Let's get one thing straight before I get too carried away with this review. War is not a joke and war is not a game. But war is certainly worth analyzing when the objectives of one of the most classic war video games are more clear-cut than the wars of the reality we live in.
In 1988, Capcom released a video game called Bionic Commando for the Nintendo Entertainment System in which a player's main objective is to take out an evil, all-powerful leader with potentially threatening secret military plans. There is also a subplot in which players must avenge tasks that a former hero -- almost a father-like figure -- could not accomplish.
I'm not kidding. And the similarities don't stop there -- the timeliness of this game runs even deeper than this description. But President Bush doesn't have a mechanical "bionic arm" that he can use to swing over large pits and to grab stuff. For this reason alone, I am pro-Bionic Commando.
Well, that's not the only reason, but it is one of them. Certainly, the concept of swinging rather than jumping adds a creative twist to the standard run-jump-shoot 2-D platform game. But Bionic Commando also has a cinematic flow to it that makes watching someone else swing and shoot just as much fun as playing it first-hand. Its movie-like plot is just as exciting as the game play itself.
The story goes something like this: In the year 198X (priceless video game rejection of logic), a secret military agency known as The Badds attempts to resurrect a defunct project, but they cannot proceed without information from their late leader, Master-D. New information has leaked through, and it appears that The Badds are attempting to resurrect this man.
The good guys, known as The Federation, have sent out a soldier named Super Joe to stop The Badds from making any further progress, but at some point, they lost contact with him. Your job, as the second-best soldier with an experimental robotic arm, is to save Joe and, consequently, the world.
A large part of the game's creativity also lies in the fact that as the player obtains new weapons and various items of interest, he must correctly choose which ones to bring into each new level. This is sometimes a difficult task, but it's hard to disagree that the rocket launcher featured in Bionic Commando is one of the greatest weapons in video game history -- second only to Metalman's metal blade, as featured in Mega Man 2.
The game also features some of the most poorly translated, awkward dialogue in Nintendo history. No child of the '80s could forget such lines as "Maybe we can find good weapon we can use" and "Get the heck out of here, you nerd!" Man, if "you nerd" doesn't completely capture the spirit of war, what does?
But the game's best feature is, without a doubt, its climactic ending. For readers who want to experience the mind-blowing, stupefying and unquestionably best moment in video game history themselves, read no further and rest assured that you should go out and complete this game as soon as possible.
For the rest of us, I ask you this: How badly would you want to blow up the head of Master-D if he called you a "damn fool?" Well, he does. I mean, "heck" was bad enough, but usage of the word "damn" in a Nintendo game is just plain bad-ass!
Of course, vengeance is ultimately yours, but at quite an intense level. It turns out that Master-D is just a clever fake name for Adolph Hitler! What video game objective could be more rewarding than explicitly blowing up the cryogenically-frozen-but-thawed-out head of the Fuhrer himself?
I could spend all day analyzing this game on many levels, but let's face it; in Bionic Commando, you not only get to send a missile into Hitler's brain, you get to graphically see it happen in all its eight-bit gory glory. I rest my case.
