’t do as good a job with the actual retail game that was released this month, but at least the Live Arcade remake was awesome.

Also of note is that Target (instore only) has the following games for $37 each this week:
Street Fighter IV [360/PS3]
Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.[360/PS3]
Guitar Hero: Metallica [360/PS3/Wii]

A demo of the multiplayer mode for the new Bionic Commando game was released late last week and I spent some time this past weekend checking it out. It seems to have pretty polarizing opinions from players – some enjoy it and others thought it was garbage. I actually tend to fall more towards the latter camp and was unimpressed with the demo. I had low expectations for the multiplayer in the first place but even then I was let down! Check out my impressions to see why for the most part I didn’t enjoy it.

I grew up loving Bionic Commando on the NES. It’s one of my favorite games on the system, so to hear that a 360/PS3 sequel was in the works to the game I was a bit concerned. Would it be any good? Will it just play like Lost Planet but without mechs? How is it going to handle swinging and grappling in a 3D world? Unfortunately, most of these questions I had weren’t answered with the demo since it was only multiplayer, but from what I played in the demo I was disappointed.

Matchmaking
First of all, the matchmaking is terrible. I applaud that Capcom went the matchmaking route for public games with Bionic Commando, but it actually has to work to be effective. Unfortunately for me, it only worked half of the time. Once in a while after I declared I wanted to play, it would fill me right into a room of 8 people immediately and the game would start. But more often than not, I would just sit there, waiting for minutes and nothing would happen.

I’d quit out, and try it again, but still, no luck. It was only after I decided to play something else for a while and come back that I’d get right into a room. And it’s not like no one is playing the demo either – it just came out last week. So for some reason or another, you either sit waiting to join a game but you’re all by yourself, or you join a full room immediately. You don’t see any sort of progress being made about a potential room being filled up or anything.

The Demo Level
My second negative impression from the game was specific to the demo level. It was a terrible choice for a level. The level is ridiculously dark, and you can’t even really make out what the level even looks like. What irks me even more is in the matchmaking screen for the level, it’s a shot of the level but in bright daylight. Why the heck were we not given that option? Who wants to play in such a dark level anyway?

I also felt that the player models were poorly designed. They were like stormtrooper rejects that all had different colors (I managed to get pink more than once -_-) and literally no personality. On top of that, weapons and items were just icons and not even physical 3D models. The whole aesthetic experience was like playing an old school game in a dark 3D world – yes, a bad combination. What the heck? I guess if the game actually used physical 3D models for weapons and such you wouldn’t see them since the level was so dark.

And what’s with it being deathmatch only? If it’s a demo why not pick a mode that isn’t the bare minimum of multiplayer. Who even plays straight up deathmatch these days?

Combat was blah – the starting weapon is ridiculously underpowered, and the other weapons handle too loosely to be enjoyable. I felt that the combat mechanics in Lost Planet were tighter, and I didn’t think Lost Planet’s multiplayer could touch the better multiplayer games on the 360. So yes, my general experience with the multiplayer matchmaking, the mode type, the level itself, the aesthetics, and the combat were not positive. I think for Capcom’s part, it was a mistake to release this demo if they didn’t want to disappoint fans of high quality games, but again, that’s just my own jaded hardcore opinion.

The Grappling Hook
The *only* redeeming and enjoyable part of the demo for me was the grappling hook. Its design was pretty solid and I enjoyed using it to not only swing off structures, but you can pull yourself towards an object so if you get really skilled with it, you can have fun. The targetting reticule lights up when your grappling hook can reach an object, and even grappling onto the side of a building allows you to sometimes jump up high enough to get onto the roof.

I also discovered that you can grapple onto other enemy players. This made the grappling hook even more enjoyable to me, as I was able to grapple onto people, pull myself towards them, and land some damage. In fact, when I had just the starting pistol, I decided to just skip it altogether and get kills by grappling into people from behind and knocking them off buildings and such.

Parting Thoughts
I wasn’t a fan of the multiplayer. Fortunately, I don’t really care much for multiplayer in gaming provided that the single player is awesome. Bionic Commando may very well have a great campaign game and for that reason alone I’ll buy it, but even if I get it, I probably won’t be playing the multiplayer much after this demo’s experience. The grappling hook was the fun part for me but it wasn’t enough to offset all of the other disappointments with the multiplayer demo.