Yahtzee Loves Hitler, Doesn’t Like Bionic Commando Rearmed

I love Yahtzee and his wild-talking ways, but once in a very rare while I come away from an episode of Zero Punctuation feeling like he missed the point entirely. Such is the sad case with the latest episode, which looks at Bionic Commando Rearmed and the reason we love retro gameplay so much.

Hint: we’re all a bunch of (wo)man-children who are disenchanted with life and desire the things we loved before we went from smelling like innocence and flowers to baboons in rut.

Yahtzee’s partially right, but he’s also very wrong.

This era of retro love is a tricky thing to analyse. We can apply a lot of psychology to it; it’s true that some gamers are annoyingly stuck on the games of their youth. Worse, some game reviewers are as well, which means every time Nintendo comes out with something as brilliantly fun as Super Mario Galaxy, I have to brace myself for a barrage of, “It’s not as good as Super Mario Bros Threeeee.”

Of course it’s not. Super Mario Bros 3 was a one-time experience, and I’d like to keep it that way (although if I choose to give Nintendo my shiny rocks in exchange for yet another remake of the game, that’s my business). Super Mario Bros 3 remains one of gaming’s highest achievements, but I haven’t forgotten that I used to play it on carefree summer days, when there was nothing ahead or behind me except more time to waste.

But notice what I said there: Super Mario Bros 3 remains one of gaming’s greatest achievements. I played the original on the Virtual Console just the other week and still found secrets and hidden passages I’ve never known about all these years. It’s a perfectly balanced game. There’s very little criticism I can level against it.

I have gone back to games I thought I loved and said “Ew” after replaying them. Still, not every game was a mindless session of button-mashing designed to raise blood pressure, no more than every game today is about war and guns (yes, retconning my previous post, here).

I never played much of the original Bionic Commando, at least not until my husband showed me how it was done. I tried it out, and I’m not ashamed to say that I sucked lemons. But I felt compelled to try again, because the arm mechanics were neat. They’re still neat.

True, they can be more intuitive, something that didn’t carry over so well into Bionic Commando Rearmed. Regardless, I got the hang (huh huh) of everything with some practise. Bionic Commando Rearmed is far more forgiving than its sire, especially when Easy Mode is turned on.

Hearing Yahtzee complain about the lack of a jump button in Bionic Commando is saddening. It’s such a basic, easy complaint, the kind of thing that’s scrawled in half-leet on forums by 13-year-old trolls. Yeah, using the grappling hook to get over knee-high objects is “doing things in a roundabout way,” but…that’s also the point of the game.

It was a unique mechanic back in the platform-saturated NES years, and it’s still a fun way to add challenge in a 2D game. You’re challenged to think beyond springing over obstacles. I find little wrong with that. But then again, I’m Canadian and was born with my umbilical cord around my neck. If the second circumstance didn’t damage my brain, the first one likely did.