Video Games have existed just a bit longer than I’ve been alive to play them (a sentence that will surely date me in the eyes of my audience). But since their inception into the world and over the expanse of time into our popular culture, there have been franchises that have received multiple iterations and have ‘changed with the times’, so to speak. Most notably would be Mario, Nintendo’s lovable plumber who has rescued Princess Peach on more occasions than I care to remember. Over the years we have seen other characters such as Sonic and Master Chief grow into characters that are shaped over series of games, both good and bad. For the most part, these are franchises that have remained fresh and interesting out of the sole fact that they’ve stuck with the mechanics that made them fun in the first place. Granted, whenever a game stands out amongst its contemporaries, you can imagine that a sequel is already on the drawing board. However, when a developer decides to tackle an intellectual property that hasn’t been touched upon in several years is when, put bluntly, the potential of a massive clusterf*ck skyrockets as relatively elementary mechanics are updated for a modern generation of gamers.
Capcom’s latest version of Bionic Commando will serve as my exhibit A. All throughout the course of the development cycle, this game was ravenously followed by many of the people who had grown up playing the original on the Nintendo Entertainment System out of the sheer excitement that a beloved property was actually receiving a modern iteration. Prior to release though, Bionic Commando: Rearmed – a 3D version of the 2D NES title – appeared on Xbox Live and illustrated how exceptional the original source material was by capturing that spirit in the remastered version. This was what gamers had wanted because it had remained true to the original mechanics that had made the NES version so much fun, even with a few minor touch-ups before releasing to Xbox Live Arcade. Bionic Commando, the standalone game that Capcom had produced turned out to be far below expectations. Now, I understand that certain things need to change with the times, but for the life of me, I have no idea what the hell happened during the BC development cycle that resulted in the game that was delivered to the hands of gamers.
Terribly janky gameplay, which resulted in punishing the gamer for just about anything tied together with a lackluster narrative, seems almost too kind. I understand that creators want to tell a story, but *spoiler alert* warping the Bionic Commando narrative so much as to try to sell gamers the idea that the wife of the player’s character’s consciousness is in your bionic arm was taking things a step too far (I’ll wait a second while you read that again). When the original was released, I never needed an answer as to why I had a bionic arm. I knew I couldn’t jump and I knew I could kick ass with my arm and my machine gun. By, tearing away the solitary mechanic of grappling with a mechanical arm, it does a disservice to the source material and ends up jading both the gamers who are new to a franchise as well as those who grew up with it. Growing up, Wolfenstein 3D may not have been the most popular FPS shooter prior to the release of Doom, but can still be regarded as its forebear. It may be because I have a soft spot for Wolfenstein in my heart, being the first game that allowed me to kill evil Nazis by the boatload, but there is no excuse for its current iteration. I’m not demeaning the mechanics of run, shoot, reload, by saying that is what Wolfenstein is at its heart.
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