Again with the Capcom!

Strong language follows.

Believe it or not, I am a longtime fan of Mega Man games.

...

All right, you caught me.  I am a longtime fan of Mega Man 2, which is one of my all-time favorite NES games and the last bit of reason that Capcom had before it went full-tilt insane on everything Mega Man.  I recently began to purchase some classic NES games (again), this time on the Wii's "Virtual Console," and I purchased a litany of favorites from a time when Nintendo was a pioneer in the development of games, not so much the way we play them.

I did not purchase Mega Man 2, however.  I was going to, but I wanted to make sure that I had all of the reasonable Mario games (not Mario Bros. or The Lost Levels -- just the ones that I enjoyed) and both NES Zelda games before getting that one.  As luck would have it, when I went to my local GameStop they were having a special on the very-backwards-compatible-with-the-Wii GameCube games, and sitting on the shelf just a few dollars more than the Virtual Console version of Mega Man 2 was Mega Man Anniversary Collection.  This disc has all six NES Mega Man games, the Super Nintendo one, and the pretty but nearly impossible to play and/or beat Playstation/Saturn one as well (no, not Mega Man Legends, Mega Man 8); you know, the one where the Mega Man character speaks and sounds like a seven-year-old Japanese girl.  You also get two unlockable craptastic arcade games that you'll only play as a curiosity.

I  was so excited:  I mean, I had a lot of these games, and now to get them all in one package, with the one good one for just a few(hundred) pennies more than what the download would cost -- That was enough to sell me on the idea.  No way Capcom could screw this one up.

No way.

Nope.

Not gonna happen.

...

The following conversation is completely made up, but words to these effect must have been spoken at some point during this collection's creation:

Capcom Moron 1: "Well this just sucks!  Nintendo gets to charge almost full price for it's classic video games on the Game Boy Advance, and now we're expected to release ours at a bargain price with all of our classics on one disk?  This is an outrage!"

Capcom Moron 2: "I know what you mean, Gary,"

Capcom Moron 1: "My name is Steve..."

Capcom Moron 2: "That's not the point, Gary. The point is that a lot of these games have spot-on control, cool power-ups, and catchy soundtracks."

Capcom Moron 1: "You mean..."

Capcom Moron 2: "Yes -- normal people have beaten them!"

Capcom Moron 1: "But what about the Rock Monster at the end of the first game with it's completely unavoidable attacks?"

Capcom Moron 2: "Sometimes people can randomly get past it -- I know, it's a flaw in our code."

Capcom Moron 1: "What about the spot in the second game where the player has to die in order to defeat the end boss, and if they don't get that right then they don't have enough power in the only weapon that can kill it?"

Capcom Moron 2: "People seem to just look past it because the rest of the game is so darn good."

Capcom Moron 1: "Um... How about when we started having the weapons make no damn sense from the third game onward?"

Capcom Moron 2: "Yeah, that didn't start to kill the franchise until later..."

Capcom Moron 1: "What about when we introduced the Mega Buster, and then powered down all of the other weapons so that they were next to useless in any given situation?"

Capcom Moron 2: "We still had to make four more games after that, and that's not even counting the Mega Man X games."

Capcom Moron 1: "Well, we have to do something!  If this collection sells, people will be expecting us to keep making these games, and I have to get back to kicking newborn puppies!"

Capcom Moron 2: "We have to do something to wreck this game so completely, yet so subtly that people will buy it, then get it home and immediately regret it..."

Capcom Moron 1: "Well, we blew the entire budget on the interface, so we can't spend money messing up the graphics, or reprogramming the gameplay to make it even harder..."

Capcom Moron 2: "Wait a minute -- the INTERFACE, that's it!  We can make the game impossible, wreck the fun, and no one will be the wiser!"

Capcom Moron 1: "But how?"

Capcom Moron 2: "It's easy, Gary-"

Capcom Moron 1: "-Steve."

Capcom Moron 2: "Sorry Gary.  All we have to do is SWITCH THE "A" AND "B" BUTTONS AROUND, THEN GIVE THE PLAYER ABSOLUTELY NO MENU OPTION TO CUSTOMIZE THE CONTROLS!  The players that remember the old games will try to adapt, but fail, BECAUSE HAVING THE TIP OF YOUR THUMB ON THE "B" BUTTON TO FIRE THE GUN AND PRESSING THE FLAT OF YOUR THUMB ON THE "A" BUTTON TO JUMP IS SO ESSENTIAL TO EVERY SINGLE SIDE-SCROLLING PLATFORMER ON THE NES, GAME BOY, AND THE RESPECTIVE CONFIGURATION ON EVERY SINGLE VIDEO GAME SYSTEM EVER THAT IT HAS BECOME THE STANDARD no one will notice how we FUCKED UP THEIR GAME BEYOND ALL REASON until it is too late!"

Capcom Moron 1: "Brilliant!  Then I'm back to kicking puppies!"

Satan: "You have done well, my minions!"

...

FUCK YOU, CAPCOM!

Retrospective: the ORIGINAL Bionic Commando

This is a review of one of the absolute worst games I have ever played, Capcom's Bionic Commando.

Not the 3rd person, action game for the next generation systems, that's not out yet (though I suspect it will end up here before too long).

No, not the recent remake of the old Nintendo Entertainment System game. Although it has some minor flaws it was an overall satisfying experience.

No, no. Not the Game Boy Color version. I dislike it, sure but even its unforgivable flaws don't make the game unplayable.

No, no, no. Not the one for the Nintendo Entertainment System - I love that game. I'm talking about the other one.

It's the version you've probably been fortunate enough to have never played. I'm talking about the ORIGINAL Bionic Commando, in the arcade.

What? You never realized that there was an arcade game, and that the NES game is loosely based on it? Then let me give you a history lesson.

In 1985, Capcom of Japan unleashed the top-down arcade game Commando upon the world. Despite being an unbelievably mediocre-to-sub-par video game, Commando is remembered by many as a great game, probably not in the least because many people confuse the game with the Arnold Schwartzenegger film, which came out the same year and has absolutely nothing to do with the Capcom property.

In the game, players take on the role of "Super Joe," an elite one-man army cutting a swath of destruction through enemy territory. Joe has his machine gun and some grenades to deal with this menace, and never gets any other power-ups throughout the entire course of the game. Odd that it is considered classic when games like Ikari Warriors do the same thing only better.

In 1987 Capcom followed this up with a side-scrolling platform game entitled Bionic Commando. Players reprise their role as Super Joe, though this time he is outfitted with a robotic grappling hook to negotiate platforms with. Unlike many similar and later games, Joe cannot jump - he is totally reliant on the grappling hook to move.

Anyone who has played any of the other Bionic Commando games will recognize this as the mission where Joe gets captured, so one could call this the first game in a trilogy, followed by the NES game (and its remakes), and the new game on the Xbox 360. You can find this game on the Capcom Classics Vol. 1 compilation disc, and MAME ROMs are fairly common too, so feel free to check it out - but don't say that I didn't warn you first.

STORY: Story? You play a nameless commando, later decided by Capcom that it would be Super Joe, the soldier from the original Commando. Joe is out to get his ass kicked and to chew bubblegum... and he's all out of gum. No, seriously - Joe is air-dropped into enemy territory under the auspices that he will stop their super weapon at all costs (which at $0.25 a game usually comes to about $10). This is as simple as a military shooter gets.

GRAPHICS: Not too bad considering when this game was made, though everything is kind of washed-out. The lack of definition sometimes makes it difficult to figure out which background elements will hurt you (there are many) and what elements you can grapple onto with Joe's hook. Longtime Bionic Commando fans will recognize some better-rendered enemies and backgrounds that turn up in the later games, giving a sense of nostalgia to otherwise unremarkable art.

SOUND: Also a treat for BC fans. The familiar theme song is here, though other sound effects are sparse.

CONTROL: Again, anyone who has played the NES sequel will know what to do. The grappling hook fires at diagonal angles and straight up. Diagonal will send you into a swing, allowing you to cover more distance (in theory; see GAMEPLAY) faster. The other button fires the gun horizontally. That's all of the control that there is.

GAMEPLAY: This is one of the ABSOLUTE WORST-playing games I have ever picked up. Your quarter will buy you three lives. You will lose all of those within the first thirty seconds of playing, because enemy troops spawn way too fast, and you have no hit points.

Once again: YOU HAVE NO HIT POINTS. One hit, you're dead. Remember in the NES game how you started with no hit points, but by vigorously collecting the little green-tipped bullets that the enemies dropped you could get more? There's nothing like that in this game. Any combination of three hits or falls off-screen result in another quarter to continue. Often times, you will find yourself in the position that there are enemy soldiers on a platform slightly above or below Joe, so that the gun will not affect them; since the bionic claw can't grip a platform that your sprite is overlapping, the end result is that you can only stand and watch as enemy troops kill Joe.

What's more, the enemy soldiers can jump from platform to platform, above or below, meaning that even the lowliest grunt in their army is more mobile than the supposed super soldier that you're playing. Adding ammunition to this theory is the fact that most enemies take more than one bullet before going down even with the upgraded weapons (which you lose when Joe dies), which effectively makes Super Joe the weakest character in the game, and EVERYTHING kills him! If you swing into an enemy soldier, Joe dies and the Soldier lives (and given that there is a constant rain of enemies coming down from the top of the screen, this happens EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU SWING). Bees come out of honeycombs and kill Joe, giant robots in the background will kill Joe just by touching him. Falling off of the bottom of the screen, even one pixel above a platform that you've just climbed up kills Joe. Enemy soldiers tap Joe on the shoulder and kill him, then walk away totally unscathed!

OVERALL: My theory was that the story originally involved Joe getting his spine blown out by enemy fire in the last game and that he was confined to a wheelchair for this one, but Capcom changed the sprite for American audiences because it was dishonorable to our veterans. I believe that the original Japanese title was Permanently Disabled Fun Super Yankee Joe Commando... I would love to see the 1986 concept art for that one...

Capcom balanced out the difficulty in the game by giving it only four stages, but you'll need deep pockets to see them all and get the "Gongratulations, you won!" screen. It is definitely not worth it, and if you're picking up the compilation collection just for this game then skip it - its not worth your frustration and doesn't add anything to the franchise.